Skills Shared and Skill Shares

Have skills? Want to share them?
Want to learn skills by doing?

At our Tuesday Welcome meals, we have begun sharing professional self-care/body care/hygiene when skilled volunteers are available.

We have begun with a monthly volunteer who has professional haircutting and styling skills, averaging six haircuts each month! It is hard to find free haircuts these days, and at best they are often a rough buzz cut. That is why is to so amazing that a Welcome has committed to providing professional haircuts monthly for Welcome guests.

Maybe you have a skill around self-care or body care that you could share Tuesdays 2-4pm. We are particularly looking for massage, holistic health practitioners, poverty/trauma-informed nursing, relaxation exercises...if you've got a self-care or health professional skill, we would love to talk to you about volunteering two hours monthly with our guests.

Thinking that you are not skilled in such ways? We can use your ordinary and extraordinary gifts in our regular programming, whether in cooking, cleaning, chatting with guests, visiting people who are isolated, or sorting clothing and toiletry donations.

And there is another opportunity if you are skilled in life, health, or nutrition skills- come share with a Health Skill Share class. Staff support includes facilitating discussion, help incorporating various learning styles, ground rules, and providing space and snack set up. Leading a Skill Share involves preparing 30 minutes of presenting or a 50 minute discussion on a particular health skill with time for questions and discussion.

Topics we would like to find skilled community members to cover in the future:
-Foot care
-All sorts of nutrition topics from poverty-informed perspectives
-Legal rights/questions around homelessness, poverty, and SRO housing
-Heart and lungs
-Vision care
-Community politics
-Transportation, pedestrian issues
-Many mental health self-care topics
-Safer sexuality

Interested? Contact Pete Feltman for general volunteering and Tuesday meals or Pastor Jay Wilson for Skill Shares.

Memorial Day

"It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of The Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; and all the nations shall flow to it, and many peoples shall come, and say: "Come, let us go up to the mountain of The Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that He may teach us His ways and that we may walk in His paths." For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of The Lord from Jerusalem. He shall judge between the nations, and shall decide for many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more." (Isaiah 2:2-4 RSV)

Today I am remembering all the veterans that have and are serving our country. We know that at least 23% of all of the homeless are veterans.

We also know that 18 vets commit suicide each day.

I am the child and granddaughter of veterans who recovered from the ravages of war in alcoholism. I wonder how many generations are affected by the traumas of war?

This year I'm getting special training to help people who have post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Veterans of nearly every war, have suffered from PTSD. Trauma is something that nearly everyone has experienced. The homeless, like veterans experience multiple traumas.

This Memorial Day I remember that another cost of war is the way that lives are forever changed. As a pastor, I hope to help all people recover from the daily battles that distract people from God(dess). As a pastor to the homeless I daily walk with people hoping that each step we take together will improve their quality of life.

-Rev. Megan Rohrer

Megan has been the Director of The Welcome Ministry (a ministry to the homeless and hungry in the Polk Gultch District of San Francisco, CA) at Old First Presbyterian Church since June of 2001 - and has been called to this ministry by a joint call from Ebenezer Lutheran Church, Christ Church Lutheran, St. Francis Lutheran and Sts. Mary and Martha Lutheran.