Reflecting & Looking Ahead
Greetings, and welcome to our December Blog Post! We hope the holiday season is treating you well, and we’re thrilled to be here updating you on the success of our Holiday Meal event and outlining our next big steps.
As you know, on Thanksgiving (or Day of Mourning) we partnered with a few local shelters and a handful of wonderful volunteers to feed 300 San Franciscans and provide them with new water bottles. This year our partner shelters were Community Forward SF and Homeless Youth Alliance, both of whom are returning partners from last year’s event. (Shout out to the other two from last year, Asian Women’s Shelter and SF Safe House, with whom we plan to partner more in the future!)
Community Forward SF, for whom we provided 131 meals, had us help out in three of their locations: A Woman’s Place Drop-In, the old Coronado Hotel that they’ve repurposed as housing, and their Eddy Street Apartments right around the corner from the Coronado in the Tenderloin. If you’d like to find out more about the wonderful work they do for the health of our community out here, take a look at their website: https://communityforwardsf.org/ .
Homeless Youth Alliance needed 100 meals, which we brought to their usual spot outside the Haight-Ashbury free clinic at Haight and Clayton. Every single Monday, Wednesday and Friday, they serve free healthy meals at that location, and their loyal clientele (along with other unhoused folks in the area) were alerted via flyers that there’d be a special meal there on Thanksgiving. Our volunteers helped pass meals out there until the crowd slowed down, and took the remainder to a second location in the Panhandle to distribute. Find out more about what Homeless Youth Alliance does for young and unhoused San Franciscans here: https://www.homelessyouthalliance.org/ .
The remaining 69 of the 300 meals and water bottles were passed out to our usual folks on the streets in the Mission District in the few days following Thanksgiving– if you’ve ever cooked for a large crowd in the kitchen of an apartment, you can understand why we had to break it up a little! Check out our video reel on Instagram or Tiktok to glimpse a little bit of the chaos of the prep: https://www.instagram.com/p/C1H5isNRDJp/ ; https://www.tiktok.com/@motherangelas_foundation/video/7315100028966784302?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=7315205493281654318 .
Cooking and prepping the 231 meals that were distributed with our shelter partners took the entirety of Tuesday and Wednesday that week (it’s possible an all-nighter was even involved), so we’ve definitely reached the maximum we can achieve with such small quarters. In order to keep expanding on the event, next year we plan to attract local grocery and restaurant sponsors to provide/prepare the food for us. Let us know if you have any ideas or contacts!
In all, this year’s event was a huge success and we cannot wait until the day we can launch this program and holiday meal in our other locations. We cannot thank you enough for your support – both financial and emotional! – as we continue to push through the growing pains of young nonprofithood and keep our gaze fixed on horizons of better health.
That brings us to the other purpose of our post today– letting you know what else we’ve got going on!
We will, of course, be continuing to implement and grow the Unhoused Support Program in San Francisco with increasingly regular meal pass-outs, and are looking forward to including the finished SF Resource Pamphlets in these distributions. The Resource Pamphlet program is our most immediate next launch, for both Birmingham and San Francisco. The Birmingham Pamphlets take precedent, though, as we’re awaiting their completion to launch the Community Events down there.
(The Pamphlets might be my personal favorite program because we get to incorporate them into all the others– they’re like the glue that holds our mission together.)
While we work on the Pamphlets and begin exploring venues for the first Community Event, we’ll continue to fundraise and feverishly fill out grant applications to keep afloat and prepare for the future. In addition to the launches mentioned above, we’re also looking ahead to the Teacher Aid & Tutoring Program (for which we’re planning a 12-week test run) and launching the Client Program in New Orleans, the latter of which will require significant overhead.
While the money side of things can be taxing, we’re keeping our heads down through the discomfort of navigating how best to convince individuals and orgs that our work is worth their hard-earned dollars, because we trust that our cause is universal and people will continue to get on board as they get to know us better. If the Holiday Meal is what we can pull off with just a few bucks and an over-drawn credit card in our pocket, imagine the scale of our programs when we have a loyal network of donors, grants and corporate sponsors!
As always, please peruse the rest of our website if you’d like to know more about our programs and mission. We would absolutely love to have you as a cheerleader, advocate, merch-wearer, donor, partner or friend. All are welcome in our mission to disrupt cyclical poverty through improved health– and we most certainly need everyone we can get.
Wishing some very Happy Holidays to you, yours, and your communities. Take care of yourselves this season, prioritize your health and happiness, and don’t forget to Share Whatcha Got to help your neighbors do the same.
