Update: Hope on the Horizon

by Jerry Windley-Daoust

Over the past six months, we’ve focused a lot of energy on bringing new volunteers into the community so that we could re-open the Dan Corcoran House to do hospitality for women and children. We took out ads in national magazines, we revamped our website, we listed our community on several other websites, and we ramped up our efforts to respond quickly and encouragingly to all e-mail inquiries. Plus, we prayed a lot.

Maybe some of you prayed, too, because beginning in January, we started receiving a lot of serious inquiries. As of this writing:

• We have one new live-in volunteer, Mike Abdoo, who has committed to doing hospitality for a year or more (see related article). 
• We have had one potential volunteer visit and decline to join us. 
• We also have four other potential volunteers who have scheduled visits to the community in May and early June. 

Currently, we have three live-in volunteers (including Mike Abdoo) who have made commitments through spring of 2012 or beyond. That’s enough to keep one house open. We would need at least three additional live-in volunteers to do hospitality at both houses. By mid-June (after all our potential live-in volunteers have made a short visit) we should know whether we will have enough people to do hospitality at both houses.

In light of this situation, we’ve decided that if we have commitments from three additional live-in volunteers by the end of June, then we’ll be able to re-open the Dan Corcoran House for overnight hospitality, probably sometime in October. If, however, we do not have enough volunteer commitments by that time, then we will be forced to conclude that it is no longer possible for us to sustain hospitality at two houses. Instead, we’ll look at other models of hospitality and other uses for one of our houses.

The logic of this decision is simple. We’ve had an empty house due to a shortage of live-in volunteers for more than two and half years. Over the past six months, we’ve done our very best to bring in new live-in volunteers. If that effort doesn’t do it, then we cannot imagine what else we might do to maintain hospitality at two houses. Allowing one house to continue sitting empty indefinitely does not seem to us to be a good stewardship of resources.

If we are blessed with enough live-in volunteers to resume hospitality at two houses, we’ll have to make a special effort to sustain that happy situation. At our discernment meeting in early April, we discussed some strategies for maintaining a full complement of live-in volunteers. That’s one of the ingredients necessary for the long-term viability of the Winona Catholic Worker community; the other is the active engagement of our wider support community (perhaps including you). For more about how you can help, see “Are you a Catholic Worker, too?” And please keep praying for the people who are discerning whether to join our live-in community!