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Catholic Worker Provides Food and Shelter to the Homeless

Catholic Worker is our first Quarterly Project, which will be followed by Habitat for Humanity, Orange County Food Banks and Eli House, a shelter for abused women and children.  The focus of our last Meetup was a presentation by Leia Smith from the Catholic Worker House in Santa Ana, where homeless families are housed and hundreds of meals are served to homeless people each week.

To support Catholic Worker and learn more about the issues of homelessness and poverty in Orange County, we have decided to start with a political action and personal action.

The political action calls for each of us to write a letter to a local government official (city councilperson, mayor, city manager) and ask several specific questions such as the ones suggested on the political action page. We’re asking these questions to learn how our cities respond to homeless people and to establish the start of a dialogue about poverty issues.

We are encouraging people to send the letters and ask for responses before the February meeting, so that we can discuss what we learn. We believe the information will help us decide the next step in a process of developing a public discussion about the issues and to let government officials know that there are people who care about these issues.

Leia Smith gave us quite a bit of information about Catholic Worker and the people, including many families and children, who live there now and an overview of homelessness in Orange County.  If you want more information on her talk, please email Susan Kopicki and she will provide more details.

For personal action, people attending the meeting signed up to serve the homeless who come to Catholic Worker for meals several times a week.  In addition to the dates presented Wednesday night, we need people for Feb. 20 and Feb. 21 from 4:30 to 6:30 pm.  Please email Susan Kopicki to sign up for a specific date.  Volunteers are also welcome any Friday morning after 8 am and before 12 noon.

We also agreed to bring blankets and jackets to the next meeting. These items do not need to be new,  just clean.

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