When I first came to work in Development at St. Anthony Foundation, we were in the middle of planning the Annual Penny Pitch and Auction in North Beach.

It caused me a brief panic. I didn’t know how to run a penny pitch. I’d been in my last job a long time. Were my skills out of date? Was I missing an important qualification? It took me several days to realize that very few people do know how to run a penny pitch. Few people actually know what a penny pitch is.

Special equipment needed: 3 pennies. Clothing: comfortable and roomy — especially the pitching arm sleeve. Players stand about 10 feet from a back board and try to throw pennies at the board without actually hitting it. There are rules about pennies that land standing up and about pennies that land on each other.

How does this raise money for St. Anthony’s? Teams pay fees to register. Players and attendees bid on auction items. Community businesses send greetings in the Penny Pitch program booklet. A lot of good people donate their time.  And all the proceeds go to St. Anthony Foundation.

2009 PENNY PITCH

Memorial Day, Monday, May 25
1:00 – 5:00 (Lunch opens at 11:30.)
Washington Square Bar & Grill
1707 Powell Street @ Union

2007 saw a 13% increase in attacks against homeless people. Now, many states are considering including Homeless people in Hate-Crime legislative. Alaska, Massachusetts and Ohio are currently pending legislation.

Nationwide, there were 160 attacks on homeless last year, resulting in 28 deaths. California ranked 17th nationally in violence towards the homeless.

The majority of attackers, 85% of them, are young men under the age of 25. “[Attacking the homeless] has become a new sport, almost a rite of passage,” Michael Stoops, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, told USA Today.

“Hey, big brother, you think you can give me the rest of those chips when you are done with them?” A weathered, 60 something man asked me. I’d been sitting in the waiting room at San Francisco General Hospital for about 4 hours by then, and that was not the first bag of junk food I’d consumed while there. I had brought a friend with me who had an injured his foot playing Volleyball in Golden Gate Park. We knew that his injury, being non life-threatening, insured us a very lengthy wait.

I handed him the rest of my chips and told him I was done. He thanked me and said the he hadn’t eaten since the night before when he found a burrito on top of a garbage can. I told him to come down to St. Anthony Dining Room for a hot meal sometime. “In the Tenderloin? Naw. I like this neighborhood. It’s calmer and I can sleep on the street without getting bothered.”

We talked a bit about the weather, the presidential election and his ailing foot conditions until we were interrupted by a member of San Francisco’s H.O.T. (Homeless Outreach Team). I moved to another seat to give them privacy and resumed watching the news.

Thirty minutes later he came over to me smiling. They had found him a shelter bed and he was leaving. I looked around and saw two other homeless men speaking with other social workers.

Often it can take several social service agencies, both public and private, to help transform a persons life. Everyone’s journey in and out of homelessness is different, and I am graced by seeing many folks change right here at St. Anthony’s.

After buying yet another bag of vending machine potato chips I leaned back into my cold metal chair and resumed watching the news. After all, it was my day off, and the folks down at General Hospital seemed to have a good handle on things.

Hi there, thanks for reading my very first blog entry. As the resident Clinic grantwriter, I’d be remiss if I didn’t take the opportunity to briefly highlight the good work of our Free Medical Clinic.

Did you know that the Clinic is one of San Francisco’s oldest and largest free clinics? Or that we provide comprehensive primary and urgent care, mental health treatment, pediatric care, and a range of specialty and ancillary care, serving about 3,500 uninsured poor and homeless patients each year?

It’s true. And this includes services you might not think of, like podiatry. For our neighbors who rely mostly on their feet to get around, foot care is a vital concern. Most Tenderloin residents (82%) don’t have access to a car. People living in severe poverty have limited means for quality footwear or fresh socks. Unforgiving concrete sidewalks can take their toll on people’s feet.

The Clinic is the sole provider of free podiatric care in the neighborhood. Our staff podiatrist, Dr. Mario Rizzo, has been healing patients in the Clinic for almost 30 years. Each week, he goes toe to toe with patients’ foot problems to help them get back on their feet. And he’s never shooed away a patient for lack of health insurance.

Here at St. Anthony Foundation we receive many donations from people in thanksgiving for articles that they have miraculously found after praying to St. Anthony, the patron saint of lost articles. We often smile after reading such stories, thinking “well, it was probably a coincidence” or “they would have eventually found the article anyway.” Let me relate a personal story that happened to me and my niece back in 2003. She and her husband were visiting from New York in February of that year. We decided to drive up to Tahoe for some sightseeing. While we were eating lunch at one of the restaurants in Tahoe I noticed a worried look suddenly come across my niece’s face. “Oh no! My ring!” she exclaimed as she felt the ring finger of her left hand, now missing her diamond engagement ring. Her husband Billy and I quized her on where she might have last left the diamond ring. She couldn’t remember and we decided to search every inch of my car for the missing diamond ring. “St. Anthony help us find the missing ring” I muttered under my breath as we looked and looked. We finally decided to backtrack to every place we visited. It was a sad drive back to the shores of Lake Tahoe. I surveyed the shore, covered in snow. Where do we begin to search? I decided to walk down the wooden stairs to the snowy shore. On the way down I spotted a glint. There below me, by the rail was the diamond ring half buried in the snow! I seized it and hid it in my hand. I looked at my niece and her husband in the distance still frantically searching for the ring. “Let’s just go home. We’re not going to find anything here,” I said dejectedly to my niece. She wasn’t ready to give up her search but decided to follow my advice. With the three of us inside the car I suddenly asked my niece who was seated behind me “is this your ring?”, showing her my right hand with the diamond ring on the little finger. He face lit up and she suddenly hugged me from behind, crying in joy for her diamond ring. All three of us celebrated the find. Now whenever I come across a tale of someone who found a lost article by praying to St. Anthony, I recall that February day by the shores of Lake Tahoe when a small miracle happened because I said a prayer to St. Anthony.

Last week Thursday, I went on my tri-weekly visit to the bagel shop a few blocks from my apartment and placed the same order I always do costing me $4.50. Two days later, I placed the same order and pulled out exact change in anticipation of payment. The cashier took the money but instead of giving me my receipt, he just sort of stood there and gave me a sheepish smile. Not really knowing how to respond, I returned same and for about six seconds, we both just stood there giving each other, well, sheepish smiles. Finally I was spared any further suspense when to my horror, he pointed at the cash register’s monitor which displayed – gasp – my cost was $6.75!!! Imagine my indignation – I mean how the heck had the price risen by 50% in two days?!!

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St. Anthony Dining Room will celebrate Earth Day with a healthy vegetarian meal of organic greens from Greeleaf Produce, freshly stuffed baked potatoes, and delicious desserts from Just Desserts Bakery. Using a careful recipe of food reclamation and resource management, St. Anthony’s serves an average of 2,600 healthy and filling meals 365 days a year at an average food cost of 33 cents per serving, and at no cost to the hungry Dining Room guests.

More than 75% of the 6,000 pounds of food that is prepared and served each day to San Francisco’s hungriest residents is reclaimed food, such as second-harvest fruits and vegetables or day old baked goods from bakeries, which would otherwise be thrown away. But St. Anthony’s commitment to sustainability goes even further. 70% of the waste matter (from preparation scraps to unfinished meals) from St. Anthony Dining Room is composted or recycled, which is then used as soil amendment for local farms. Next year, the St. Anthony Dining Room will be housed in San Francisco’s first LEED certified Green Direct Social Services building.

“Earth Day is really about bringing awareness to responsible utilization of our resources. At St. Anthony’s we feed a lot of people every day, but we do it with serious consideration of the resources at hand. Food gets transformed to nourishment, waste gets transformed to compost, compost gets transformed to food. And lives get transformed in the process.” Noted St. Anthony’s spokesperson Francis Aviani.

“As an award winning natural bakery, we create a lot of delicious desserts before we perfect a recipe,” Noted Just Desserts Executive Chef, Mani Niall. “As a socially-responsible business, it makes sense for those desserts to go to food banks or St. Anthony’s”.

Just Desserts is known throughout the U.S. for their award winning all-natural desserts. Greenleaf Produce provides peak-of-the-season produce to many of San Francisco’s finest restaurants and food service facilities. Both organizations contribute to Bay Area sustainable resource management by donating their overages to food banks and organizations like St. Anthony’s.

As a development intern here at St. Anthony Foundation I ran into two very simple but important values that make St. Anthony’s such a scrupulous organization: respect and dignity. Because everyone treats one another with these two values while spending time at the organization it allows for a productive state for the common good. From the well known Dining Room to the many other services St. Anthony Foundation provides, the atmosphere is always one in which everyone works together to pursue a better state of being. During the months that I got to be a part of the foundation, I have seen more about how the non-profit industry works as a whole, as well as the tenacious dedication and knowledge from staff who work hard and continue to provide for thousands of guests daily.

The experiences gained from my internship will no doubtingly be a valuable assets in the future.

When I was in high school, there was guy named Marcus (not really his name) that was always super popular. Smart. Atheletic. All that. I have run into him a few times over the years, and have always been surprised and slightly flattered that he bothered to say hello. After all, I was the goofy artsy chick with the skittles colored hairdon’ts at the “alternative” school and he was the Football God that could do no wrong. We would give abbreviated updates when our paths crossed-he gave up sports and became an artist; I gave up visual art and became a dancer; he worked in social services for a while, but decided he liked carpentry better, I went from the private sector to freelance; he gave up his petrol hungry car and was sticking to his revolutionary bicycle; I drove a biofuel run car with perpetually clogged fuel lines …

When I saw him in the Dining Room the other day I was caught off guard.  I remembered all the times he had made an effort to share his grace with me when the last person I wanted to run into was the Popular Guy from my high school. I looked over at him and smiled a hello. He smiled back, albeit a little sheepishly. I started to make my way towards him, but got pulled away by a coworker with a question. When I turned back, he was gone.

The first time people volunteer in the Dining Room they are often surprised at all the different folks that come to St. Anthony’s to eat. People on their lunch break, elderly and veterans, people that are dressed for an interview or for church, families, and people with disabilities. As the economy continues to shift (are we using the “r’ word yet?), I watch our lines get longer and longer, and wonder how many more people will come to the Dining Room to eat, how many more patients will come to the Clinic how many more Marcus’ will I run into …

If you paid taxes this year, you may be receiving an economic stimulus payment from the IRS. The payment is meant to provide a little relief for people under particular economic pressure and to encourage us all to buy more this year in the hope that this will stimulate the economy.

Perhaps you don’t feel that you need the relief. Perhaps you don’t want to buy more clothes, appliances, or other consumer goods.

I don’t think my tax dollars are ready to take a day off for shopping yet. They have more work to do before I buy even one more item to squeeze into my little apartment. They can work to put the poorest of the poor to work. They can feed and shelter seniors whose work is done.

I expect a very high return on my investment.

Donating your economic stimulus payment to charity? Talk about it here.