Please visit us for our open house!

Come see the progress we’ve made fixing up the House of Hospitality, check out our garden plans, and peruse our photo album.

Meet and chat with guests, volunteer hosts, board members, and other Bread & Roses supporters.

Eat yummy snacks, listen to good music, and even dance in our kitchen if you like!

Bread & Roses’ volunteer hosts, board members, and guests will be available to answer any questions you may have.

We’ll have copies of our newsletter, progress reports, budget, and finance reports handy for you to look over.

But, most importantly, we’ll have good music and great snacks!

Saturday, Dec 12th

Donations will be gratefully accepted.

Download:

B&R_newsletter_Nov_09[1]

At Bread & Roses, we’ve got this recipe down pat.  We baked 6 turkeys and had close to 30 people over for Thanksgiving dinner this year.  Guests included volunteers (thank you Tom, Roxanne, Dana, and kids!), in-laws (thanks for coming Martin!), women from the B&R shelter, families from the Family Support Center’s shelter, and a couple folks from Camp Quixote.

It was a great time.  We danced around to the Pogues and Irish Independence music while baking turkeys, pies, and pumpkin bread.  Meta gave proper instructions for “see-food” to the small children (much to the delight of the parents).  Pets chewed on stew bones.  And there was an abundance of food.

Special thanks to Maria Garner (with FUMCO and the Volunteer Center) for chasing down the turkeys!  Hope you didn’t get too winded, Maria.  :)

For full details on the volunteer opportunity, please visit the Family Support Center’s listing on the Volunteer Center site.

Bread & Roses now accepts online donations through JustGive.org!  Just click on the “Donate Now” button on the right sidebar. Don’t miss the “make this a recurring donation” option.  :)

Please welcome our new board members

Nanci Lamusga, Emily Lardner, and Shannon Ford have graciously accepted invitations to join Bread & Roses’ board of directors.

Nanci was a founding member of the Bread & Roses community in the early 1980’s (she traveled here from the Des Moines Catholic Worker) and has strong nonprofit management experience.

Emily co-directs the Washington Center for Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Education – a public service center at The Evergreen State College – and is returning to Bread & Roses’ board after a couple years off.

Shannon Ford is a program manager at the Capital Clubhouse and got her start in human services as an intern at the Bread & Roses Advocacy Center.

Welcome back to the B&R community, folks!

Moving forward financially

Bread & Roses has contracted with a new book-keeper to provide stronger, more in-depth oversight of our finances.  Gerda Wynkoop will be managing our books and reporting to the board of directors.  Gerda is a highly experienced professional who came with strong recommendations from the local nonprofit community.

Other great news: Thanks to a very generous gift from the Tides Foundation, as well as the very hard work of our Treasurer (Chris Bauermeister) and the rest of the board, Bread & Roses is having a stronger (financially speaking) September than we’ve had in many, many years!  We owe a big “thank-you” to our supporters, neighbors, volunteers, families and friends for coming to our aid as we’ve worked to bounce back from a rough year.  Thanks to you, we’re building momentum!

Garden fun

Several of the guests from our women’s shelter have put in an extraordinary amount of hard work as we’ve started rehabilitating our fruit/veggie gardens.  Their reward will come at this Friday’s dinner when I break out the pies made from our home grown fruit!  We’ve all had a great time working (and eating) together.

Stay tuned

We may soon have video capability, which means YouTube embedded videos here on our blog.  We’re thinking along the lines of a virtual tour, community updates, board member and volunteer interviews… let us know what you’d like to hear about and who you’d like to hear from!

Come join us for dinner!  7:00PM tonight.  Just bring a side dish and a smile!

1320 8th Ave SE, just a few blocks east of City Hall

We’ll be doin’ tacos for the potluck dinner tomorrow night.  All are welcome!

Dinner starts at 7:00 PM at the House of Hospitality.

A guest at our family shelter offers assistance: “Give me your hand.”  Like Indiana Jones reaching for the Holy Grail in the final scenes of “The Last Crusade”, I consider my choice: air conditioning in the 100+ degree weather, or the safety of the of the second story bedroom floor in the Guesthouse.  Luckily I am no Indiana Jones, and my feet are firmly planted on the roof of the front porch.

Welcome back to the Catholic Worker, I think to myself.  In the end, we managed to get the air conditioner back inside, but too late.  The fan had broken upon impact on the porch roof.

Meta and I are now moved back into the House of Hospitality.  The house is still a wreck, though the responsibility for this no longer falls on previous residents.  The walls have been painted, the wood floors stripped and refinished, the electrical outlets and light switches are all in working order, and the toilets flush without leaking.  The house is ready to shine – it just needs us to unpack all our boxes, put away our things, and give the place a good cleaning.

There are still a great number of repairs to be made, however.  The roof and supports over the back porch are rotted and need replacing, along with the stairs leading up to the apartment over the detached garage and a good deal of the siding on the House of Hospitality.  The back porch at the Guesthouse is rotting through, and the repair list for the Guesthouse must be nearly as long as the Plowshares‘ collective rap sheet.  We’ve just started on the application for rehab funds from the City of Olympia, and should soon have the money to being making the repairs.

We are deeply grateful for the outpouring of support since our big community meeting in June.  Scores of volunteers have stepped forward to help restore our buildings, donations have grown, and (!!!) the Tides Foundation sent us an unsolicited grant of $10,000 to support our general budget.  This is the first August that I can recall in which Bread & Roses has not been out of money.

Our guests are doing very well.  A young mother and her daughter moved into their own place in July, and a second young family is preparing to move to a new apartment within the next couple weeks.  We are starting to plan out our community meals, and the guests are showing signs of anticipation – offering to help cook, hinting about the “best” family recipe, planning their schedules around the meals, etc.

I am so very thankful for their patience.  In the midst of all the chaos lately, the guests have had a difficult time getting their needs met from us.  The plumbing seems always to be springing leaks, the toilet paper runs out, food runs short, there are boxes and furniture and piles of random things in the yard, and yet the guests show the kind of cheerful perseverance that can really only be found among people who have survived real poverty.  [Note: Most of these issues are now being addressed as we are starting to settle in.]

I’ve never really understood the Catholic Worker commitment to voluntary poverty, and have always said that “simplicity” seems good enough for me.  But our guests remind me of the value in poverty: hardship makes good people into great people. And the point of all this is not merely to house and feed people in need, but rather to make ourselves into better people, to create a world in which it is “easier for people to be good”.  I fear sometimes that I would lack the courage and the character to be as great as our guests if I were to face their same adversity.  I am like the rich man who could not answer Christ’s call to give up all he had and follow God.

Enough navel gazing for the morning.  The day is ripening, the sun is shining, our cat is out chasing the squirrels, and I’ve got to get to work.  As things settle in, we’ll be blogging more often.  Please stay tuned!

Annual Operating Budget 2009-2010

Bread & Roses Progress Report

Thank you!