Volunteer travel log: San Francisco

My last entry in my volunteer travel log, which seems like a long time ago, had us leaving Michigan, headed for San Francisco. Now there’s a change—in scenery, in culture, in pace, in essence! 

San Francisco is a vibrant city with lots of culture, great small movie theaters, the ocean on one side and the bay on the other, streetcars, and Fisherman’s Wharf. But it’s a city. It’s crowded, congested, noisy, and hurried, and there are far too few parking places. Long-time residents say that when you go out for dinner in San Francisco, you find a parking place and then look around for a restaurant. SF is geographically small—7.5 miles square—which makes it an easy city to walk (if you don’t mind the hills). I walked more miles in the year we spent here than I have since my mega-hiking days some years ago.

Coming from the political work I’d been doing elsewhere, it's not too surprising that my first foray into San Francisco volunteering was in LGBT politics. No particular anti-LGBT politics were afoot at the time (this was before the courts declared same-sex marriage legal and then Prop 8 then rescinded that right). But the local LGBT-rights group was very active anyway. I loved this idea: there were other issues of oppression happening in the state, and if we were committed to equality, we should be working for other groups’ equality, as well. So Equality California (EQCA, for short) was working hard on other issues. I joined up for the usual tasks of street corner voter ID, phone banks, and door-to-door campaigning. As a fundamentally shy person, I hate these activities. But organizers who are far wiser and more experienced that I am say these things work. So I devoted an afternoon a week to the street stuff and supervised a phone bank one evening a week. EQCA's work contributed to some great successes at the ballot box and forged alliances with other groups who stood by us when our turn came to be the targets. A good start to being involved in SF.

My next project, and the one I was most invested in here, was a totally new undertaking for me: teaching literacy to English-speaking adults. I heard about a training offered by Project Read, a literacy program at the SF library, and spent several weeks learning how to do this work. I had completed their training and was between learners when I decided to pursue an additional volunteer position that unexpectedly gave me a chance to put the training to good use.

There’s this program in SF called Delancey Street. It is sort of a half-way house for people coming out of prison or off the streets. They can choose to come here instead of other places of incarceration. This program is entirely run by the residents/inmates. In fact, residents designed, built, and are responsible for all maintenance of the block-sized residence hall where they all live. 

They run a restaurant in one corner of that building and a coffee shop in another. They perform all the duties required to operate these facilities—planning, ordering, cooking, serving, cleaning up, book-keeping … everything. They also have a moving business and do all the jobs required to run that business, from truck maintenance to booking jobs and record keeping to pick-up and delivery. At the holidays, they run Christmas tree lots, and residents do everything needed for those, too. Their income from these businesses helps to fund the program. The residents can’t leave except by earning the privilege and with supervision, but their days are filled with the things that fill working folks’ days on the “outside.”

The Delancey Street building with the Bay Bridge in the background

When I learned about this program (by visiting the restaurant with my partner, who knew the story), I was so impressed by the idea, that I decided I wanted to volunteer there. I met with the woman in charge and discovered that volunteering there wouldn't be so easy to arrange. They have no volunteers because the residents do everything. The one thing they were interested in was someone to teach a literacy class. Bingo! A perfect fit! So, for the rest of our time there, I did a weekly literacy class with a group of guys earning their way back into free society.

Both the teaching and the interpersonal parts of the task were challenging. These were guys who had grown up with minimal reading and writing ability. Their spoken language was fine, but they couldn’t read instructions for their work, couldn’t write a letter to the child they hadn’t see for years, couldn’t answer a letter from an old friend who had tracked them down, were concerned about getting out because there would be no one to translate the signs, the menus, the newspaper, and the instructions, on one to help them write letters (or emails), complete forms—all the things that make life in a print-laden world possible. On top of that, they had had minimal contact with people other than their fellow residents (and before that, fellow prisoners), and they were not very attuned to everyday social graces. Also, they had had virtually no contact with women. Boundaries were a huge issue here.

Challenges and all, this was a great experience. It felt really worthwhile and kept me thinking hard about how to be helpful. The classes were wrapped in a lot of laughter, like about the confusing maze of rules in English. And they brought many very gratifying moments, like helping that guy write a letter to his daughter. I don't know how much it helped because I had no contact with any of them outside class. Well, except for one letter, probably a result of my failure to be totally clear about that boundary thing. But that was quickly handled, and the rest was pure satisfaction.

I also did a couple of rather short-term volunteer gigs during that year. I worked for a while in the LGBTQ history archives, sorting and filing boxes and boxes of old documents, newspapers, flyers, and assorted memorabilia from decades of LGBTQ life in the city. This was a fascinating job just for the exposure to these old records. On the fun side, I learned (but was not at all surprised?) that there was a very active women’s touch football league in the 60s and 70s. On a more somber note, I also sorted through records from the 1980s, early in the AIDS epidemic. San Francisco (along with NYC) was ground zero for that disease in this country, and the impact on this city was immeasurable and tragic.

For a short period toward the end of our SF time, I volunteered with the health department, working at street fairs (of which there are many in SF) to disseminate safer sex information and provide free HIV and hepatitis testing. This felt like an excellent service to provide. It was also a pretty fascinating introduction to communities I usually wouldn’t encounter. Expanded my horizons, for sure!

And then, after a year of “sharking for parking,” in a friend’s words, we were off again. The next move brought us home to Colorado. For me, it was truly coming home—to the place of my childhood and virtually all of my adult life. To the mountains, the open, complicated skies, and the smell of rain (I never knew that rain doesn’t smell like this everywhere).

And then, the process of finding my place started all over again.