Online Silent Auction

An online silent auction has been created for the upcoming fundraiser. New items will be added up until July 24th, so check back regularly.

View the auction here.

Join us on July 25th

Extending the Welcome
a fundraiser

Friends of Welcome -

Today I'm writing to invite you to two events. On July 25th, 7 GLBTQ pastors, including myself, will be welcomed onto the official roster of the Lutheran church (ELCA). This day of extending the welcome to GLBTQ members of the Lutheran church is 20 years in the making. You can join us in person, at St. Mark's Lutheran at 4pm or watch the service on the internet by live stream. Click here for more information about the service.


After this historic service, join Welcome at an after party fundraiser. Enjoy dancing, a silent auction, appetizers and drinks (beer, wine and soda). You need not attend the service to join us at the fundraiser.

Welcome has been working since 1996 to help the chronically homeless and hungry move indoors, get connected to life saving services and learn the skills they need to improve their quality of life.

Join us in the ballroom of the Hamilton Hotel (631 O'Farrell) to extend the celebration for great cause. For more information and to buy tickets for the event, click here.

If you are unable to join us and would like to send a donation or pay for one of Welcome's guests to participate, you can donate online.

Or, mail a check to Welcome:
1751 Sacramento St.
San Francisco CA 94109

For more information about Welcome visit:
http://www.sfwelcome.org

Blessings,

Rev. Megan Rohrer
Executive Director
Welcome

P.S. I hope you'll join me for the service and the fundraiser. This is one more opportunity for us to raise funds to match the challenge gift of $15,000 we received from St. Paulus Lutheran.

$15,000 Challenge Grant from St. Paulus Lutherans

Friends of Welcome -

I'm excited to announce that our friends at St. Paulus Lutheran Church in San Francisco have given Welcome a $15,000 challenge gift this month in order to inspire donors and congregations to support Welcome during this important time.

To date, congregations have pledged $64,050 and we will be receiving another $21,500 from grants. Together with other donors and congregations, your support now will enable Welcome to raise the $15,000 in salary support we need to raise in 2010.

Once we reach our $15,000 goal, Welcome will be able to use the additional support that comes in this year to replenish our savings account. A healthy savings account is important for sustaining Welcome through difficult economies (we were sure grateful for these funds last year!) and ensures that Welcome will be able to provide support for individuals living in poverty for years to come.

So if you've been following all the wonderful projects that Welcome has been working on over the last couple of years, whether your are giving for the first time for the hundredth time, we hope you will consider a special gift to help us raise our $15,000 goal. And for those of you who need to be challenged to do it, St. Paulus Lutheran double dog dares you to help match their $15,000 gift.

Donate Online or mail a check to: Welcome, 1751 Sacramento St, San Francisco CA 94109

Blessings

Rev. Megan Rohrer
Executive Director
Welcome

P.S. Thanks for all the ways that you support Welcome through your donations, prayers and volunteer time. St. Paulus Lutheran challenges you to help Welcome meet it's goal to raise $15,000.

Join Us and Support Welcome

Join us for
A Free Farm Afternoon
Gough & Eddy
in San Francisco
May 22, 2010
2:30-4:30

3:30 Talk by Novella Carpenter, Author of Farm City

Music Provided by: Lia Rose

Food Donated by: farm:table, Mama's on Washington Square, Greens, Maggie Mudd, and Bi Rite Market.

A family friendly afternoon at the Free Farm. Food from Mama's on Washington Square, Green's Restaurant and many more. Wine tasting. Coffee from Farm Table Cafe. Carla's kid's corner. Music and Poetry. A fun and very special afternoon.

A special talk by Novella Carpenter, author of Farm City, a book about her first year running Ghost Town Farm in Oakland. Novella Carpenter will speak at 3:30 pm. ghosttownfarm.wordpress.com

Join us and support WELCOME. We provide a communal response to poverty with a simple philosophy of providing food, education and counseling to the communities we serve.

tickets $75, $50, $25. Pay what you can afford. Consider buying two tickets to sponsor one of our community members.

Our Organization:
When Welcome was founded in 1996, our initial mission was to work with the homeless in San Francisco's Polk Gulch District. In 2008, our work resulted in over 155 people moving indoors. We continue to work with the same low income individuals to help them learn the skills they need to remain indoors, to improve their quality of life and to become self-sustaining individuals through meals, one-on-one support and creative community projects that address the health needs of those living in poverty.

Location:
At the Free Farm at the corner of Gough & Eddy in San Francisco

The Free Farm:
Is a farm that will grow 12,000 pounds of food that will be distributed for free to members of the community. You can find information about the free farm at thefreefarm.org

Order your tickets now: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/107417

In the News

Check out this great story about the Free Farm from KQED's Bay Area Bites Blog.

excerpt:

Or, what about starting from the very beginning, and growing more food from scratch right here in the city? Even in cities as highly populated as San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley, a surprisingly amount of arable land is still available. Just look at the Free Farm, which was started on a vacant lot at Gough and Eddy Streets in January of this year.

Pastor Megan Rohrer, a young Lutheran pastor who works with a variety of homeless communities around the city as the executive director of Welcome Ministry, wanted to expand the work she was doing, going from feeding the hungry of San Francisco to growing food for those same communities. The St. Paulus Lutheran church was willing to offer an empty lot it owned to her and a dedicated community of volunteers to make a garden.

Meanwhile Tree, a longtime food-justice activist and community gardener as well as the founder of the Mission's popular Free Farmstand, was looking for a place to grow more local food to supply the farmstand. Once Megan's church connections met Tree's gardening expertise, the Free Farm was born. With grants from the Mesa Foundation along with several local Episcopal and Lutheran churches, plus a whole lot of wheelbarrow-pushing volunteer labor, the weedy lot has undergone an astonishing transformation.

What was once a trash-strewn, needle-littered eyesore that neighbors called "The Pit" is now a welcoming, mural-lined space full of neatly mounded raised beds planted with salad mix, potatoes, beans, broccoli and lettuce. Bricks salvaged from the St. Paulus church (which stood on the space before burning down in 1995) now form strawberry beds on the hillside and a winding spiral bed planted with flowers, herbs, and vegetables. Cold frames and a newly built greenhouse are filled with trays of tiny seedlings, everything from kale to tomatoes to marigolds started from seeds donated by church communities across the country. Bright garden-themed murals by local artist Leanne C. Miller cover the concrete wall on the west side, and there are plans to bring more artists and sculptors into the garden to create site-specific works.

Volunteers get down and dirty every Wednesday and Saturday from 10am to 2pm, building infrastructure, hauling mulch, manure and compost, planting seedlings, waterings, and more. A volunteer-made vegan lunch, often featuring produce harvested from the garden, is shared by all. Volunteers will also share in the harvest, with excess supplying the Free Farmstand (Rohrer hopes to establish another neighborhood Free Farmstand on the site) as well as providing fresh local produce for twice-weekly homeless dinners organized by Welcome. (For more information on Welcome's additional garden projects around the Bay Area, go to Urban Share.)

Read the whole article and leave comments about the article at: KQED's Bay Area Bites Blog

In the News

Free Farm San Francisco - Tonic

Volunteers turn an overgrown lot in San Francisco into a farm that will provide free food.

San Francisco is one of the most expensive cities in the country, which makes the idea for the Free Farm all the more remarkable. The 1/3-acre lot located at the corner of Gough and Eddy streets is planning to provide free food to whomever wants it, with much thanks to a man who goes by the name Tree.

As the San Francisco Chronicle reported, Tree, a resident of the city's Mission District, opened what he called the Free Farm Stand in his neighborhood back in 2008, thanks to donations for the supplies he needed and a lot of hard work from various volunteers. Even though Tree said, "I've always got more people in line than food," he's managed to grow and give away more than 6,000 pounds of food.

Tree oversees the volunteers at the plot of land located at Gough and Eddy, land that used to be "an overgrown space for the homeless, junkies and partying gang members." The Rev. Megan Rohrer, executive director of The Welcome Ministry, a San Francisco nonprofit aiming to end poverty, asked the land's owner, the Lutheran Church, if Welcome could grown food on the lot, and the church agreed, unofficially giving them three to five years. Following a three-month cleanup, seedlings are now being planted and while it could be months until workers start to give out food, it's going to happen.

Not only will it help those in need, but as Tree explained in the article, it also helps the community at large. "Doing things for free encourages people to share. It encourages people to be community, to be family. It provides people the chance to be generous with each other." Let's hope the generosity continues to spread.

See the original: Free Farm San Francisco

In the News - SF Chronicle

From: Free Farm Plants Seeds of Community, Generosity, San Francisco Chronicle, March 22, 2010

Free Farm plants seeds of community, generosity

March 22, 2010|By Justin Berton, Chronicle Staff Writer

The folks planting a farm on the corner of Gough and Eddy streets in San Francisco hold no illusion that they'll cure urban blight with a head of lettuce.

They make no claim that a fava bean sown today will reduce the prison population tomorrow.

"I'm a simple person," said a man who goes by the name Tree, a Mission District resident who oversees volunteers as they plunge seedlings into mulch. "We're going to grow food here, and then we're going to give it away to people who need it."

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The 1/3-acre lot, known unofficially as the Free Farm at the Corner of Gough and Eddy Streets, will soon provide free food to anyone who wants it. It's being built and cultivated by a group of people who decided the unused parcel, on a particularly busy Western Addition intersection, was a great place for a peach tree to grow.

And a mulberry tree. And potatoes.

"Doing things for free encourages people to share," Tree said. "It encourages people to be community, to be family. It provides people the chance to be generous with each other."

Tree first put his proverbial money where his mouth is in 2008, when he opened the original Free Farm Stand in his Mission neighborhood at 23rd and Treat streets. Relying on donations for supplies and elbow-grease from volunteers, by his count, he's since grown and given away more than 6,000 pounds of food on Sunday mornings.

"I've always got more people in line than food," he said.

Going home with a plant

Tree also sends visitors away with potted plants and small fruit trees. "I don't know if they go home and plant them, take care of them, or throw them away," Tree said. "I just know that I gave them a plant."

Tree has a salt-and-pepper beard (mostly salt), a diminutive frame, but the thick and soiled hands of a lifetime gardener. He declined to share his birth name because "this story is not about me."

The Rev. Megan Rohrer, executive director of Welcome, a San Francisco nonprofit that works to end poverty, helped start the Gough and Eddy project after she asked the landowner, the Lutheran Church, if the organization could grow food on the church's unused lot. Through Welcome, Rohrer has persuaded about six Bay Area churches to convert vacant land into urban gardens and farms in the past couple years.

The Western Addition lot was once the home of St. Paulus, an ornately designed church with Gothic arches and a towering spier that was destroyed by fire in 1995.

For more than a decade, it was an overgrown space for the homeless, junkies and partying gang members. When Rohrer lead the three-month cleanup effort, it took weeks before she could walk across the soil without hearing the sound of crunching glass.

Value of free food

Rohrer said the church has agreed to let the food farmers use the plot for three to five years, but nothing is in writing.

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"We're secretly hoping the farm will be so exciting they'll let us keep it," Rohrer said. "But I know the realities of the economy, and how much the land must be worth."

The concept of worth, and market value, is something the workers at the Free Farm like to challenge.

To Pancho Ramos-Stierle, a volunteer working the land last week, the worth of a farm that generates free food for a community can exceed the worth of a high-rise condo. Ramos-Stierle met Tree at the Mission Free Farm a few years ago and was so inspired by his generosity he began working at the Karma Kitchen, a cafe in Berkeley that opened in 2007 and operates on a "give what you can" billing system.

Trying to feed everyone

"If the community appreciates it," Ramos-Stierle said of the farm, "it will support our work. No strings attached. ... Why can't there be a re-emergence of a culture of generosity?"

It will be weeks, maybe months, before workers begin handing out roughage and beans, Tree said. It will be at least a year before the fruit arrives.

Yet each passing day another volunteer arrives at the gates and asks to help, and each week seems to lure another interested neighbor.

"We're trying to live with a certain intention," Tree said. "Our intention is to feed everyone. In terms of whether we can accomplish this in this city, I don't know."