Many people think of poverty programs as schools or hospitals. Poor people come to the program, they use the tools they are given, they graduate from poverty. They find the cause of their poverty, they are cured.  The next group comes in.

At St. Anthony’s we have thousands of guests who do graduate. They learn new skills or they learn to speak English. They get clean and sober or they get health insurance. They find a job that will allow them to live independently.

But many of our guests face multiple barriers to participating in society. They live with both physical disabilities and mental health problems. They struggle with an addiction and they struggle with illiteracy. They are elderly, which is not a disease and has no cure.

These are the guests we hope to keep connected to our programs, not to graduate. If they keep coming back to St. Anthony Social Work Center, they can access benefits and keep the stable housing we’ve helped them find and get help managing their limited incomes. If they keep coming to the Free Medical Clinic, they can get help managing a chronic illness and get medication on the spot, so they don’t forget to take it. If they remain in the Madonna Senior Residence, they can built strong relationships with other residents and blossom anew by aging in place.

These are the guests we hope will stay in community with St. Anthony Foundation. Their lives will become more stable; they may even become more self-sufficient. But their strength lies in staying together, not in “graduating.” And by remaining in community here, they make our community strong.

In case you didn’t know, March is National Women’s History Month.

“Women are capable of forging lasting change, starting with their families, then transforming entire communities and beyond,” states an op-ed piece co-authored by President/CEOs of three leading women’s funds, ”We know that when women are economically secure, families are economically secure and, ultimately, so are communities and nations.”

A few facts for thought:

Since 1956 St. Anthony Foundation’s Madonna Residence has provided low-income and homeless senior women the stability and support to restore their health and build community.

In California, women make up 68 percent of minimum- wage workers, making them especially vulnerable.

Annually 1,400 uninsured women rely on St. Anthony Free Medical Clinic for their health needs.

St. Anthony Dining Room has seen a 10% increase in families coming for lunch service.

In the United States, the subprime mortgage crisis is taking a higher toll on women: 32 percent of women borrowers hold sub-prime mortgages, compared with 24 percent of men.

5,500 women and 16,000 families recieved free like-new clothing from St. Anthony’s Clothing and Housewares Program.

As we observe this month learning about the amazing women who have helped build our rich city, state and national history, let’s also remember the many women who everyday are struggling to create a new legacy and history for themselves and their families.

“I like color: white and pink and blue and yellow. Something loud. So I thought, an island. I’ll put them on an island.”

Barbara Coleman is explaining how a quilt is made. Not only made, but conceived, constructed, corrected, and finished.  Barbara is a member of the Madonna Quilters, and their work was on display at the San Francisco Quilters Guild 2009 quilt show at the Concourse Exhibition Center last weekend. The group includes residents, house social workers, and program volunteers.

All of the Madonna quilts in the Guild show are mermaid quilts. The group decided to do mermaid quilts from Laurel Burch’s mermaid fabric after quilt artist Jeanne Jacobson shared her mermaid quilt from Laurel Burch’s fabric design.

After Laurel Burch, the resemblance ends. Each quilt is a picture of mermaids and the sea, made from innumerable different fabric sources: an aqua water pattern, several fish patterns, and a fabric with palm trees.  Some of the women have stitched on embroidery thread for hair, sequins for eyes or scales, fuzzy yarn for sand, shells as abstract borders or as inhabitants of the underwater kingdom.

Gretchen Nelson included humans swimming around her mermaid. Molly Wu’s quilt is threaded with fabric showing notes on music staves because mermaids sing.

Barbara’s mermaids have yarn hair. One of her fish has sequin eyes; another has a tiny toy eye that showed up in the donated materials. Barbara is from New Orleans. Crystals dot the water in a very Louisiana take on mermaids: “I thought of the fireflies on the water,” she says.

The San Francisco Quilters’ Guild had their annual show last weekend, (which I believe we will hear more about in tomorrow’s blog) and the senior ladies from St. Anthony’s Madonna Residence were invited to display their most recent quilting projects. It was really great to see the women come out and show their work. What was unexpectedly impacting to me, was seeing the work that St. Anthony’s does in a broader social context.

Usually coming to work throughout the week, my view of our services is from the perspective of someone on the inside. I know the statistics of homelessness and poverty, understand the advocacy work, I have heard the personal stories of guests that come through our programs, been around on the holidays and celebrated with folks here in the Dining Room. Yet this weekend offered a new perspective, away from “home turf.”

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I love my job as Advocacy Coordinator here at St. Anthony Foundation, and one of my favorite things to do is to talk politics with the women who live at St. Anthony’s Madonna Senior Center and Residence. Last month, I asked our Madonna residents if they’d like me to organize some non-partisan debate watching parties in the recreation room at the center. I wasn’t too surprised when they accepted my offer, and  I prepared for the party by trying to figure out which type of snacks would go best with our evening of political discourse.

Our Madonna residents don’t pull any punches, and they certainly aren’t shy about speaking their minds! The opinions and comments that were flying around the room while we watched the debate were significantly more entertaining and informative than the debate tracking graph at the bottom of the television screen.

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I’ve been writing about the people we serve who once served others. The middle-aged woman I interviewed who lost her apartment after taking care of a terminally ill brother. The elderly woman who couldn’t find work in her home country after caring for her father all of her life. The veterans from a succession of generations, still broken by the wars they fought in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The seniors who worked full time into their early 70’s.

“I’ve always worked for a living,” Maggie told me,” I’ve always had a nice apartment. I’ve been on my own for a long, long time. Of course I’d never been homeless before. This was a first, and a shock.”

What is remarkable to me is the lack of bitterness in the stories our guests tell. All they can talk about is how grateful they are for the help they receive from St. Anthony’s. They talk about the hope they feel as they begin to address their situations, a hope they credit to St. Anthony’s rather than to their own courage and resilience. People going through the Dining Room line praise the security team for treating them with respect and friendliness, for acting more like hosts than guards.  Maggie wants to be sure I include her thanks to Fr. John and Sister Andrea in what I write “for their wonderful council.”  Bertha praises the staff and guests at the Madonna Residence for creating community.

“When I first came here, I was welcomed with open arms,” Bertha said.  “Everyone here made me feel at home.”

Community and respect seem like small recompense for all Bertha has done for others.  The same is true of so many of our guests.