Every Day at LSH

This is going to be an optimistic email. I’m saying that right from the start, because at first, it’s going to seem like a real downer, but stick with me. Like everything else, it will get better.

One of my favorite books of poetry is The Country Between Us by Carolyn Forché. The last poem is called “Ourselves or Nothing”, and I think about the final lines often. “It is either the beginning or the end of the world, and the choice is ourselves or nothing.”

Big news for LSH, and big news for Philadelphia.

A few months ago, we wrote to you about how food donations were down while the need for food was rising. I was planning for this email to be about how awesome you are (which you are), and how all of your donations and volunteering helped (which it did), and how we’ve been able to keep up with demand. That was going to be a really fun email to write. I’ll write that email one of these days, but not today.

Right now, we’re staring at the possibility of SNAP benefits freezing tomorrow. Over the past month, the number of people coming to us for food doubled. Yesterday, the number of people tripled.

In 2021, my family and I were still new to Philadelphia. We’d moved for my job, only to find ourselves, like so many others, isolated by the pandemic and longing for community.  On MLK Day that year, my sons and I decided to deliver donations to LSH’s family shelter, Jane Addams Place.

I want to write a little something about joy. And honestly, I’m self-conscious writing to you about joy because I don’t want you to think that I’m oblivious to the challenges our clients face or immune to the anxiety so many of us are feeling about, well, everything. I get it. Writing about joy feels like a real “read the room, David” moment.

At the end of every year, starting around Giving Tuesday, we ask for your help. Okay, fine, we ask lots of other times, too, but I think we can all agree there’s definitely a focus on donations before the calendar flips. The point is, every year we ask, and every year you step up, and I really shouldn’t be surprised anymore, but I am. Maybe surprised isn’t the right word. Touched. Moved. Humbled. Inspired. Grateful. 

I’ve been thinking about the incredible highs and devastating lows of our work here at Lutheran Settlement House. This work can be tough. I’m not writing to bum you out (stick with me, I promise this gets more hopeful!), but every day, we see people caught in the housing crisis, and struggling in the economic crisis, and aging comes with so many challenges, and sometimes people don’t even know where their next meal is coming from, and sometimes they don’t even know if they’ll be safe at home.

Last week Olivia, the Director of our Bilingual Domestic Violence Program, did just about the worst thing that a person can do. She was late to a meeting. I know, right? But before you judge her too harshly, listen to what she was doing that made her late.