LAUNCHED: happiness hour, ep. 1
Hello! Welcome to our blog, Happiness Hour, where we tell you what’s going on with Mother Angela’s. Normally, we’ll use this space to outline our activities from the preceding month, but for our very first post we’re stretching all the way back to our adventures over Thanksgiving (January’s been mostly paperwork & recovery from the Bay floods anyway— check out this photo of our neighborhood from the SF Chronicle).
Before we begin, we want to take a moment to address the history and harm surrounding the Thanksgiving holiday. Thanksgiving means different things to different people, and we want to make it clear that we stand with those who recognize it as the National Day of Mourning. Mother Angela’s supports LandBack and other efforts to reverse historical theft from Native Americans, and we look forward to the day we’re able to expand our work to support folks on reservations affected by generational poverty (with their blessings of course).
In an effort to make the complex November day meaningful in terms of our mission, we focused on expressing our gratitude for our own resources by giving back to our community so that as many people as possible would have full (and non-inflamed!) bellies. This effort constituted the San Francisco launch of our Shelter & Unhoused Support Program, and gave us our first opportunity in the Bay Area to live into our mantra, Share Whatcha Got.
In 2022, the Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing found the Point-in-Time (PIT) count of unhoused people to be 7,754 in San Francisco. Of those, only 3,357 were staying in shelters. That means over 4,000 people were staying on the streets, in a car, or some other place not fit as an overnight dwelling. That’s a lot of people without a safe place to call home.
As you’ll read on our website and social pages, we believe that the pursuit of happiness should be accessible to all. To these ends we center the three H’s (home, health, and healing) in our programming, as well as public education across those spaces. Our Unhoused & Shelter Outreach Program lies in the crossover between Home and Health, allowing us to support the housing endeavors of existing shelters (from a place of limited capital) and provide nutritional education and gut-healthy meals to their clientele and other local unhoused folks. We’ve also test-run the concept in Birmingham in the last few months with a few small produce pop-ups in the neighborhoods we’ll be serving there.
Over the week of Thanksgiving 2022, we cooked and delivered over 200 gut-healthy meals made of clean, organic ingredients in four local shelters.
meal bags before being tied up
After researching shelters in the Mission Dolores area that shared our values and overlapped with our niches (youth, DV, womens’ services, lgbtqia, etc.), we reached out to offer our support. We ended up settling on four amazing shelters: San Francisco Safe House, Community Forward San Francisco, Asian Women’s Shelter, and Homeless Youth Alliance. We capped it at four shelters to ensure the meals were made of the best quality ingredients and that each org received enough meals for its needs. Next year, we’re hoping to make the event even larger.
materials organized by shelter
Each meal pack consisted of arugula salad (with dry-roasted walnuts, dairy-free parmesan, and a light lemony dressing), lemon-pepper green beans, turkey breast or sautéed mushrooms, and roasted sweet potatoes. In order to prevent insulin spikes and inflammation (and effectively serve those with dietary restrictions), all of the food provided was organic and free from added sugar, dairy, gluten, seed oils, preservatives, and processing. To streamline preparations, we purchased the turkey breast and potatoes from Whole Foods (and had enough leftover to donate to their workers at the end!), but made the salads, green beans and mushrooms at home.
turkey and potatoes warm in the oven before being packed up
several dozen bags & boxes of organic green beans, greens and mushrooms stuffed into a small-family-sized fridge
lemon-pepper green beans being prepped on the stove
Those who received pre-packed meals also received stainless steel water bottles, complete with carabiner caps to make hydration a bit more convenient.
a few of the 150 water bottles given out with pre-packaged meals
only place more crowded than the fridge— the dishwasher before filling these up!
Packaging and delivery was a little different for each shelter. For prepackaged meals, we arranged the foods in the specific order they should be eaten inside each bag. Consuming veggies first is proven to drastically reduce glucose & insulin spikes, and therefore minimize the resulting inflammation and fatigue that leaves so many of us feeling exhausted and weak every day. Where we used larger serving trays, we set out the trays of food in the ideal order. This will be a recurring theme in the nutritional side of our health education— online, in person and in our upcoming Resource Pamphlets (see instagram for details).
salads stacked in an overflowed cooler before being packed into bags
some of the pre-packaged meals before their departure
food platters at SF Safe House
Overall, it was a very successful launch to our San Francisco programs! Our Board President and Director of Operations had a wonderful time preparing and delivering the meals with the help of her family, and we’re thrilled to have supported some of the organizations with whom we hope to continue our work.
Follow us on Instagram and Tik Tok for more educational content and to hear about all the ways you can support us in our mission to make the pursuit of happiness accessible. And remember, when you share whatcha got, you can change quite a lot!
