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!

Are You a Catholic Worker, Too?

We’ve just offered an upbeat update on our efforts to increase the size of our live-in community so we can re-open the Dan Corcoran House for overnight hospitality to families. But equally important to the sustainability of our work is our larger support community (that includes you!).

It is your donations and practical help that keep the houses running. And your visits to the houses—even just to share a meal or play cards—are more valuable than you might imagine for boosting the morale of our guests and live-in volunteers. The engagement of our support community is a very real measure of the vitality of the Winona Catholic Worker. We recently discussed what we can do to create a broader, more inclusive, more lively, community of people doing the works of mercy with us.

We’ve always extended an invitation for you to “just stop by” for a meal or to hang out, but we realize that many people are initially most comfortable coming to do something. So, beginning with this issue of the newsletter, we’ll list some of the many concrete ways that people can help out and to make it easier for you to connect with our guests and one another—to create community!

We also intend to schedule regular, communal “work days”. This will be a time when you can just show up and help with projects around the houses: cleaning, gardening, small maintenance projects, etc. We’ll also continue to schedule fun social activities that allow people in our wider support community to celebrate with one another and our guests. All in all, we’re looking to build community WITH YOU! And hope that one day you might think of yourself as a Catholic Worker too!

Life Leading to Community

by diane leutgeb-munson

The Winona Catholic Worker is both proud and lucky to have Mike Abdoo as its newest live-in community member. Mike joined us a few months ago, from Detroit, Michigan. Being a man of few words but much thought and work, he has settled into Bethany House in a way that has looked rather seamless. The atmosphere in the house is much the same as before his arrival, namely because he relates to the guests with ease and quietly completes projects before you notice that he started.

We in Winona are grateful for many reasons that Mike has decided to use his many talents for the benefit of this community. His training as an electrician has been indispensible already. Before moving here, Mike worked in the trade that his father, brother and many uncles share in Detroit. It is the nature of that work and his upbringing in a working class family that he says makes it “often easier to relate to guests than to the other live-ins volunteers.” His family ties are strong but his life has not always been easy and he readily admits that he and his family have had struggles that help him to relate to the guests that he now lives with.

Mike has long assumed that his life would lead him toward community living of some kind, though the timing was not quite what he had expected. He had lived in an intentional community in Detroit, through which he encountered a Catholic Worker house in the city. Intrigued, he began to explore other Catholic Workers. In his discernment with the Winona community it became overwhelmingly clear that he was ready for both the move and the commitment. He would join us in the winter, only after embarking on a cross-country road trip. Weeks before moving in to the community Mike and a friend drove from Detroit to California and back, seeing the country and generating fodder for endless stories.

Though at first glance he does not seem an extrovert, one striking observation is that it took no time at all for Mike to commence his exploration of Winona, which involved not only biking around town at length, but, perhaps more importantly, meeting people and developing friendships. It had not been two weeks since his arrival that we happened to be downtown together and people greeted him by name. His investment in coming to live in Winona is bigger than committing himself to the work of the houses, though that alone is an astounding job. As he explains it, he does not see the point in living in a place if you are not going to build relationships, try new things and really get to know the area.

The wider community will likely soon get a chance to witness another side of Mike when he beings sharing his poetry with us. Having published a book of poetry, he is no longer a novice and says he is working towards a collaborative open mic poetry night with some friends in town. The depth of his life experience and the refreshingly radical view of the world that he holds undoubtedly season his words.

Each time a new member joins this community it is a time of joy, like a rebirth for these houses. As we welcome the new energy and learn to make decisions with another voice in the circle, it is important to step back and remember how incredible it is to find a person like Mike in the world. He is here because he shares the core beliefs of this community, which is a simple way to say that he is ready to devote his life, in this moment in time, to live in poverty, alongside those who do not choose but instead are cast to such a place. Mike believes, as we do, that by living in community we can better care for one another. He also sees that violence will never bring peace in our homes, in our community or in our world. He knows that there is a grounding force in the faith life that is shared by this community and is ready and willing to enter that space with humility and respect. Mike is a lot like us, but it is good to remember that he is unique in our world. We are thrilled to have his spirit here alongside ours to help us find the way toward our better selves.

Current volunteer opportunities

Check out our How to Help page for a list of ongoing volunteer opportunities, and the Join Us page for information about joining our community as a volunteer living in the houses. Here are some special needs we have right now (this list was last updated May 2011):

Communal work day: June 4, 9 am - 12 pm. We will be working on a variety of projects at the houses; come for the whole morning, or just part. Some of the projects we'll be working on:

• sealing holes in the foundations of both houses
• preparing the Bethany House front porch for painting
• repaint indoor trim at Bethany House
• wash windows
• clean venetian blinds

Garlic harvest: mid-July. This will involve one or two days of work digging, cleaning, and hanging to dry the garlic we've been growing in the backyard.

Summer work week. We will be closing the houses for a few weeks over the summer to accommodate a break for our live-in volunteers and to get some major repair work done. Please join us July 11-16 for our Summer Work Week; some of the projects we'll be taking on include:

• repairing the stucco on the exterior of the Dan Corcoran House
• replacing the kitchen countertop at Bethany House (the current one is rotten)
• installing a new shower stall at Bethany House

Join our volunteer teams! To help out on a more regular basis, join one of our volunteer teams; find out more on our How to Help page.

Current house needs

Donations are always welcome; here are a few things we are especially in need of (this list was last updated in May 2011):

• prayers for the needs of our guests and our live-in community
• coffee
• fresh fruit and vegetables
• butter
• canned goods
• food pantry items (to give away to those in need)
• money to pay bills and household expenses