community events

(currently fundraising for 1st Birmingham Community Event, to be scheduled early 2024)

These events combine mutual aid with the HHH method to provide free goods, services and vital information to the community. They also create opportunities for Mother Angela’s staff to meet members of the community and invite them to participate in our other programs.

We plan to partner primarily with local farms and grocers to provide clean produce (especially vegetables) at our events, but we’ll also source a number of home goods that serve our health & wellness ends. The hope is that by providing clean, affordable and sustainable goods for free at the events, we both help close some urgent budgeting gaps and encourage folks to adopt some more sustainable practices in the long term.   We are very intentional about providing food and wisdom that help to economize home health practices for our community in an effort to make better health more accessible.  The mutual aid items offered will vary a bit by season (for example, there will be more emphasis on warm clothes and blankets at winter events), but examples of goods include: 

Our community events are also meant to replace traditional fundraisers that cater solely to the entertainment of donors. Our events will be fun and family-friendly for both the community members attending for free and to ticketed donors (who will also be invited to bring supplies for the mutual aid drive). The event itself will be the same for everyone: free music, snacks, face painting and more (think block party) in addition to the free mutual aid goods and items/beverages for sale. Some non-grocery local businesses as well as some larger chains (with more to give) may also be invited to sponsor the event in exchange for a banner/booth, hopefully providing some exposure for the smaller shops. Partnering with businesses in this way will also help us cover our overhead as opposed to entering the events at a large deficit.

• Non-toxic cleaning & cooking supplies

• Laundry tabs & dryer balls 

• Diaper sets, diaper genies, and other baby products

• Menstrual underwear and cups 

• Over-the-counter medicines, painkillers, contraceptives and pre/probiotics

• Seeds & growing supplies

• First aid kits

• Pillows, blankets (and tents for the unhoused + shelter resources)

• Toiletries

• Low-maintenance fans / heaters 

• Unisex all-weather clothing items

• Resource pamphlets (see resource program) + low cost recipes

client work

(first family to be accepted in New Orleans in 2024 upon fundraising & paperwork completion)

This is the heart of our work: taking families in tricky situations and meeting them where they are with compassion and determination to navigate the unique hurdles they face. Unlike single-issue organizations and government entities providing economic relief, our programs (the client work in particular) are holistically designed to provide clients with the tools to prosper independently and pursue happiness for the rest of their lives. We hope to identify families most affected by the generational cycle of poverty, and subsequently disrupt that cycle by putting health first. Our approach is based on the three H’s:

home: Many clients will either be currently experiencing homelessness or considered at-immediate-risk for eviction or other loss of housing. Our first step is to alleviate this pressure by taking on rent payments (if the client is already in a comfortable home) or finding safe, temporary housing until the client is on their feet. If necessary, we’ll help them to find secure longterm housing as well. Additionally, we introduce families to nontoxic, sustainable and cost-saving ways to shop & consume home goods that will help alleviate the overall financial burden of maintaining a safe home. To this end we’ll also teach families to grow some of their own produce if their space and lifestyle/work schedule permit.

health: Along with meeting their various medical needs, we encourage our clients to trust in the science behind stabilizing gut health and balancing blood sugar. A healthy gut microbiome fosters a strong immune system; hormonal balance; energy levels; heart health; diabetes prevention; and management of mental illness, mood disorders and emotional wellbeing. In order to meet the greatest variety of dietary restrictions (medical, religious, etc) and keep costs low, the recipes we share with clients and online will be nutrient-dense, vegan, low in sugar, and free of nuts, seeds, soy, oil and optionally gluten. Studies demonstrate that a diet focusing on veggies, starches and legumes is both safe and optimal for all stages of human life, including pregnancy. There is even evidence that global populations eating only this way are largely free of the chronic and longterm preventable diseases that have become so commonplace in American life— the ones that can make someone’s health an obstacle in keeping their family afloat.

Because work/life balance is also central to maintaining health, we work with our clients to help them lock down a satisfactory and sufficient source of income, and then educate them regarding means to continue growing their wealth. To this end we also support adult literacy, primary and secondary education should any family members need tutoring, standardized test prep, assistance with higher education applications/fees or finding non-predatory arrangements for student loans.

healing: Trauma comes in many forms, all of which can create obstacles to achieving both financial and socio-emotional stability. Clients will bring a variety of diagnosable trauma— from illness and injury to abuse and loss— which we honor as a central component of our whole-person programming. We are prepared to address any of these issues by providing access to physical therapy, psychotherapy, legal services, support groups (grief circles, AA/NA/Al-Alon, etc.) and any other means necessary to facilitate longterm healing.

unhoused & shelter support

(currently fundraising for 2nd Annual Holiday Meal in SF + expansion of meal pass-outs & donations)

In service of both the gut-health side of our mission and supporting the unhoused community, we plan to partner with local shelters (homeless, domestic violence, youth, lgbtqia, etc.) to periodically donate delicious, gut-healthy and allergy/restriction-friendly meals that often aren’t in the budget of even the most well-funded and well-operated shelters. Our resource pamphlets will also be distributed as part of this program, as will applications to participate in our client work when appropriate.

We also deliver meals to unhoused individuals in the neighborhood with whom we’ve formed a friendly rapport. These gift bags will include both the resource pamphlets (containing information about our local shelters), but we respect the autonomy of unhoused individuals to decide where they feel safest spending the night. We’d like to establish trust with our unhoused neighbors in all our locations, not only so that we can meet some immediate needs like food and water, but also so that they might feel more inclined to use our resource pamphlets or participate in other programs that might offer them longterm solutions for homelessness and instability.

It is our hope to someday own and operate a multi-purpose shelter & community center of our own in each of our locations, which will have options for both the temporarily unhoused and chronically homeless. Until we have that capital, we’re supporting our neighbors and the wonderful shelters already doing the work to address the housing crisis plaguing the nation.

teacher aid & tutoring

(applications for classroom aids & volunteer tutors coming soon for San Francisco)

All of our work— and it pains us to say this— is entirely inadequate without equitable access to quality education. As a nonprofit, we have no place in partisan politics, but we are firm in our belief that public education should be prioritized at every level of community, state and federal government, no matter who holds office, to make every child’s experience both safe and worthwhile in terms of the knowledge and opportunities reaped.

As things stand, teachers (especially in low-income school districts) are bearing most of the burden in trying to close these gaps. Our teacher aid fund approaches the problem from two angles, allowing teachers maximum resources, assistance and autonomy in their own classrooms.

Half the fund will be dedicated to providing whatever supplies the teachers at our partner schools need most: from pencils and notebooks to healthy snacks. We give teachers the reins in terms of telling us what they’re missing. Who could possibly know better?

The other half of the fund will pay local people interested in education to come into the classroom and act as teachers’ assistants on a part-time basis. Overcrowding and time limitations are major hurdles in many classrooms across the country, and an extra adult who can be useful at the teacher’s discretion makes a world of difference.

It is our hope that the locals we hire for this program will go on to be educators or support education in these communities, bringing firsthand knowledge of what it takes to succeed in their unique environments. The best fits will likely be college students with free time during the day, those employed part time or with a flexible full-time schedule, and those working towards any degree in an educational or social field.

Our tutors, meanwhile, will only need to be available after k-12 school hours, and can even be high schoolers themselves (so long as they’re tutoring middle and elementary students; tutors for high schoolers will need to have a complete high school transcript). Our primary goals in the tutoring program will be bringing students to their present grade level in the core subjects, as well as assisting high schoolers interested in attending college with standardized test prep, applications and essays.

A link to apply for tutoring or teacher aid positions in Birmingham and San Francisco will soon be available on the “share whatcha got” page of the website.

It is our hope that, once strong relationships are forged with these schools, we can also work with them to help provide education surrounding lifelong healthy eating and self care habits, source clean produce for school breakfasts/lunches, access early mental health interventions and offer them the use of our resource pamphlets for students to take home.