Volunteers Needed at the Hospitality Hour Program at St. Francis Lutheran Church

 
A partnership of St. Francis Lutheran Church and Welcome in San Francisco, The Hospitality Hour Program serves breakfast every Sunday at 7:30am to the homeless and hungry living in the Casto/Duboce Triangle Neighborhood.  

Why this Meal is Important? 56% of individuals living with HIV/AIDS in San Francisco do not have enough food to regularly take their medications.  For many HIV+ individuals, their food insecurity are due to limitations on income that are a part of local and state health care requirements.  The Hospitality Hour provides breakfast and hospitality to some of the most vulnerable residents of San Francisco.

How Can You Help? Individual and group volunteers are needed every Saturday from 9:30am-1pm to sort food donations and prep food and every Sunday from 7:30-9:30am to serve food, eat with guests and help us clean up.  You can help once, annually, monthly or weekly.  Let us know your coming or simply join us at St. Francis Lutheran Church (152 Church St.) Volunteers need to push the button marked "parish hall" on the front gate to enter the building.  

Ready to start volunteering?  Email sfcares@welcomeministry.org and let us know you're interested in volunteering at the Hospitality Hour on Saturdays and/or Sundays.

Want to learn more about this and other opportunities to volunteer at SF CARES programs?  Fill our our Volunteer Information Form and will help match you to available opportunities.

The Work of Christmas

This blog post takes its title from the name of one of my favorite poems, The Work of Christmas, by Dr. Howard Thurman.

When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:

To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among brothers,
To make music in the heart.

This has been a slow month for blog posts, but the SF CARES collaborators have been as busy as ever providing pastoral care, soul growth opportunities such as worship, Bible study, writing groups, meditation and street retreats; growing food; feeding people, and giving away all the hundreds of pairs of socks Crystal Springs Sangha, Presbyterian Church in Chinatown, and St. John’s United Church of Christ collected for us in December. 

We were blessed with an abundance of volunteers, as we are each year during the holidays.  Now we’re moving into the time of year when we usually have a bit of a lull. Not a lull of need as those we serve still need all that we have to offer, but a lull of volunteers.  Our regulars like the Congregational Church of San Mateo, the Congregational Church of Belmont, Old First Presbyterian and Saint Paulus Lutheran are all already scheduled for their usual shifts, but we need you to help us continue the work of Christmas.  We would welcome your help as:

• volunteers to serve at the Community Dinner any second or fourth Saturday from 5:00 - 7:00 from January 26^th onward
• hosts for the Friendship Banquet Tuesdays beginning on January 15^th  
• a group to provide simple lunches for 100 people for Open Cathedral Civic Center January 13^th or February 10^th or 17^th
• a group to bring simple food for Open Cathedral Mission for 60 on any Thursday evening except the fourth Thursdays of the month
• folks to come weed and plant and other gardening tasks at the Free Farm any Wednesday or Saturday anytime between 10:00 - 2:00 from January 12^th onward
• Crises Line Counselors for the Night Ministry willing to serve one night a month from 9:45p.m. until 2:15a.m.

You can click on the highlighted text above (or just scroll down in this blog) to get a more full description of any of these opportunities.  We hear from our volunteers all the time that they get more than they give as they serve with us and we are working on even more ways to nourish our volunteers to do all the wonderful things they do in the new year.  So come out to get your soul fed and to help us continue Christ’s work in the world.  You can contact us at sfcares@saintpaulus.org or 415-673-3572.

New Links!

Ok, so adding links to the blogs of our collaborators isn't all that exciting, but I wanted to highlight that they're right over there in the sidebar now.


You can read up on the Bible Study That Doesn't Suck.  You can see what's going on at the Faithful Fools or Welcome or the Free Farm.  You can see the DIY Guide to addressing Poverty and Injustice.  All right here from our little side bar.  (Ok, I do get a little excited when I figure out anything tech.) 

A table set and ready for the Friendship Banquet

In other news, we still need hosts for all of November for the Friendship Banquet and a group to cover lunch at Open Cathedral on November 11th.  So drop us a line at sfcares@saintpaulus.org or give us a call at 415-673-3572 if you'd like to come meet some really cool people and have a chance to feed them, too.

Service at Open Cathedral

Reading the blogs is informative, and hopefully inspiring, and coming out to help is a lot of fun, so enjoy the blogs listed over there on the right and then come on out to join us.

Vision, Faith, Abundance

This picture

highlights the abundance at the Free Farm that I’ve been wanting to write about recently.

I’ve also been wanting to write about this passage from the Gospel of Mark for a while now.

“He also said, ‘This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain--first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come.’"

So here’s my chance to do both.

This scripture shows us a pretty wild vision of the kingdom.  Usually, in similar stories, we see the sower as God or maybe Jesus.  How wild is that?  God out scattering seed without taking any kind of control over how it sprouts - whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed does its thing.  God scattering seed and watching it grow and not understanding how it all works.  What kind of faith does that show?  God happy to take in the harvest, joyful over what has been given even is God doesn’t know exactly how it came to be.  It gives us a pretty different idea of God that what is usually preached.

Tree and the other good folks who run the Free Farm are not like the God represented in the passage I quoted in that they do know just what they’re doing.  This kind of plant will flourish best in this location, here’s how you harden off a seedling that’s been in the green house to get it ready for planting outside, this is how to make the best compost.  And everything is well planned at the Free Farm, this plant will go in this bed, here’s where we need more irrigation, time to take down the beans because we’re done harvesting them and we can put something else there now.  Unlike the God of this passage, Tree can tell you exactly how a seed sprouts and grows.  Unlike the harvest in the passage, the produce of the Free Farm does flourish under the abundant care of our many volunteers, not regardless of whether they sleep in or come to the Free Farm on workdays.

And all that knowledge and care results in the kind of abundance seedlings in front of Pancho in that first picture represent.  Abundance that goes to feed people in need who otherwise have limited or no access to good, fresh produce. 

But there is some faith involved too.  The faith of the folks who started the Free Farm that an old abandoned and littered lot that even after cleaning up looked like this:

could one day look like this:

Faith that each Wednesday and Saturday we can get enough volunteers out to do all the work required to get those seeds from sprout to harvest.  Faith that we can find someone each workday to bring the vegan lunch we always serve to our volunteers.  And, these days, faith that we can find another parcel of land equally as suitable to the Free Farm’s needs when we have to move in a few years to make way for development.

So come out some Wednesday or Saturday from 10 a.m. until 2p.m. and help us keep the faith.  We’ve got plenty of friendly people to show you around and a good lunch to share.  Chances are we’ve got a task or two suited to your ability level.  But best of all you’ll have a chance to help us grow some faith that as wild and wonderful a vision as the Free Farm can have a viable place in San Francisco. 

Community Dinner Needs Hosts

Did you know that many church feeding programs, such as St. Anthony’s and Glide, do not serve dinner on Saturday nights?  Saturday Night can be the hardest time for those who need a meal to find one.  Welcome tries to at least somewhat fill this gap on the second and fourth Saturday of each month by hosting a Community Dinner at Old First Presbyterian.  At each dinner we serve 200 - 300 people a nutritious dinner in a warm, respectful environment. 

This meal is a cut above many other free meals in the City.  The meal is served restaurant style to our guests at their tables. Sometimes, one of our guests will offer to entertain the others by playing the grand piano located in the hall where we serve dinner.  When the serving slows down, we eat with our guests and we encourage our volunteers to do the same.  Often we have socks or other clothing or toiletries to offer our guests. 

Unsurprisingly, we have seen an uptick in the number of guests coming to the Community Dinners over the last year.  We are doing all right on volunteers to serve (though we could use a few more!) but what we really need is more groups to buy food and prepare the meal.  The kitchen at Old First is well outfitted and there is always an experienced person on hand to help volunteers with whatever they need.  Right now we are looking for groups to cover any of the fourth Saturdays through the summer:  June 23^rd, July 28^th or August 25^th.  We can accommodate large groups, or if you only have a few people to cook, we will get additional volunteers to help you serve. 

If you like the idea of providing a meal when it is most needed and of serving in an environment that respects the dignity of our guests give us a call at 650-673-3572 or email us at sfcare@saintpaulus.org.