Community Outreach & Social Justice at St. Paul's
Feeding the Hungry
The Pantry of Hope distributes groceries to our neighbors twice a month after the last Sunday service. At Christmas and Thanksgiving, we travel throughout Oakland to bring special holiday meals to seniors who have requested them.
Caring for Vulnerable Children and their Families
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At Christmas we “adopt” five families chosen for us by the Children’s Hospital/ UCSF Benioff Center for the Vulnerable Child. The center provides us with a list of gifts these at-risk
children and their families want and need. Gift tags for them are put on a “Giving Tree” so that parishioners can select, purchase, and wrap the presents, our gifts of love. We assemble about 50 Back to School Backpacks every summer to distribute to children whose families cannot afford these critical supplies Standing Against Violence
We work towards peace in our streets by participating in Night Walks sponsored by Faith in Action East Bay, in which a group walks through the streets of an impacted Oakland neighborhood to let them know we are not alone.
Every second Saturday we join the members of True Vine Church for a Stand In, where we stand from 11am until noon at a corner in West Oakland near where someone has been killed and loudly, with bull horns & chants, call on people to put the guns down, and let the community know that this cannot be just another blip on the nightly news, that this person was important and their death is not acceptable. We are the principal supporters of Guns to Gardens, an initiative that helps to beat swords into plowshares by collecting guns at one-time events in exchange for gift certificates and a hand-forged garden tool fashioned from the weapons retrieved at the previous year’s buyback. Helping to Create Pathways Out of Poverty
We support the Episcopal Impact Fund, which funds community-based poverty relief efforts, focusing on housing security for families as a cornerstone in breaking the cycle of intergenerational poverty in the Bay Area.
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