By Ana Rodriguez Soto - The Archdiocese of Miami
Photographer: ANA RODRIGUEZ-SOTO | FC
Archbishop Thomas Wenski poses with the Hope for the Homeless group from St. Agatha Parish, who go out on the streets every Wednesday evening to feed and distribute clothing and blankets to the homeless. They are renown for their distribution of hot soup.
MIAMI | While roaming the streets of Miami the night before Thanksgiving with the Lazarus Project team, Archbishop Thomas Wenski met up with a group from St. Agatha Church in Miami that makes the rounds every Wednesday night.
Hope for the Homeless was started in 2010 by two St. Agatha parishioners, Hector Gonzalez and Moises Pineda. Gonzalez had been taking food and other items to the homeless on his own between business appointments. Having earned a small monetary award from his work, he donated it as seed money for the ministry. Pineda, who hopes to enter the Paulist Fathers next fall, felt a calling to start a homeless ministry at the parish.
Photographer: ANA RODRIGUEZ-SOTO | FC
Archbishop Thomas Wenski chats with Hope for the Homeless co-founder Moises Pineda, center, and fellow volunteer Michael Perez. The group, formed at St. Agatha Church, go out and feed the homeless every Wednesday evening.
Photographer: ANA RODRIGUEZ-SOTO | FC
St. Agatha Parish's Hope for the Homeless volunteer Josefina Recio hands out clothes and blankets to the homeless.
They began by preparing sandwiches at Gonzalez’s house, and little by little others joined them. Group members wear bright yellow shirts when they go out that make them easily recognizable.
They distribute “whatever we feel they can use,” said Josefina Recio, who was handing out not just sandwiches but clothes and blankets on a recent Wednesday night from the back seat of an SUV.
They also hand out sheets, towels, pillows, shoes. “We just stop wherever we’re needed,” she said. “We just stop the car and give whatever they need.”
The irony is that the homeless are not always hungry. That’s because many groups and churches regularly visit them on the streets and hand them food. The night of Nov. 22, three different groups stopped along the same street — unaware that another group had done the same thing minutes before. Often the food gets dumped on the streets, which leads neighboring residents and businesses to protest about the “mess” made by the homeless.
Hilda Fernandez, CEO of Camillus House, understands people’s desire to provide first-hand assistance. But she recommends that those who embark on these ministries coordinate with each other, or better yet, go through established programs such as Camillus House or the Missionaries of Charity.
Camillus provides breakfast daily, starting at 8:30 a.m., for about 100 street people Monday through Friday. They also serve three meals a day, seven days a week, to another 340 or so residents in their emergency shelter and treatment programs. The soup kitchen run by Mother Teresa’s Missionaries opens at 9:30 a.m. every day but Thursday. Both places welcome volunteers and food donations.
Camillus also has a Casserole Program by which groups can prepare and freeze a nutritious meal and deliver it to the shelter. Camillus provides the recipes and the aluminum containers and will pick up donations of more than 50 casseroles. Each casserole provides 10 meals.
Last year, Camillus received 14,000 frozen prepared meals, which helps the agency offset some of the cost of the more than 220,000 meals it serves each year. Lunch on Thursdays, for example, has been provided by the Pedro family of Our Lady of the Lakes Church, Miami Lakes, for more than a decade now, Fernandez said.
For those who can’t be involved in an organized ministry, but feel a pang of guilt whenever they see a homeless person on the street, and wonder whether to give them cash or buy them a meal, Camillus House nurse practitioner Rose Anderson offers this advice:
“Always be kind,” she said. “You’re not going to change their life with $5, nor ruin it either. But the act of somebody caring makes a lot of difference.”
