Sunday Hospitality Hour and Senior Program at St. Francis Lutheran Church

Welcome has partnered with St. Francis Lutheran to help run their Sunday morning meal and the Senior Center on Wednesdays.

The Sunday Breakfast got its start fifteen years ago when St. Francis began serving coffee to their neighbors who live outside.  Soon doughnuts were added to the offering.  Over the years it became a full meal.  Most of the food is donated so St. Francis keeps its cost low.  The meal now feeds between 80 to 130 of their homeless and marginally housed neighbors, including families and children, each week. 

The Senior Center draws a dedicated group of seniors who enjoy visiting with each other, sharing lunch, and a game or other activity.  There is also a program that varies week by week, including such cool acts as a troupe of women in the 80’s who come and do dance routines, ballroom dancers, and a singer who gives pop quizzes on Judy Garland trivia.  The occasional motivational speaker visits as well.

We are delighted, as always, for another opportunity to feed people’s bodies and souls.  One of the things we’re trading to St. Francis for the opportunity to work with them is our promise to recruit some additional volunteers.

 We have quite a variety of tasks and shifts available:

 

Food to Sort

 On Saturday we need folks to:

• Receive food donations from 9:00am - 1:00pm
• Help do prep work for the Sunday morning meal, such as setting up, arranging flowers etc.
• Deliver food to other programs when we have more than we’ll need for Sunday.

On Sunday we need folks to:

• 5:00am - 7:00am: do morning kitchen support such as assisting the cook in preparing the meal for the day, and helping set up dessert trays
• 7:00am - 8:30am: serve coffee to our guests
• 7:00am - 8:30am: serve food to our guests
• 7:00am - 8:30am: do food pantry support such as help give away food pantry items and clothing to guests at the meal
• 8:00am -9:30am: help clean up such as help pick up trash around the neighborhood, do dishes, take out trash, clean toilets
• 9:00am -12:30pm: do guest support such as help support and de-escalate individuals with mental health, addiction, or hunger issues who are interested in attending Sunday morning services

Read one volunteer's experience of volunteering on Sunday morning.

For the Senior Center on Wednesdays we need folks to:

• 10am-2pm: do elder care and nursing support such as helping seniors in need of mobility assistance, answer questions about health questions and providing blood pressure readings for participants
• 10:00am -1:00pm: assist the cook in preparing the meal for the day
• 1:00pm -2:00pm: help pick up trash around the neighborhood, do dishes, take out trash, clean toilets

If any of these tasks sound like something you’re called to, let our Minister of Volunteers, Valerie, know either at 415-673-3572 or sfcares@welcomeministry.org and she’ll give you all the details and get you scheduled.

Food for the Heart: Volunteering at St. Francis Lutheran Church

By Laurel Kapros

 

Early Sunday mornings used to find me still in bed, sleeping, unaware of the waking city, of people getting up and needing a good, hot meal.  But that was before I started spending Sunday mornings volunteering for the Hospitality Hour at St. Francis Lutheran Church on Market and Church streets in San Francisco. 

Spending Sundays in a church is a new experience for me.  I was not raised with much traditional religion, but I did grow up in a shared food community, with group gardens and sharing of resources, to make sure everyone had enough to eat.  So this morning I join a crew of dedicated volunteers, community members and church leaders to feed a meal to 90 to 140 marginally housed and homeless San Franciscans.  We might all still be a little sleepy, but there is an air of camaraderie in the kitchen and dining room.  We work together to get ready for the morning meal, making up the desert plates, prepping the food, setting the tables with bouquets of flowers.  So that when the men, women and families come, we will be ready to serve up salad and hot chicken stew, hand out fruit and a few sweet treats, make sure that people leave with bags of pantry items like oranges, bread and yogurt. 

           

Two homeless children get a tour of the church after the meal.

The lessons I’m learning at the St. Francis morning meal are lessons of cooperation, abundance, and heart.  It is not always easy for me to see the homeless in our Bay Area cities, I don’t always know how to help.  What can help is giving these men, women and families a hot cup of coffee, a plate of food, a good morning and a smile.  Getting a thank you and a smile in return, and realizing everyone deserves to be fed.  It is particularly hard for me to see the homeless families with children.  But what is not hard is seeing another man give his cupcake to a little girl.  There is joy in playing with the children, giving their tired parents a small break.  In making a game with the kids of cleaning up a mess, and when it is time to put away the broom, of hearing them chant, “We want more chores, more chores!”  They are certainly kids after my own heart with their desire to help out, to clean, and to be a part of a community. 

And there is the lesson of abundance, that there can be enough to go around of both food and heart.  Businesses donate food to the meal programs, if there is too much for that particular meal, another program can certainly use it.  There are food and resources out there, but oftentimes help is necessary for it to get to the right places.  Thanks to volunteers and organizations like Welcome, St. Francis Lutheran Church, Food Runners and SF CARES, this bounty can reach those who need it most.  It is about sharing these meals, these resources, making sure everyone, myself included, is fed, body, mind and spirit.

learn

Everything Welcome does is designed to support communities responding to poverty.  We believe that all volunteer opportunities are a time when we can reflect on what we have to give, how we are giving it and how we can unlearn the ways that we are contributing to poverty in our world. 

In addition to our meal programs, some of our unique programming is designed to support individuals and communities who are interested in learning about how they can make a difference in their world:


Just Lutheran: A multimedia online DIY (do it yourself) guide to enable Lutheran congregations to respond to poverty. Sponsored by the ELCA Hunger Project.  http://justlutheran.blogspot.com

Community of Travelers: Weekly interactive worship experience, since 2010, that has transitioned to online webcasts featuring activities, liturgy, prayers and songs that correspond to the lectionary text for the week after posting. Innovative projects include: Bible Study that Doesn't Suck (TM), The Gospel According to Pop and the Lady Gaga Mass.  This project is in partnership with St. Aidan's Episcopal Church in San Francisco. 
 
Urban Pilgrimage: Welcome's newest project to provide educational opportunities, certificates for trainings in urban ministry, curriculums for youth groups, pilgrimage opportunities, mentoring for groups and individuals and teleconferences. This project is a partnership with SF CARES and the Faithful Fools Street Ministry.

Vanguard Revisited: 
Vanguard Revisited is a project in partnership with the GLBT Historical Society, that enables homeless queer youth to creatively interact with a group the history of the street hustlers who lived in San Francisco's Tenderloin District in the late 60's.  This project will create a magazine, book, exhibit and nationwide speaking tour to highlight the poverty and issues that affect queer street youth.

Somatic Trauma Care:
This one-on-one support for homeless and formerly homeless individuals enables them to gain the skills they need to heal from the trauma that causes and comes from life living on the streets.  Designed to help individuals live fuller more independent life, participants in our trauma care often find they are then able to utilize other services and opportunities to improve their health, education and ability to participate in community.

Urban Share Community Gardening:
The Urban Share Community Gardening Project transforms unused church properties into community gardens to grow free produce.  Welcome has created community gardens at Bethlehem Lutheran in West Oakland, Shepherd of the Hills in Berkeley and St. Paulus and St. Mark's Lutheran churches in San Francisco.  More than 2,400 pounds of food have been harvested from these gardens since February of 2010.

The Free Farm: A community farm created on the ashes where St. Paulus Lutheran Church used to be before it burned down in the early 90's.  Since its creation in 2010, more than 8,593 pounds of free food have been harvested and given away to it's neighbors.  This project is in partnership with St. Paulus Lutheran Church, SF CARES, the Free Farm Stand and Produce to the People.

grow

In 2008 and 2009, Welcome helped many of our formerly homeless guests in the Polk Gultch District of San Francisco move into marginal housing.  While the single room occupancy (SRO) hotel rooms help meet some of our participants need for shelter, they created new needs for the guests in terms of addressing their food needs.  Often with strict rules about appliances to heat food or limited access to communal kitchen spaces, housed guests are still dependent upon food pantries and food programs. 

In 2010, Welcome created the Urban Share Community Garden Project to respond to the changing food and nutrition needs residents around the Bay Area.  Welcome continues to share what it learned building community gardens with congregations around the country.  If your congregation is interested in replicating our garden project, please contact us so we can support your efforts. 
 

Urban Share Community Gardening:
The Urban Share Community Gardening Project transforms unused church properties into community gardens to grow free produce.  Welcome has created community gardens at Bethlehem Lutheran in West Oakland, Shepherd of the Hills in Berkeley and St. Paulus and St. Mark's Lutheran churches in San Francisco.  More than 9,000 pounds of food have been harvested from these gardens since February of 2010. 

The Free Farm: A community farm created on the ashes where St. Paulus Lutheran Church used to be before it burned down in the early 90's.  Since its creation in 2010, more than 8,593 pounds of free food have been harvested and given away to it's neighbors.  This project is in partnership with St. Paulus Lutheran Church, SF CARES, the Free Farm Stand and Produce to the People.