The Fourth Grade Class at the Hamlin  School has been busy these last few months. They have  learned to knit and have donated to St. Anthony’s 35 hand knit scarves to be distributed to St. Anthony guests.

The students shared that they wanted recipients to know that the scarves had been knit with love and compassion and they hoped that those who receive them will feel that expression of concern. We are sure that they will!

I am privileged enough to have the opportunity to spend a good bit of my time introducing interns to the Tenderloin. At St. Anthony’s, internships are not about making sending faxes and fetching coffee.  Interns are hands on and instrumental in the services we are able to provide to our guests, clients and patients.  They have the opportunity to provide direct service in one or more of our programs while at the same time learning more about the deeper structural causes of poverty and homelessness.

This past summer, St. Anthony Foundation hosted nine interns from seven different schools across the country.  Below is an excerpt from a reflection written by Taje, a bay area high school student who spent part of her summer working in St. Anthony’s Employment Program / Tech Lab, Clothing Program and Dining Room, while also engaging in educational enrichment sessions to learn more about the issues of poverty and homelessness.  This is what she had to say about her experience:

“This summer I had the privilege of working at St. Anthony’s.  St. Anthony’s is a non-profit organization that helps the underserved people in the community.  During my internship at St. Anthony’s, I was able to work in the many different areas of service.  My first experience was in the Dining Room, I was terrified because I had never been in the Tenderloin area, so I didn’t know what to expect.  As I continued working, I found that it was a joy to work there.

“Another thing I favored about the Dining Room was the simple fact that it was called a Dining Room, instead of a soup kitchen.  Just the name made it feel like it was a family setting, somewhere you could come and feel safe, like at home with your own family.  And as time progressed, I felt like I had joined the St. Anthony’s family because each time I came to volunteer someone always remembered my name.  I don’t recall a day in my experience at St. Anthony’s where I wasn’t smiling.

“Working at St. Anthony’s taught me a lot.  It helped me break down the barrier of being afraid of homeless people.  I gained a new outlook on them and more respect.  I learned that when you’re on the outside looking you can sometimes be quick to judge, but when you’re finally on the inside and taking on the emotions of others you can identify yourself with them and be more understanding,  At first I thought that this internship would feel like community service, but I feel that I have walked away with so much more than that.”

If you would like to learn more about St. Anthony Foundation’s internship program or ways that you can get involved, contact Megan Pippet at mpippet@stanthonysf.org or check us out on St. Anthony’s website!

Today is the day folks, get out and VOTE! There are six propositions dealing with the budget deficit and six opportunities for you to voice your opinion with your vote.

What are we voting on? For an quick and easy break down of the six measures click here.

Who is affected by these measures? Teachers, students, at-risk youth, foster kids, seniors, people with mental illnesses, you and me, and probably the person next to you right now.

How long does it take you to draw 6 one-inch lines? About thirty seconds.

Go to your polling place and VOTE!

Don’t know where your polling place is? Click here and enter your home address to find out.

I have spent a great deal of time this week riding the #5 Muni, a bus that so conveniently shuttles me from St. Anthony Foundation to the University of San Francisco, just several miles down the road. There is no shortage of differences between these vastly diverse communities, one being a social services non-profit serving the needs of San Francisco’s poorest, and the other being a major university serving the educational needs of their young, vibrant student population. My job is to help others recognize the similarities and bridge the gap between these two Golden Gate Avenue communities. Here at St. Anthony’s, I work in the Justice Education, Volunteer and Advocacy department. One of my primary responsibilities is to coordinate our service-learning program. For the past few years, I have helped to facilitate student access to the community in a way that is both meaningful and educational for students, but also provides value-added service to the organization and those we serve. Students are given the opportunity to practice skills in a real-life setting that they have acquired in the classroom, and while doing so, learn from the community they come to serve. Such a simple, yet transformative idea, that goes further than just transfer of knowledge and gets to the heart of discovering self-worth and empowerment for both the students and the guests/clients with whom they interact.

This being the second week of May, USF’s spring semester is quickly coming to a close and I am given the opportunity to participate in many of the students’ final presentations about their service-learning experiences (hence the frequent trips back and forth on the #5.) It is this point in the semester that my typically ongoing questions of “What are students learning? What are they gaining from this experience?!” are often answered. They often speak of a particular client with whom they worked in the tech lab or share something they learned from a participant in the Father Alfred Center. They realize that they have left their mark on St. Anthony’s and the Tenderloin Community, and hopefully many will look back on this experience as one that in some small way, has changed their lives. It is my hope that they walk away thinking, “We’re not so different after all.”

Come join me and the St. Anthony staff in thanking this semester’s service-learning students and interns at the Semester Celebration event on Thursday, May 14th from 3-5pm at 150 Golden Gate. Find out for yourself about student experiences at St. Anthony’s and the valuable education that can be achieved through experiential service-learning!!

Ed. Note: This was written by Elysa, an 8th Grade student at a local Bay Area school. Elysa’s assignment was to interview someone from a non-profit to show the human side of volunteerism. Her subject for this interview was St. Anthony’s Justice Education and Volunteer and Advocacy (JEVA) staffer Megan Pippet.

Every day, St. Anthony Foundation serves 2,600 meals. Every month, they provide another 2,600 individuals and families with clothing and housewares. Every year, they provide 12,000 patients with free medical care. They provide countless others with resources to stabilize and improve their lives. But these numbers have next to no importance for St. Anthony; according to Megan Pippet, Education Outreach Coordinator, St. Anthony Foundation is “more focused on making people feel comfortable and at home.”

Megan’s career in service began when she spent a year at a homeless shelter in Phoenix, working for no money as part of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. She had originally planned to pursue a career in business, but her experiences at the shelter influenced her to continue to help the homeless and poor after graduating college. Her desire to work at a nonprofit organization led her to San Francisco; “I found St. Anthony and it was exactly what I was looking for.”

Here at St. Anthony, Megan is in charge of coordinating the internship and service learning programs. She loves “working with high school and college students and helping to educate about the issues of hunger and poverty.” The best part of her job is “seeing when these issues ‘click’ in their minds.” Megan also claims to have “the best co‐workers, volunteers, guests, and clients.”

Megan’s job would be nothing without the people she works to help, “people who feel trapped and unwelcome and who society doesn’t understand.” Through years of working to better the lives of these people, Megan claims that “they make you think about what the most important things in life are…You may think you’re better because you went to college or have more money, but some of them are much more happy even though they have much less. They humble you.” Even though Megan’s job doesn’t involve directly interacting with the beneficiaries of St. Anthony Foundation, she takes to heart everything and everyone she works to help; “some people just like to feel good about themselves after helping, but it goes deeper than that. Like seeing smiles and knowing that you were there to help.”

The choice Megan made to pursue a career in service has paid off with her work at St. Anthony Foundation. Megan enjoys her job and is proud of what she does and what St. Anthony works to achieve. “We offer somewhere safe and comfortable—a family.”

Nearly five years after the Mayor Gavin Newsom’s release of the Ten-Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness, the majority of San Francisco’s homeless population is still out in the rain. Mayor Newsom created a 33-member council of advocates, legislators and service providers to advise the most effective strategy to end chronic homelessness, and guide his policy-making in the areas of homelessness.

“The plan produced by the Ten-Year Planning Council is both a blueprint and a bold step toward a new and revolutionary way to break the cycle of chronic homelessness,” concluded Newsom, in his office’s press release following the release of the plan in June 2004.

It unfortunately appears this blueprint has been collecting dust, and lays the ground work for a home the homeless will never see.

The plan’s central strategy is a housing first model. The “Housing First” model emphasizes immediate placement of the individual in permanent housing, where they have access to services, on site, necessary to stabilize the individuals and keep them housed.

A few key statistics found in the Ten-Year Plan:

The cost to provide one chronically homeless person permanent, supportive housing, with treatment and care is nearly one-fourth of the cost to care for the same person using Emergency Room services and/or incarceration costs San Francisco. ($16,000/year versus $61,000/year.)

San Francisco has the highest per capita rate of homelessness of any major American city.

7,000 homeless people live in SF at a given time. Some estimates put the number as high as 15,000.

There are 1,623 homeless kids in the San Francisco school system.

Up to 20% of homeless people have full-time jobs; 30% of adults in homeless families have full-time jobs. (The National Coalition for the Homeless)

52% of Bay Area cities said more mental health services is the most effective way to reduce homelessness. (U.S. Conference of Mayors 2007 Status Report on Hunger and Homelessness)

With the looming budget crisis and drastic cuts threatening the already starved social service programs, many of the programs required for this plan to work are facing devastating funding reductions, if not complete elimination. The 2009 bi-annual city-wide homeless count was conducted January 27; the results of this count will perhaps shed light on what progress has been made.

As I was reading a recent SF Weekly, one article really caught my attention. The title read: Homeless SF State Students struggle to stay in school and stay loaded. Being a college student in San Francisco myself, I was shocked to learn that in this very city there were homeless drug addicts also working toward their college degrees. The article followed the trials and tribulations of two journalism students, Rex and Steve, and their lives at San Francisco State University. Getting through college is hard enough on its own, then add sleeping outside an abandoned building and keeping up with a drug addiction and I can assume it’s near impossible.

As an intern at St. Anthony’s I have become very aware of how much poverty, hunger, and addiction affects the wonderfully dysfunctional city of San Francisco. Everyday the foundation’s Dining Room serves thousands of hot meals to the hungry. Fr. Alfred Residential Treatment Center has participants as young as 18 trying to kick life threatening drug habits. And the recently upgraded Employment Program / Tech Lab offers a way for people without computers to check e-mail, search for jobs on the web, and etc.

In the midst of this “economic crisis” everything seems to crumbling around the American people. Is my next paycheck coming? Will I have a job in a month? Can I pay my mortgage? Can I feed my family, or even just myself? You get the idea… These are the questions people are asking themselves daily. The SFSU students from the article seem to be doing the best they can considering the cirmcumstances. Once you become comfortable with a situation, whatever it may be, it’s hard to change. Thankfully there are places like St. Anthony’s who are working to help. Here people can get involved in any number of programs that can help them, whether they need rehab services, medical services, or just a hot meal.

Click here to read the inside of the card

A few weeks back we blogged about our Backpack Giveaway in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. Hundreds of kids in the neighborhood got their choice of a new backpack, loaded with school supplies, along with a few healthy snacks. This is event is many of our staff’s favorite day, many of us staying late to volunteer. Helping our youngest and most vulnerable neighbors prepare for a new school year is a reward unto itself. You can only begin to imagine our surprise when we were given these hand written and decorated cards from two of the children who received backpacks.  To Alan and Vanessa: You’re quite welcome! Make us proud, learn lots, and do your very best.