April Showers, May Flowers, June Bloom
Greetings, all, and welcome to the April, May + June combined blog post! As the title suggests, this post comes with a rollercoaster of news and updates. We’ll jump right in:
It is with a heavy heart that Mother Angela’s will be pausing operations in Birmingham for the time being to focus on launching the remaining programs in New Orleans and San Francisco. With Angela (our namesake and board VP) back in New Orleans, we’ve lost not only a board member on the ground in Birmingham, but also our primary connection (and highly-efficient contract worker) to the community we’d begun to serve in the micro-programming and hoped to serve more wholly in the fully launched programs. Efforts to find a suitable new Bham board member have been dizzying, frustrating, and ultimately entirely futile.
We’ve found ourselves in a tough spot– overextending to try and keep momentum in Birmingham and consequently taking time away from our program launches, fundraising, and the rapidly expanding Shelter & Unhoused Support Program in San Francisco. That you’re receiving a combined April/May/June blog post in July should be proof enough that things are beginning to slip, and we can’t compromise quality of work any further for the sake of keeping three locations.
We’re already looking for a 5th board member in both New Orleans and SF, where we have far more connections to folks deeply involved in and committed to bettering their communities. The member will likely be a teacher, social worker or healthcare professional, and we’re excited to find the perfect fit. We’ll also be shifting the first round of Resource Pamphlets and the first Community Event to New Orleans.
We’re still very disappointed, though, about the change of plans in Birmingham, and we’d like to apologize to those of you who are following our work because of your connections to the location. We feel that this rollout strategy will yield a more efficient path to fully-launched programs in both SF and Nola, and allow us to return to Birmingham better prepared, connected and funded in the future.
This brings us around to the good news, which is that we’re making great progress in other areas! The Shelter and Unhoused Support (SUS) Program in particular has continued to flesh itself out in exciting ways in San Francisco. With each successful meal and narcan pass-out, we’re becoming more and more familiar with the specific needs of our most vulnerable neighbors and how to most efficiently and safely serve them as we continue to grow.
In May and June we successfully began implementing the neighborhood glass-jar-donation initiative, in which we invite our stable, housed neighbors to donate their used glass jars, bottles and lids to provide us with free, sustainable containers in which to distribute water, smoothies and some types of solid food. Below is the flyer we left on doorsteps around the Mission District, and we were thrilled to collect a solid number of jars. In the coming months we’ll be trying to make this into a larger-scale project: upping the number of flyers we distribute and, theoretically, proportionately increasing the number of jars we’re able to collect each round.
flyers distributed in the Mission District (program info and website+instagram were shared on the back)
We’ve also recently begun reaching out to local grocers and restaurants to see if we can come to some arrangement in which these entities donate leftover produce for our pass-outs. Those who participate will be considered “sponsors” of the program, and will of course be allowed to advertise their participation (which will give us a nice little bit of extra exposure too). Our ultimate goal– though we’re still feeling out how to go about this– would be to gather enough sponsors that we can implement public produce fridges around the neighborhood to help supplement the nutritional needs of our low-income and unhoused neighbors alike. The biggest obstacle there, of course, will be convincing either the city or local business entities to pay for the electricity necessary to power these public fridges, but we believe in the powers of persuasion and patience.
Sex workers, primarily on Shotwell Street, are also becoming major recipients of the SUS program (despite many of them being housed), because we’re finding that their needs for harm reduction supplies are quite high, and there are very few local entities willing to provide them with necessary aid. We may ultimately need to rename the program to better include them!
Serving local sex workers has also been a wonderful way to include women and queer people more wholly in our programming, as the majority of the folks we serve in our daytime meal and narcan pass-outs are men. In the future, we’d like to formally launch advocacy to make their profession a legally recognized one, which would greatly mitigate the physical danger associated with this line of work. Regardless of how you personally feel about sex work, its existence is a fact of life and de-stigmatizing/de-criminalizing it will make it safer for workers, clients and neighbors alike (the very same principles of Harm Reduction we follow where drug use is concerned).
[ Learn more about the Harm Reduction movement at https://harmreduction.org/ or check out our instagram post on the topic: https://www.instagram.com/p/C4L7sn5yI70/?img_index=1 ]
We’re still navigating the best ways to share aid supplies with these women and queer folks without causing too much of a ruckus (so far we’ve been pretty successful in small doses!), but we’re absolutely adamant that their needs continue to be prioritized, especially because many of these workers have young children to support and are suffering from untreated PTSD.
Speaking of which, PTSD was the subject of our May + June research and online education posts, and we now have a greater understanding of just how far-reaching these issues are in our communities. Much of what we learned about PTSD in California and San Francisco is consistent with what we’ve been learning on the streets– unhoused people and sex workers in particular are not only disproportionately vulnerable to trauma, but face heightened discrimination when they do try to seek care in addition to all the usual obstacles of inequitable healthcare access.
We were also horrified (but not exactly shocked) to learn that as many as 60% of children in New Orleans are currently suffering from PTSD. Some studies put the numbers even higher. This is largely due to consequences of prevailing cycles of poverty, like community violence and instability in the home, as well as the lasting effects of Hurricane Katrina. Sure, kids today weren’t alive yet when the disaster struck, but many of their parents, grandparents, aunties, uncles, cousins, teachers, doctors, elected officials and police are carrying around unaddressed trauma from the truly catastrophic event. This research only made us re-commit ourselves to centering trauma care as a central health need in our communities, in addition to all the other chronic illnesses and conditions our neighbors are facing every day.
[check out our instagram posts on PTSD and Cancer (yes, cancer can be a chronic illness!) here]
As far as the other programs, here’s where we are:
Teacher Aid Program: We’re currently in some loose discussions with a few high-need schools in San Francisco about a 12-week pilot program for a classroom assistant this fall! More updates to come (planning with schools is naturally a bit slow in the summer months).
Client Program: Though we still have massive amounts of overhead to raise in order to best serve our first clients, we already have a few interested parties in New Orleans and look forward to exploring what this program could do for them once we have the money. If you’re interested in the structure of our home-health-healing approach, check out the program description on the main part of the programs & blog page.
Resource Pamphlets & First Community Event: Obviously, the pivot away from Birmingham forced us to eat a lot of sunk costs, but we’ve turned things around as fast as we can and are approaching a completed draft of the New Orleans Pamphlets. Expect to see it in the July blog post! We’ve also begun looking into and reaching out to a few potential venues for the first community event, as well as looking into contract help to bring the event to life. I’ll be heading down there in roughly the next six weeks to look at event venues and interview potential clients and board members as well.
Overall, it’s been a stressful and strained couple months, but we’re thrilled to say we’ve begun to regain our momentum after letting go of Birmingham and the burdens of overextending and underperforming. Navigating the guilt of this pivot and focusing on streamlining all of our programming has been tedious and draining, but we’re over the hump of those challenges and are very much looking forward to finding out what the rest of the summer will hold for us.
As always, thank you so much for taking the time to keep up with our movements and for your incredible love and support along the way. Also as always, feel free to reach out if you’d like to connect us with grants, philanthropists, other charities, potential board members, local-business sponsors or other resources, or if you’d just like to get involved as a volunteer or donor yourself!
We hope you’re having a wonderful summer, and remind you to take the time to prioritize your own health needs, personal peace and pursuit of happiness. Lots of love!
