Help: If you want to do something nice this year for poor families and homeless people in San Francisco, here are the three major places where free holiday dinner meals are served. All three need your help this year more than any before.
Eat: If you need a place to eat a free holiday meal this year, then you definitely came to the right blog. I have personally eaten at all three of the following and for a number of years I was on staff at one of these. If you don't have a place to eat this year, please don't hesitate, because I assure you a warm welcome and a great holiday dinner awaits you! Just remember that lines at all three start forming early and they stay long right up to the end. Come early and invite everyone you know. You may have to wait in line for an hour or so, but you will be seated.
All three of these meals are free and all three are great holiday dinners with all the trimmings.
1) Tenderloin Tessie --
"Tessie" was Perry Spink's drag name. Perry was a well-known and very popular bartender in the San Francisco gay community of the 1960s and 70's. The dinners began with a few turkeys back in 1974 and today the Tenderloin Tessie's organization serves thousands of free full-course holiday dinners with all the trimmings.
Eat: If you need a place to eat a free holiday meal this year, then you definitely came to the right blog. I have personally eaten at all three of the following and for a number of years I was on staff at one of these. If you don't have a place to eat this year, please don't hesitate, because I assure you a warm welcome and a great holiday dinner awaits you! Just remember that lines at all three start forming early and they stay long right up to the end. Come early and invite everyone you know. You may have to wait in line for an hour or so, but you will be seated.
All three of these meals are free and all three are great holiday dinners with all the trimmings.
1) Tenderloin Tessie --
"Tessie" was Perry Spink's drag name. Perry was a well-known and very popular bartender in the San Francisco gay community of the 1960s and 70's. The dinners began with a few turkeys back in 1974 and today the Tenderloin Tessie's organization serves thousands of free full-course holiday dinners with all the trimmings.
This November 25th and again on December 25th, the all-volunteer work force will serve hot turkey dinners to as many people who show up between 1 PM and 4 PM. That can add up to thousands and this year is expected to be larger than last year. It has been growing every year. They're going to need a lot of help and cash support too..
This is a very difficult year for everyone -- Tenderloin Tessie volunteers and supporters included!
The venue will again be the First Unitarian Church. The church is at 1187 Franklin, which runs parallel to Van Ness and is just one block up the hill. The cross streets are Geary and O'Farrell.
The Muni 38-Geary line, both inbound and outbound, stops right across the street.
If you can volunteer some work time please call Michael Gagne at . If you can donate some money please also contact Michael by phone or drop a note to or send a check to Tenderloin Tessie Holiday Dinners, POB 420631, San Francisco, CA 94142
Tenderloin Tessie volunteers and supporters will do the whole thing all over again on Christmas Day (and again on Easter Sunday 2011) at the same venue and during the same hours.
For the record: December 25th is selected because it's a good day to do that sort of thing, but it is just as much a Chanukah Dinner as a Christmas Dinner or a (fill in the blank) Dinner. Think: "Holiday Dinner".
The same thing is true for Easter Sunday. It's just a good day to do the dinner. Everyone is off-work that day, but please also consider the Easter Dinner to be a Soltice, Equinox or Spring Dinner if you prefer (as many of us do).
Tenderloin Tessie's began as a spontaneous outreach of the San Francisco LGBT community and to this day the clear majority of volunteers and supporters come from within the LGBT community. If you are Transgender, gay, lesbian, bisexual, a non-homophobe straight or just a sweet person and if you are looking for a place where you will feel comfortable and have a really great home-cooked holiday dinner, then waste no more time, dear friend, because Tenderloin Tessie's is the place for you. And, of course, this effort from the LGBT community is the most elegant, well-appointed and comfortable of all the San Francisco offerings. The meal is home-made and absolutely delicious. It is a dinner-house quality meal served in elegance, if you have a little imagination, but they do a very impressive job. The amount of effort and time and love put into this dinner by really nice people who genuinely care is sweeter than all the "elegance" of a Pacific Heights mansion.
St. Anthony Dining Room and the Glide Free Meals Program serve free meals every day of the year and they are very skilled at what they do, but that kind of daily operation is a different kind of talent from what the Tenderloin Tessie volunteers do three times a year.
They have a different concept in mind. They come together three times a year to create a real, family home-cooked gourmet holiday dinner and serve that dinner in warmth and elegance in an upbeat and fun atmosphere. Every year they accomplish this task with grace. Laughter and cheer is everywhere. The volunteers at Tenderloin Tessie's are some of the finest, nicest, most caring people in San Francisco.
So, if you're a crabby old bastard, just send Tenderloin Tessie a check and go eat at one of the other places. They're ready for you. But if you want to spend a lot of time laughing and smiling and doing some neat things this holiday season, come eat at Tenderloin Tessie's or give Michael Gange a call at and volunteer some of that valuable time of yours.
Visit Tenderloin Tessie online at http://www.tenderlointessie.com/
2) St. Anthony Dining Room --
In most major cities across America, if you head into the deepest and poorest part of the inner city, you will usually find the brown-robed Franciscan friars somewhere nearby. These followers of Francis of Assisi (a radical social liberal left-wing Catholic-Christian born in the Italian town of Assisi in the late 1100's) focus their efforts on the poor and homeless. In San Francisco the friars opened their doors at St. Boniface Church on Golden Gate Avenue in the heart of the Tenderloin in 1900 (but the Franciscans have been in San Francisco since their arrival with Friar Junipero Serra in 1776 when they founded Mission Dolores).
For the past 60 years the St. Anthony Foundation has been providing multiple services to the poor and homeless of San Francisco. The St. Anthony Dining Room serves more than a million free hot meals every year. Here are three ways you can help the friars and the St. Anthony Dining Room:
A) $100 can feed 230 people
B) Volunteer your time
C) Thanksgiving and Christmas Holiday Dinner Volunteers
And here's the menu if you would like to know what's for lunch today. The Muni 31-Balboa stops across the street from St. Anthony's on Golden Gate Avenue at Jones Street.
Non-holiday regular daily hours: Seniors are served beginning at 10:30 AM. At 11:30 AM the staff and volunteers begin seating everyone else. The staff maintain an orderly line and provide security for the guests waiting in the line.
They continue to seat until everyone waiting in line has been seated. On non-holidays that is usually around 1:30 PM.
St. Anthony's is completely accessible and they do not make disabled people wait in a line.
Like Tenderloin Tessie, the friars and volunteers at St. Anthony Dining Room will serve full-course special holiday dinners on Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day and Easter Sunday. Unlike Tessie, the people at St. Anthony Dining Room repeat the same routine of cooking meals for long lines of hungry people every day of the year. They never close and they have been serving those hot meals since 1950 -- that's sixty years of feeding San Francisco's poor.
But on Thanksgiving and Christmas it is an absolutely amazing place to be. There are so many smiles and laughs and good will among the Muslim families sitting at a table next to a Vietnamese Buddhist family who share their table with an African-American senior with family roots in America pre-dating the founding of this nation. They are all there: the entire complex tapestry of the emerging Tenderloin. Everyone from everywhere gathered together around a table. It is Chanukah and Christmas and New Year and Ode to Joy come alive. It is the place your heart wants you to be.
Volunteer your time, make a food donation and donate some desperately needed money.
And remember, although St. Anthony Dining Room serves free hot meals 365 days a year, the lines really swell to huge numbers on Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter, so extra volunteer help, tons of food and a lot of money are needed.
3) Glide Church -- Rev. Cecil Williams --
Rev. Cecil Williams is an institution unto himself. Since coming to Glide in the 1960's, Cecil has built the church into a 10,000-member institution with more than 50 social service programs and a free meals program that serves thousands of meals a day -- always free. Janice Mirikitani, an amazingly talented woman who is both a celebrated poet and the successful CEO of the Glide Foundation, the entity that directs Glide's programs and handles all the daily management of the non-profit 501(c)(3) with hundreds of employees working in more than 50 social service programs that serve thousands of people - always free - and on a daily basis (Whew! It's hard just typing that all out!) is married to Cecil.
Those two in the picture: Janice Mirikitani and Cecil Williams are an absolutely pefect match in many ways and on many levels. So, this is the house they have built:
Nobody is rejected at Glide and everybody is accepted just as they are. Glide is like no other place anywhere ever.
Glide is crowded at every holiday with thousands of people of every gender identity, every race and ethnicity, crowded with families, children, seniors and an increasing number of homeless teens who come to Glide for a family holiday meal they will get nowhere else. A good number of these same people come to Glide every day of the week, some year after year, to eat breakfast, get a bag lunch to take on their day's journey, and then come back in the afternoon to eat a hot dinner.
Glide really is "home" to many thousands of people in San Francisco. Glide isn't just a church. That's not a big-enough word for Glide. Glide is a family. It is a big, disfunctional, wonderful, multi-colored and multi-cultural family and Cecil is their Great Papa. He is the warm, wondeful spirit of Glide and so shall he always be.
Those two in the picture: Janice Mirikitani and Cecil Williams are an absolutely pefect match in many ways and on many levels. So, this is the house they have built:Nobody is rejected at Glide and everybody is accepted just as they are. Glide is like no other place anywhere ever.
Glide is crowded at every holiday with thousands of people of every gender identity, every race and ethnicity, crowded with families, children, seniors and an increasing number of homeless teens who come to Glide for a family holiday meal they will get nowhere else. A good number of these same people come to Glide every day of the week, some year after year, to eat breakfast, get a bag lunch to take on their day's journey, and then come back in the afternoon to eat a hot dinner.
Glide really is "home" to many thousands of people in San Francisco. Glide isn't just a church. That's not a big-enough word for Glide. Glide is a family. It is a big, disfunctional, wonderful, multi-colored and multi-cultural family and Cecil is their Great Papa. He is the warm, wondeful spirit of Glide and so shall he always be.
Many of San Francisco's poor and homeless are also members of the 10,000-member strong Glide Memorial Church. It is impossible to be among staff, recipients or volunteers and not bump into Glide Church members. You will see what I mean if you ever attend a Sunday Celebration at Glide. You'll hear the magnificent and very widely acclaimed Glide Ensemble and be right in the middle of the amazingly eclectic and animated, charged-up Glide family, or at least a couple of thousand of them.
Many of these same folks, the Glide family, come to the Glide Free Health Clinic for non-judgmental free medical care. Others come to Glide for addiction recovery and later on, job training and placement -- and all of these people plus a whole new group of people -- families who are the victims of the economy -- come to Glide on Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day and Easter Sunday. Glide has become their "home" too.
Just like most families there is a lot of dysfunction and a lot of folks are broke. But, Glide just keeps on going. Glide can give the Energizer Bunny some spare juice. Despite whatever comes their way, Glide continues to serve some really first-class full-course holiday meals to a staggering number of people. And as the numbers keep growing, the money keeps dropping. Most of the Glide Family have time and skills to offer, but no money. That's the way it is. They need help.
No money means no food.
Glide faces a tremendous need for both food and money.
Help Glide this holiday season with your cash donation or you can volunteer, but keep in mind that Glide has become an enormously popular place to volunteer time on the holidays. Sometimes Glide has people ready, willing and standing-by to help. People they have. It's money they really need.
That being said, they usually have a few volunteer positions they try to make available to people. Check here to see what is available.
Idea: How about starting a new family tradition: you spend your birthday giving to others instead of receiving by volunteering at Glide. Glide and your family would (eventually come to) love that idea. It would become a family tradition to pass down. Volunteer a few hours serving meals at Glide. Then give Glide a generous donation as you leave. Classy. You're going to learn a lot about others, but you will end up learning much more about yourself. Here's the place to start with your new Family Birthday Tradition!
The Muni 27-Bryant line stops right in front of Glide on Ellis Street at Taylor.
About the photos:
Top: The Martin Luther King Jr Dining Room in the First Unitarian Church where Tenderloin Tessie hosts free full-course home-cooked holiday dinners every Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day and Easter Sunday. During meal sittings musicians perform on the stage, which you can see in the back left portion of the photo. The Tenderloin Tessie dinner is, I believe, the cream of the offerings in San Francisco.
Middle: Friar Floyd Lotito, OFM, the popular Franciscan who served the poor of the Tenderloin since 1970, died this past year. The 74-year-old joined the Franciscan Order in 1953 -- that's 56 years of serving other people. Today, other hands carry meal trays at St. Anthony's, but the daily meal continues without interruption because of people like Floyd. Now, St. Anthony Dining Room needs your help to keep that tradition going. The need is great, but the laborers are few.
Bottom: This is not the most current photo of Jan and Cecil, but it is a partcicularly good one. The background is Glide Church on the corner of Ellis and Taylor Streets.
1 comments:
Nothing feels better than giving your time to the people less fortunate that yourself.
Service to people who suffer makes you a better human being..
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