Community Ministries Update 06/15/20

How the Community Showed Up during COVID

When CM programs took a 2-week hiatus in March, we weren’t sure what next steps for programming and services would be, or how to engage the community in coming alongside our friends navigating homelessness in the midst of a pandemic. But once we started offering limited services in April, we were amazed to see how this diverse community of parishioners, neighborhood friends, and Pathways participants showed up.

From weekly check in calls with Pathways participants to purchasing cleaning supplies for the more stringent health standards, from making and dropping off masks to researching available resources across the city, from sending in toiletries for showers to finding and writing grant applications for funding, from making greeting videos so people know they are remembered and loved to providing lunch for our on-site operations team — you showed up! Thank you for giving us and all we serve such incredible support.

As we continue to provide mail service, showers, and medical and psychiatric appointments, we have added nutritional snack boxes and breakfast sandwiches to our weekly routine. We called upon some of our current core volunteers to assist in making this possible.

Our trained volunteer chefs, Ellen Lazzaro and the Narramores, who have served in the kitchen since last fall to make meals for Pathways or Sunday Community Meal are now giving their time to prep the food and boxes for our team to distribute on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It’s been a relief and encouragement to the staff to have these volunteers partnering with us again!

Grateful to have Richard & Kathryn Narramore back in the kitchen! 

Charles Jones has been serving the duration of the pandemic, offering almost daily Pathways support in the kitchen with tireless and gracious effort!

Summer is finally here (well almost!) and we will continue the services above throughout July. At this point, we aren’t planning to open any more aspects of the past programming or to engage volunteers in other ways of serving on-site. In August, we will take a much needed break from all programs to give our staff a time of rest and to assess what our goals for programming will be for the fall.

We will continue to post opportunities to support the limited Pathways services we’re running at https://allangelschurch.com/community-ministries/volunteer/, and to keep you updated.

Peace & Joy,
Whitney Edge for the CM Team