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.

How to respond to panhandling?

When someone asks you for a dollar on the sidewalk, do you ever wonder what would be the most effective way to help?

Born out of a series of meetings between faith groups, businesses and local residents of the Polk Gulch District, the Welcome Ministry listens deeply to the needs of those living in poverty, the community and city government. Our programs not only fill in the gaps between what the city and other organizations provide, but focus on the crucial barriers that prevent people from improving their quality of life.

For example, when the Welcome Ministry learned that lack of identification was preventing hundreds of homeless individuals from gaining access to city and organizational resources, we developed the Homeless Identification Project. As a result organizations with ten times the budget of the Welcome Ministry began referring their clients to us. While helping 224 people obtain their birth certificate and 121 obtain state issued identification may not seem like much, the program enabled more than 155 individuals obtain housing in 2008.

This year, the Welcome Ministry is creating two crucial new programs. As we began to help our formerly homeless guests move indoors, we learned that their new homes do not have proper cooking facilities. Instead of giving out food like a typical food pantry, with an assumption that individuals have a way to cook groceries, the Urban Food Share Program will provide pre-cooked take home meals, opportunities for communal cooking and gardening and health and
nutrition classes.

But the needs of those living in poverty go beyond food and shelter, many of our guests have trauma from military service, domestic or childhood abuse, violence or as a result of years living on the streets. Stress and anxiety from trauma can be debilitating. Classes and direct one-on-one care will enable many of the most vulnerable in our community to cope with or heal from the trauma that prevents them from improving their quality of life.

If you are like the Welcome Ministry, and you want to invest in small changes that can make a big difference in addressing the root causes of homelessness, please join our unique community of San Franciscans responding to homelessness, one person, one sidewalk, one city at a time.

Support the Welcome Ministry