Volunteering and Visiting with us
Delivering Groceries to the Poor + Food Donations + Hospitality kits + Financial Donations + Visiting us + Follow the Little Way of Justice and Peace
We always need volunteers to help do deliveries of food to the poor who don't have transportation to get to a food bank. Our big delivery in July 2006 will be Saturday morning, July 22, 2006. We start at 9 AM. Volunteers can come and help bag the groceries, and then we need people to do the deliveries. Groups are great. There is no need to check in with us before volunteering for Delivery Day, just show up. We meet at the Dorothy Day Center at St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church, 4909 North State Street. State Street runs along the eastern boundary of the St. Charles parish property. Sometimes we don't have enough volunteers on Delivery Day, so we also need back-up volunteers who could make deliveries during the week following Delivery Day. And we could also use volunteers to do "Fast Response", which is take a delivery to someone who needs food right away.
Contact Bob Waldrop, at 613-4688 or bwaldrop@cox.net about becoming a Back-Up delivery volunteer, or a "Fast Response" delivery volunteer. He will put you on a list and as need arises, you will get a phone call and if you can help fine, and if you can't, he will call the next person on the list.
We deliver several tons of food every month, and we are happy to receive donations of food to give to the poor. The most important foods that we need are listed below, ranked by their order of importance and is based on balancing the questions, "How difficult is this food for us to get", "How expensive is it", and "How important is it". We strongly urge you to think beyond the "a few cans of generic green beans" when you think about donating food to be given to the poor. We receive lots of beans, rice, pasta, and canned vegetables from the Regional Food Bank, but the items listed below are not as available. Powdered milk hasn't been available at all for several months. Peanut butter is a very important, high protein, comfort food. Canned fruit is an important source of nutrients. Canned meat, soups, and chili are always in short supply. Cooking oil and sugar are useful for preparing other foods, and are expensive to buy.
1. Powdered milk
2. Peanut butter
3. Canned fruit.
4. Canned meats
5. Spaghetti sauce
6. Canned soup
7. Cooking oil
8. Sugar (2 lb bags)
We encourage people to have food drives at their schools, parishes, or workplaces and collect food items on this list for us to deliver to the poor. Donated foods should be delivered to the Dorothy Day Center, call Bob Waldrop 613-4688 or Marcus Evans 740-0697 to arrange a delivery time and to make sure someone will be there to let you in.
A hospitality kit is a lunch-size brown paper bag packed with items useful to homeless people. This can include:
- A wash cloth in a zip lock bag,
- Travel-size toiletries
- Chap stick (very important)
- Hand lotion (very important)
- Some hard candy and/or a granola/protein bar, or packaged peanut butter and crackers
- A clean pair of socks
- A card with a personal note, signed only with your first name
This is a good project for groups.
We use financial donations for buying food to give to the poor, providing other occasional help with medical expenses, rent, utilities, gasoline, in situations we come across, to pay for the hosting fees for our web sites and the cost of our help line, to publish our newspaper and other various tracts and broadsheets. In accordance with Catholic Worker tradition, we do not offer federal tax deductions for donations to the Oscar Romero Catholic Worker House. Checks can be made payable to Oscar Romero Catholic Worker House, and mailed to 1524 NW 21, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 73106. We can accept donations via PayPal, emailed to jpeaceokc@yahoo.com .
Visiting the Oscar Romero Catholic Worker House
Visitors are always welcome, but we do encourage you to call first to make sure someone is home (405-613-4688). Although if you are passing through and just want to stop by, and take your chances on somebody being home, that's fine too. If no one is home, feel free to wander around and look at the gardens. If your hungry you can nibble on any ripe produce or fruits you find. Depending on the time of year, you could make a pretty fine salad of maybe 12 different items from our former lawns. We don't operate a shelter or a soup kitchen, so we don't have staff on duty. In fact, we don't have staff. We aren't an organization, we are an organism. Or maybe rhizome would be a good description.The Oklahoma City Catholic Workers are an extended family of many households scattered across central Oklahoma. If you stop by and we are here, we can give you a guided tour of our gardens, we can tell you about our work, you can see the various things we did with our "Extreme Green Makeover" of our house. Catholic Workers traveling across the country and coming through Oklahoma City are welcome to stop here for food and a bed if you need it.
We are also willing to host a limited number of groups each year who want to come here for a week or so of immersion in poverty, solidarity, sustainable living, prayer, and service. The minimum size of a group is 6. Generally ten or 12 is the upper limit, we can sleep twelve but it is crowded. We can work with you to design a week that does good work here and meets the needs of your group. We need a couple of months warning however to put something like this together. We don't do groups smaller than six, and we can only do this 3 or 4 times a year, because these are major events for us that take a lot of our time and there is only so much of that available until we figure out bilocation (tri-location would be even better). Past groups have visited a solar homestead, learned how to start vegetable and herb plants, painted the house of an elderly African American woman, delivered food to the poor, put plastic over the windows of elderly people (just before winter), done yard work and made small repairs for the elderly, distributed Better Times Almanacs, attended anti-war protests, attended the trials of people involved with civil disobedience, attended legislative hearings at the state capitol, visited the Oklahoma City Bombing Memorial, learned how to bake bread and make pizza pockets, and we do the Social Justice Stations of the Cross, where we visit 14 different locations relating to social justice in central Oklahoma City and connect that with one of the traditional Stations of the Cross.
Note that these immersion experiences are first and foremost religious experiences. Everything we do during the time we share together flows from that. We will offer you some suggested readings to prepare yourselves for the experience, and we will ask you to observe certain ascetic disciplines, including recycling everything on your trip, coming and going and while you are here (paper, glass, recyclable plastics, food leftovers), we will ask you to avoid junk food and candy "treats" while you are here (except for those we will make together). We will not eat meat at every meal, and will keep to a food stamp budget for the meals. We encourage you to bring real food for your journey here and we will give you real food to eat on your way home.
Note that the Oklahoma City Catholic Worker House is not the Hilton, and not even up to the accommodation standards of a cheap motel. Sleeping is on the floor, we have mats and 8 air mattresses if you want them. There is only one bathroom with shower, sink, and toilet, there is a 1/4 bathroom with a toilet only. We haven't spent a lot of money on interior decoration and are indifferent housekeepers. You need to bring your own bedding and towels. The food, on the other hand, will nearly all come local farmers, and nobody who has visited here has ever complained about the food. We are who we are, no more and no less.
We can also organize one day or half day service/learning experiences.
Contact Bob Waldrop at 405-613-4688 or bwaldrop@cox.net to get more details or arrange a visit.
Follow the Little Way of Justice and Peace
Linked at www.justpeace.org , under "Essentials" is information about what we call a Little Way of Justice and Peace. We invite everyone to follow this pathway of compassion, peace, justice, personal responsibility, prayer, and holiness. Don't think about "how interesting it is that those Catholic Workers do all this wonderful stuff". Instead, think about how you yourself, in your own situation, can live a life that is more just, more peaceful, more compassionate, and with more prayer, personal responsibility, and holiness. Then you too will find lots of "wonderful stuff" coming your way. We didn't get where we are now overnight, and neither will you, but everyone must start some place, with some thing, and we believe if you open your heart to God, that he will show you the paths that you should take. We start small or we do not start at all. Do what you can, with what you have, where you are, and pray that God will make up the difference between what is needed and what you yourself and your friends and family can do.
We are not here to give people a cheap emotional high about the good that can be done if you work at it, nor are we here to assuage the guilt of people who know they should do better but don't. We call everyone - rich and poor and all points in between - to a path of "doing the Word", not just "hearing the Word" - a change in the ways and manners of our living upon this good earth. If you really want to help us, then first look in the mirror and examine your own life and ask yourself what needs to change.
Open your heart to the Eucharistic sacrifice of our Lord and see the implications this has for the way you live. Turn away from gluttony and selfishness and conspicuous consumption of foolish material goods, and turn towards faith, simplicity, sustainability, justice, and peace. Too many of us say that we want peace, but the way we live our lives calls out for war. In our refusal to curb our appetites for energy (gasoline in particular) and resources, we tell our government that any level of violence is permissible so long as our gluttonous desires are satiated. This is truly a path that leads to destruction, and so we invite all to turn away from death and catastrophe and join with others on the journey towards life, beauty, and wisdom.
We do not have to be successful as the world counts success, our call is to faithfulness.