The St. Anthony Foundation expects to serve 1,500 Christmas meals to unhoused San Franciscans on Monday, continuing a more than 70-year-old tradition.
“We always find that there's a dire need for people to have a warm meal on Christmas Day,” said St. Anthony’s interim CEO Bryan Young. “We're happy to do it and extend that type of generosity with a smile.”
The services organization is whipping up more than 2,100 pounds of chicken leg quarters, 160 pounds of rice, 400 pounds of mixed vegetables, and 470 pounds of brownies this year, which St. Anthony’s will distribute in its Tenderloin dining room from 10 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Monday.
“It's a nice feeling to volunteer, doing it you feel you're useful,” said Farris Hix, one of the 60 expected volunteers scheduled to help out on the holiday. “Contributing to others and helping people who need help in life.”
Hix has volunteered with the organization for about 15 years now. There are more self-served meals than when he first started, but there’s still a lot to do in the dining room and beyond.
“I have, over the years, participated with the computer training school and classes they conducted periodically,” he said. “For resumes and things so they can get a good job in an office.”
The retired Montera resident said he spends a lot of time volunteering with other Bay Area organizations, including the San Francisco VA Medical Center, but he has stuck with St. Anthony’s for the community he’s built there along the way.
“I enjoy going and I enjoy socializing with people that are there —- volunteers, staff, and guests,” he said. “I stay in touch with people.”
Along with the annual meal, St. Anthony provides other essential services year-round and during the holidays, including hot showers, donated clothes, internet access, and connections to the most critical need of this population: housing.
“That's not something that we do,” Young said. “We try to partner with city shelters and try to offer them an opportunity to help them get onto a waitlist.”
The organization opened a new shelter facility just a couple of months ago, the Kaplan Family Oasis Shelter in Cathedral Hill, a temporary housing shelter for unhoused families with children and women.
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“That's really been our big focus for us this past year,” Young said of the facility, which has 59 units with availability determined on a case-by-case basis.
There were 7,754 unhoused San Franciscans as of last year’s point-in-time count. The City has around 3,850 shelter beds in the system, after Mayor London Breed announced an additional 300 beds in November.
The need for services among this part of The City’s population is ever present, and Young said offering things like the Christmas meal provides an opportunity to connect people with the help they need.
“People are struggling with either addiction or being marginalized by society,” he said. “Our dining room and our meal is sort of this stable thing that they start with.”
From there, people are linked to services, including housing or medical help, through their clinic. The San Francisco Community Clinic Consortium estimates that the St. Anthony clinic serves more than 3,100 people a year.
As Young and his staff prepare for the Christmas Day meal, they’re conscious that the need for meals and other services doesn’t diminish after the holidays.
“People have a tendency to say ‘OK, I'm gonna go in for Christmas and everybody wants to do that, it's a great day to be here,’ ” he said. “But it's when Christmas is over that our volunteerism drops a little bit.”
The foundation offers breakfast and lunch seven days a week in the dining room, as well as a “to-go” meal at 2 p.m. Monday through Friday. Young said he hopes more volunteers like Hix will join during the rest of the year to help out.
In the meantime, he’s looking forward to Christmas Day, and seeing the generosity and joy of the season firsthand.
“It's a time when a lot of people are missing relatives who may have passed, or just their families, and they find a community within our dining room,” Young said. “So Christmas Day is really special for us.”
