House of Grace - Philadelphia

30 years ago (with a little help from actor and friend of the Catholic Worker Martin Sheen no less) Mary Beth and Johanna departed their community of the Los Angeles CW for Philadelphia, a place closer to the part of the world they both hail from. A couple years later they’d start a new CW community in the East Kensington neighborhood; The House of Grace.

    What makes this Philly CW different than most (maybe all?) other CWs I’ve visited is that they have a health clinic staffed by the Catholic Workers themselves. Yeah there are other communities that run medical programs in varying ways and to varying degrees. Some will simply let another organization use their space to offer services. Some have medical professionals who just start volunteering and helping out.

    Johanna and Marybeth are the medical professionals. One of them is a physician's assistant and the other a nurse practitioner (sorry if I got that slightly wrong!). 

    When I was there folks came with back ache, looking for a check up, needing a health screening for employment, with respiratory trouble, needing wound care, headaches.
    They’ve been on the front lines of battling covid too and still offer covid tests and immunizations.

    They’re more than just a clinic though! They also help folks out with all kinds of other needs. Each day they are able to offer showers to about ten folks and bathroom services to plenty more. Folks come in and can get directions and a bus pass to get to an appointment, they can charge their cell phone, borrow a book from their lending library, get some over the counter medicine, or grab some hygiene items and seemingly all kinds of other stuff on a person to person basis. 

My first evening helping at the clinic I got to kind of just relax and watch the shift go by. They were fully staffed that night with a long time volunteer running the shower, a pre-med student who showed up weekly to help do intakes, and another helper besides. Plus it was the beginning of the month so the prospect of a big crowd was small.

I was really only asked to help with an odd task here or there until the end of the evening which brought clean up time and the chance for my generic Catholic Worker skills of sweeping and bathroom cleaning to shine.
It all ran smoothly. Folks hung out outside and wrote their names in order on seperate lists for showers and to receive medical care. When folks were called to come in they were given a mask at the door to help prevent the spread of covid, asked what they needed help with and then given a generic medical screening,  and weighed by a volunteer.  Temperature and blood pressure were often taken as well when it was a more experienced/skilled volunteer helping out. When an exam room upstairs opened up they’d get seen pretty immediately.

Sometimes a person isn’t needing medical help specifically. If they were just looking for reading glasses or directions and a bus pass to the hospital a volunteer type would be able to help them out.

I felt a little bit run through the ringer on the couple of nights I was called upon to really help out because there weren’t other volunteers. I’d never filled out ~medical charts~ before, and as a visitor/new volunteer didn’t fully understand what all folks could access or what the rules are. There was a lot of action and I could imagine it being even more difficult for someone not used to working in a CW/homeless service scene.

    But I made it through my shifts! Taking a turn running showers, helping wash laundry, directing bathroom traffic at the front door. On one of the off days I even painted the recently remodeled shower room a little bit.

    The Philly CWs are friends with the Franciscans with whom they share the block. The friars, with help from their year long volunteer corp, operate a soup kitchen on the corner and host daily mass and the two communities support each other in various ways including if there's a big disturbance (fight) at one or the other location.

    Both locations keep narcan on hand and have had to deploy it. Their block is just past the edge of an extreme opioid use area of the city and at the time of my stay a couple friends of the community had recently died on the street from fentanyl overdoses. Mary Beth told me that this shift to opioids in the past few years was a change in the demographic of the poverty of the area from what had been much more of a local generation kind of poverty during most of their CW's history.

    But the CWs and Franciscans just keep chugging along doing what they can. Mary Beth and Johanna are really solid Workers and in addition to running their clinic also raised a couple of sons and operate a house of hospitality next door to their own home.
    There's even a medical clinic in Haiti they're regularly raising funds for.