My first experience volunteering came when I was in my youth. I was raised Catholic, and my mother was passionate about giving back and helping others. She came from a lower middle-class family where things were never easy, and she had a lot of responsibilities around the house and caring for her younger siblings from an early age. She was very involved in the Church and involved her two youngest sons (my brother & I) in her efforts. My first volunteering experience that I remember was serving food for migrant workers. If you are unfamiliar with migrant workers, they typically move to a new country or region to find work and save money to return to their families. Imagine the level of sacrifice that is required to move to an entirely new country just to find the opportunity to provide for your family, all the while not getting to see them or communicate with them outside of an occasional phone call or letter (before the days of cell phones & facetime).
I always admired how much my mom cared about other people and how willing she was to give away the little extra she worked so hard to get. That is one of the things I appreciated about being raised Catholic. However, it significantly hurt my mother's ability to love herself (my brother & I struggled with this as well). We all still struggle with this to an extent, and to this day, we have talked about the feeling of not doing enough to help the seemingly infinite number of people in need. This feeling of not doing enough led me to get back involved with volunteering when I finally found the strength to act on what I knew was right for myself.
There are many people in need of help and many ways to help. They don’t all involve volunteering or sacrificing the little free time that most of us have. Do the right thing when the opportunity presents itself and put yourself in their situation. This brings me back to my volunteer work with the homeless. I serve lunch every Sunday at Hesed House in Aurora. It reminds me a lot of the time I spent serving migrant workers. Many people in the shelters work, but many of them have been there for a long time. I enjoy volunteering and want to continue getting to know the shelter's people better. Unfortunately, Sundays are the only time I can consistently volunteer when the Hesed House needs volunteers. Given that, I started to feel like I wasn’t doing enough and could do more (anyone sensing a theme). I contacted another local shelter to offer my time and effort to help their cause. The shelter was Wayside Cross Ministries, and I was trying to volunteer in a mentorship program. Through my experience in dealing with emotional trauma, I have become very adept at detecting the pain of others, and I try to teach the skills that I developed to get through my situation. I was very excited for the opportunity to work with someone who was struggling but actively trying to better themselves. I emailed the program director, who was eager to help. I told him a little about what I was trying to do at Cherry Willow Apparel and how I’m currently assisting people experiencing homelessness. I was shocked when I got his response. I have included it below for your reference."Thanks for the information. As a Bible-based, Christ Centered, transitional housing and recovery center, we require people who work with our residents as mentors to be affiliated with a local church for a few reasons. Two of them are to help every individual explain and reenforce who they are in Christ. Another is to become their family, introducing them to their church and walking with them in that relationship.Most of them come from broken families and have never had a good picture of what a church family looks like. Rather, they come from a gang or dysfunctional families that have not placed God at the head of their house.That's why it's so important in our recovery process.I hope you understand that brief explanation, and I wish you well in your endeavors at Hesed House.” That doesn't sound very Christ-like to me by turning down a helping hand. At the time, I thought it seemed like they were more concerned about indoctrinating the homeless people into the Church than actually helping them. It didn’t fully come together for me until I read my good friend's book “Altar Boy to Atheist: Giving Up God”, an excellent read for anyone interested in learning about growing up catholic. He cited how the Church is often more concerned about improving the institution than the people within. This made sense as I reflected on my interaction with the Program Director at Wayside. They are essentially praying (pun intended) on the most vulnerable among us and telling them that the only path to recovery is through Christ. This exclusionary viewpoint is central to the Catholic belief system and the hierarchy which they try to maintain. A lot of Catholics believe suffering is essential, including that ghoul Mother Theresa, who did more harm than good (read more here). I’m trying to make the point that we can’t rely on our institutions to help the most vulnerable in our society. We can’t count on the government to help them either. Both of these institutions thrive when people are in need. They relish the power that comes from people relying on them. Both institutions have more than enough power and wealth to create a solution that ends homelessness, yet they don’t. They need people to be weak and suffering so that they continue to have power over them. This is why it's up to people like you and me to make a difference. That is why I started Cherry Willow Apparel, to support and empower these people to care for themselves so they no longer have to be under the thumb of these institutions. Thank you for reading this blog. I encourage you to share the stories of the people who are homeless you see, whether stories I’ve documented or the countless others out there trying to do good. Supporting the brand can make a real impact in these people's lives, and people who make it out of the worst situations are usually the type not to stop until they bring others with them. Together, we can make a positive impact in this world; we can empower all individuals by showing them how beautiful they are; together, we can end homelessness!
