Live in Volunteers Needed

By Jerry Windley-Daoust,

For the past two years, we have not been able to provide overnight hospitality for women and children due to a lack of live-in volunteers. Over the summer, our core community spent quite a bit of time thinking and praying about this. We came to the conclusion that if we are unable to find enough live-in volunteers to resume hospitality for women and children by March, we will need to “re-purpose” one of our two houses of hospitality. Selling or otherwise relinquishing control of one of the houses is a strong possibility. We hope that that outcome will be avoided by making an all-out push to find new volunteers in the coming months.

The purpose of this article is to provide some background on this situation to those of you in our wider community who have supported these houses over the past eighteen years or so.

Our experience has been that it takes at least three live-in volunteers in order to provide overnight hospitality at each of our houses. (Bethany House has provided hospitality to single men, while the Dan Corcoran House has served women and children.) Three people are just enough to provide a near-constant presence in a house, not to mention the sense of community that is so essential to the volunteers doing the sometimes difficult work of hospitality. Over the years, we have been blessed with many people who have been willing to do this work without pay or benefits, other than room and board (and of course many spiritual benefits!).

In the past two years, though, we have never had more than three live-in volunteers at a time. Practically, this has meant that we have only been able to maintain one house of hospitality. We have been providing meals and overnight hospitality to single men at Bethany House; meanwhile, we have been turning away single women and families on a fairly regular basis. We recently met with the leaders of several local social service agencies, and they confirmed that emergency housing for homeless women and children continues to be a pressing need.

Up until now, we have taken a “wait and see” attitude toward this problem. In the past, we’ve always found new live-in volunteers to continue the work of hospitality—even if that process took a few months or a year. That just hasn’t happened this time.

Instead, we’ve been turning away people in need of shelter, even as one of our houses sits empty. While at times that may be a short-term necessity, it is not a situation we can justify in the long term. It simply isn’t a good stewardship of resources (see related article).

Over the summer, we brainstormed about two dozen other possibilities that would make good use of our two houses if we are unable to find the volunteers necessary to do overnight hospitality at both houses. Most of those “Plan B” possibilities involve selling, renting or giving the house to a church group or social service agency in Winona.

We’re acutely aware that disposing of one of the houses would be a big and probably irreversible step. Before we take that step, we would like to make one last-ditch effort to find more live-in volunteers. We’re making this effort because we believe that the personal, Christian hospitality that is practiced at our houses is preferable to any of the alternatives we can think of.

How can you, our extended community, help? We’re taking out advertisements in several national magazines, and your financial contribution to defray these expenses would be appreciated. We’re also aware that, in the past, live-in volunteers have generally come to us by word of mouth; perhaps that will be the case again. Please spread the word. You might pass on a line from the advertisement we’re running: “We are seeking light-hearted, compassionate, spiritually grounded individuals to join us in doing the Works of Mercy in our small, family-style houses of hospitality.” Interested individuals can learn more at our website, or by calling or e-mailing us. The discernment process for new live-in volunteers generally lasts several months, including thirty days of living in community and doing hospitality.

Finally, you can offer a prayer or two. As we are reminded repeatedly in the daily work of hospitality, God’s providence has a way of seeing us through, one way or another,

A Mystery Unfolding: Laurie is with us

By Barbara Allaire

Four years ago, a woman came to visit our houses to see what the Catholic Worker was all about. Laurie Watson had just taken a job at Cathedral Parish in Winona as the Pastoral Associate, pulling up roots from a full, abundant life and work in Missouri to move to a town she had never known.

With a newly earned Master’s in Pastoral Ministry from Loyola U of New Orleans, Laurie was shifting gears into direct parish ministry, after decades working in various social service settings. Much of that time she had worked with troubled teens, refugee teens, sexually abused children, and the foster care system. For the last 18 years, she’d had her most loved social service work of all, with developmentally disabled and autistic adults in a group home where she was a supervisor for 14 years.

Things have a mysterious way of working out, for those who have eyes of faith to see the mystery. On that day four years ago when Laurie visited the Dan Corcoran House for the first time and was welcomed by Mary Farrell and others who shared the vision of the Catholic Worker with her, a very distinct thought came to her: “I wish I’d known about this place before I took the job at Cathedral.”

But as is characteristic of her, Laurie leaped into her work at Cathedral enthusiastically, becoming a beloved member of the staff there who coordinated faith formation, RCIA for initiates to the church, lay ministry among volunteers, and a myriad of programs. Wherever the action was happening at Cathedral, Laurie was there in a leadership and collaborating role. At the same time, she sought ways to be ever more involved in the Winona CW community. Over the past four years she has volunteered in many ways, being a house coordinator, cook, and listener extraordinaire once a week for the 4-7 pm hospitality time.

“But in these four years in Winona, I always had the sense that I needed to be more involved in the Catholic Worker. It felt like a prodding from God. So I prayed about what I could do.”

And here is where the mystery begins to unfold. This Spring the sad news came that because of dwindling finances, Cathedral would have to lay off a number of staff, including Laurie. “When I got the news, over the next few days the smile on my face got wider and wider. I loved my job, and I never would have quit it. But losing my job I began to see as a wonderful opportunity. Now I could be a live-in Catholic Worker. Moving to Winona had been the hardest time of my life because I felt like I’d left my spirit behind in Missouri, where I had so much connection and spiritual family. But something told me that God would lead my spirit to where I’m meant to be.” And that seems to be what is happening.

Laurie moved into Bethany House this summer, with some time off to be with family before entering fully into the work of the houses; she has two grown children and four grandchildren. As this article is being written, she is helping her parents back home neat the home farm in northeast Iowa where Laurie grew up, as her father is close to death.

Where did Laurie’s yearning for a Catholic Worker way of life come from? Without hesitating, she traces it back to her parents and their life on the farm. “Only recently it dawned on me that we were poor when I was a child. We had what we needed because we had the dairy cows and pigs for food, and we were content. We had no ‘wants.’ We had nothing beyond the essentials, and we were happy. My parents are Catholic Workers without realizing it.” Though they wouldn’t have called it “stewardship,” the family was “taught never to waste anything, to care for things, to improvise something out of nothing, to reuse.” That dimension of simple living appealed to her in the Catholic Worker.

Laurie also traces her CW affinity to a tendency from a very young age to be sympathetic to the underdog, to have a deep concern for what would happen to the marginalized, the outsiders, if they were not treated with care. As an example, she recalls riding the school bus when a new family of children, who were poorer than the usual farm families, got on the bus for the first time. “The kids were saying, ‘Scoot over, don’t make room for them; they’re dirty.’” But Laurie deliberately made room for them because, “I wondered, “What’s going to happen to them if no one makes room for them?”

Laurie has been making room for the poor and vulnerable ever since. In her teens she took a special interest in the elderly, spending many hours and building many relationships at nursing homes. Her parents modeled well how to take care of other people, especially older folks.

Though she has lived on her own for a number of years, Laurie says that living with others at Bethany House is something she thrives on. The simplicity of life, even compared with the relatively simple life she had been leading, is a challenge, but one she is eager to embrace. “The conservation of things here is so intentional—the saving of water, the composting, sharing our excess with the local pigs.” She has not missed TV one bit. “Conversations with people and reading are so much richer.”

What amazes her is the generosity of people, the sense of abundance. “We get donations all the time; we never have to feel stingy about giving away what we have because we know that more food, or more whatever, will be on the way.”

Laurie is also moved by the tremendous need for shelter—“how many times we have to turn people away.” But Catholic Workers do what they can with what they’ve been given. “At the Catholic Worker, you’re kind of forced to live in the present. When you get up in the morning, you have plans for the day. But your day is dictated by unknowns—whoever knocks on the door, maybe a huge donation of produce or other food that needs to be dealt with. We’re responding to whatever happens that day, and there’s a huge variety. It allows me to be open to the gifts of the day.”

And one of the gifts that each day brings is a chance to be with the guests at Bethany House, whether they are the men residing there or the people who come for a meal and some company in the afternoon and evening. “They come with such different backgrounds and stories,” Laurie says. “It’s so life-giving to be part of their lives. That’s a wonderful reason to be a Catholic Worker.”

We rejoice in the mysterious ways that God works to bring just the person we need to us at just the moment we need her. We embrace Laurie with a full heart.

Stewardship: Catholic Worker Style

By Laurie Watson

This is the fifth in a series of articles exploring each of our core values: Community, Hospitality, Faith, Voluntary Poverty, Nonviolence, and Stewardship

Stewardship is our way of life in Catholic Worker communities.  We’re all about living simply and being aware throughout our everyday tasks of how we are called to use resources wisely.

The living out of stewardship is one of the ways that initially attracted me to the Winona Catholic Worker Community.  So much of the day-to-day routines and decisions made here are rooted in the belief that we are called to live simply and responsibly.  In my childhood years, I grew up on a small family farm in Iowa in the 1960’s.  We had neither a lot of money nor possessions, so living simply was the norm out of necessity.  We took good care of what we had because replacements were not readily available.  Things were expected to last a long time.  We got our money’s worth from everything, purchasing replacements only when what we had could no longer be mended, repaired, or improvised upon one more time.  We valued what we had rather than desiring something new.  And ours was not a culture of “disposables”—no disposable diapers, paper towels, or Kleenex.

Here at the Winona Catholic Worker community we value that same lifestyle.  We use and reuse rags instead of paper towels.  We save gray water (dirty mop bucket water) to flush the toilet.  We buy used household items from the ReStore, if available.  We recycle whatever we can and are frugal in our purchases.  One of our never-ending tasks is washing and reusing plastic Ziploc bags!

Obviously, one of our motivations for living simply stems from necessity. We rely on the generosity of others for 100 percent of our living expenses.  We are blessed to be recipients of money, food, and other donated items for the house and personal items for the guests.  That leads to a deeper motivation for our community to embrace stewardship.  We see that all we have is a gift.

This idea of gift is especially clear in the life of the houses of hospitality, where everything is literally, a gift.  Every meal, every morsel, every comfortable chair, every cup of coffee, each and every hot shower and restful night in a warm, safe bed is literally a gift…from you.  The connections between giver and gift are just more obvious in a house of hospitality, where we rely on donations and trust in providence to provide for the needs of our guests.

In a broader sense, we also recognize all creation as a gift from the Creator.  We have a responsibility to care for God’s creation because it has been entrusted to all of us to use for our own good—and for the good of others, including future generations.  Taking care of our earth and its natural resources—the green revolution—isn’t anything new to Catholic Workers.  We conserve energy by hanging clothes on the line to dry, using bicycles or walking instead of driving whenever possible, going without air conditioning, keeping our thermostats set lower in the winter months.  We live this way because we recognize that our lives are immersed in gift.  Our culture teaches us about individual ownership; we think we “own” things.  But really, everything we have comes to us as a gift.  Our presence on this earth is transitory.  That awareness prompts us to respect and maintain what we have for future generations. 

Stewardship calls us to be in right relationship with our environment and with others.  Our lives are a cycle of constant giving and taking.  It’s so easy to see ourselves outside of nature’s circle as we take from our environment, outside the cycle of mutualism. 

Likewise, our relationships with our guests need to be balanced with our desire to live in a right relationship with the earth.  We don’t insist that guests completely embrace simple ways of being good stewards.  For example, we do have a clothes dryer for our guests.  We recognize that it’s easier to live out a simple lifestyle in community with support from one another.  The practice of stewardship also grows out of our other core values: hospitality, non-violence, and faith.  This connection between our treatment of our resources and our moral character is something Wendell Berry writes about in his book, “The Unsettling of America” from which there is an excerpt in this newsletter.

Living in the Catholic Worker makes it easier to see all of these connections, and helps us to practice stewardship in a community of forgiveness and hope.