Students from Mercy High School, an all-girls college-preparatory school in San Francisco, just brought a van full of donations from their most recent clothing drive.
The clothing they collected will go to help poor and homeless families and individuals at St. Anthony’s Free Clothing Program.
Thanks, ladies! You are awesome!
“Knit 2500 scarves. By hand. By Christmas.”
That’s the idea behind St. Anthony Foundation’s Holiday Scarf drive planned for this year’s Christmas Celebration. We want to give every guest who comes to us for a meal on December 25th to leave with a brand new, hand knitted scarf to keep them warm for the following winter months.
We’ve got a lot of work to do in the next six months to insure that all our guests get these thoughtful gifts by Christmas. We’re still undecided on what to call this outreach of crafty support, that’s why we’re reaching out to you.
Have an idea of what to name it? Leave your naming idea in the comment’s field below by Monday, May 31. We’ll take the best name’s a present them on the blog to be voted on soon!
Download: PDF Flier with more information. Please feel free to email it to your friends and family and encourage them to participate as well!
Update: The votes are in! This project will be known as “Scarving Artists”. Thanks for the suggestion, Bill S.!
We heard through Filipinas Magazine that YFPA hosted a sock drive benefiting St. Anthony Foundation of San Francisco. Thank you!
The Hoodie People had this to say about their 2nd annual Hoodie Drive, and the hoodies they donated to St. Anthony’s (thank you!):
The 2nd Annual Hoodie Drive was another small victory for www.hoodipeople.com. We surpassed last year and showed up at St. Anthony’s with 100 warm pieces of clothing including items from our own closets. It was actually raining while unloading the hoodies and there were lots of homeless people, including women and small children, squeezing under store over hangings for shelter. Seeing families in the cold is no joke and showed us first hand how bad homelessness gets. When we got inside the worker behind the glass said, “Oh, wow. Those will be gone quick.” Experiences like these certainly make us want to do more and re-confirm why we do this each year. Our bin had hoodies, sweaters, jackets, and rain coats donated at hoodiepeople.com’s One Year Anniversary Party. We had donations from Triumph 4th Street in San Rafael, CA again this year too.
And what a holiday donation drive it was. The Ramallah Club kicked off the giving spree on the first day with 96 turkeys. Eighteen young people from The Joint Youth Ministry came all the way from San Jose with 26 bags of clothing which some of them spent their day sorting and bagging while others unloaded donations from people driving up to our doors with food and clothing for our guests. We received a record 1163 turkies over the week before Thanksgiving and hundreds of deliveries of clothing and toiletries over Christmas week.
Our friends heard our cry for socks. More than 3,000 pairs, in every size, color, and pattern, with plenty of plain but very warm crew socks and work socks to fill Christmas gift bags for all the guests who came to the Dining Room. Gymboree donated hats, chocolate, bags, and labels that said “Happy Holidays” and put the bags together. The Palace Hotel came through with 2800 mineral washes for the bags and cartons of other useful gifts for St. Anthony residential programs. The Hilton and other hotels gave shampoo and lotion. And Jane and John Doe just kept giving and giving and giving.
Anything that didn’t go into a gift bag will be given to our guests for months to come, as the rains continue and the cold grows sharper. This is how the 5,000 get fed. And clothed and healed and living better, safer lives: when people of good will are not too afraid for themselves to open their hands and share what they can.
Thanks to the students of the Jefferson School for collecting 1020 pairs of brand new socks for our guests in their sock drive! Here are a few pictures from their visit.
Thanks to the Kelly family from Menlo Park, who dropped off a Suburban full of clothes from their drive on Monday. What a great way to do a drive! They emailed their friends and said:
“We’re collecting clean, gently used clothes for St. Anthony’s. If you’d like to donate men’s, women’s, or children’s clothes, just email us back, then Sunday morning leave the bag outside your front door. We’ll drive around and pick them up.”
So many people are doing drives for us. It makes such a difference to our guests, who are really struggling this year. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!
“It’s like grabbing two high tension wires and being electrified with love and compassion.”
– Lama Tharchin Rinpoche, explaining how devotion and compassion work together. The more intense our devotion, the more vast our compassion, the brighter we shine.
Reno D. and friends just donated almost 8,000 pounds of turkey, along with a cash donation. Happy Holidays, Reno!
One of my favorite things in this life is pulling clean laundry out of the dryer, and slipping my cold feet into a pair of snug warm socks. There’s really nothing quite like it. Torrential downpour and chilly wind in the city’s dismal winter months makes the experience that much more rewarding.
As we prepare for the holidays, and gear up for what is traditionally the busiest time for St. Anthony’s, we take note of these items like socks that make a big difference in such a small low-cost way.
Imagine if instead of out of a drawer or dryer, the socks you were sliding on in the morning were the same wet ones you braved the rain in last night, and for the previous few days for that matter. Many of our homeless guests at St. Anthony’s are on their feet and perhaps don’t have a place to rest and recharge. A clean new pair of socks are not an accessory or afterthought, they are a piece of refuge and reenergizing that we can offer to make that day better.
You can be a part of that refuge, bring in clean new socks for guests at St. Anthony Foundation. Or hold a drive with friends, coworkers or church groups and gather socks to bring in for our Curbside Donation Drive.
The month of October is a beautiful time in our beloved city- the days are bright and sunny, but with a fall crispness that makes me think of … Mission Street Foods shiitake and oyster mushroom dumplings in miso soup! If you haven’t tried this sublime treat, tonight is your lucky night, AND you can support St. Anthony’s at the same time.
Mission Street has a brilliant restaurant model of taking over another kitchen (Lung Shan restaurant) a couple of nights, bringing in guest chefs, and giving a portion of the profits to local non profits. So in honor of the Feast of St. Francis, MSF is donating to St. Anthony’s on Thursday. Check out the full menu:
Olive dirt with fresh mozzarella, cherry tomato, tatsoi, basil oil – $7
Roasted cavalo nero kale with boudin blanc, bacon, mustard, pickles – $9
Fermented black bean short rib with parsley root puree, horseradish, mustard green – $10
Black pudding with seared scallop, hashbrown, tarragon – $10
“Blackened” pork belly, goat creme fraiche, cucumber, cilantro on flatbread – $7
Lung Shan’s Vegan Delight: shiitake and oyster mushroom dumplings in miso soup – $5.5
Grass jelly with mascarpone pavlova, caramelized lychee and banana – $6
Punk Junk, an alternative music based non-profit organization,in collaboration with the Vans Warpeded Tour, is doing a drive for St. Anthony’s this Saturday before the Warped Tour.
Skip the long lines to get in at Pier 30/32 by bringing food, clothing or housewares for St. Anthony’s. You’ll get a “cut pass” that lets you enter the show 15 minutes before everyone else, along with other perks all day long.
