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A Friendly Place

Where Sisters Serve Up Coffee, Care and More

    A young prostitute is found propped up against the delivery door of a woman’s homeless shelter in San Francisco. The right side of her skull is savagely crushed. While her death barely makes a blip in the media, Sister Mary Helen, a volunteer at the shelter who discovered the murdered woman, vows to find her killer: “Her death shall not go unnoticed,” she claims.
    Such begins the ninth Sister Mary Helen mystery, Requiem at the Refuge, by Sister Carol Ann O’Marie. In real life, Sister Carol Ann is much like her sleuthing alter ego—minus the penchant for discovering dead bodies—a septuagenarian nun who co-founded a homeless shelter for women, a Friendly Place, in downtown Oakland.
    It was almost 20 years ago that Sister Carol Ann was talking with her fellow sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, Sister Maureen Lyons and Sister Suzanne Steffan, about wanting to do more with their lives. Sister Carol Ann had recently witnessed a homeless woman urinating in an alley in San Francisco and was struck by the inhumanity of the woman’s situation. The three started chatting, and the idea for a daytime shelter, where homeless women could find refuge from the street, if only for a few hours, was born. Sister Carol Ann and Sister Suzanne set out to find a building to rent.
    “We can’t do that,” Sister Maureen recalls telling them. “We don’t have any money.” But her sister nuns were visionaries, she says, and wouldn’t be stopped. In 1990, A Friendly Place opened in a former storefront on West Grand Avenue in Oakland. At first, few women came in. “They felt it was too nice,” says Sister Maureen. “They weren’t comfortable, so it took us a while to build up the clientele.”
    The sisters put in showers and washer/dryers and served only Peet’s or Starbucks coffee. Once word spread, the shelter attracted as many as 70 to 80 women per day, and the sisters soon realized they needed a larger space. In 1994, they bought a rundown, single-occupancy hotel on San Pablo Avenue for $250,000 with a loan from Catholic Healthcare West, then gutted and renovated it. It took two years. “When we were starting, we were dying, just dying,” recalls Sister Maureen. “Not sleeping, wondering how we were going to make the next [mortgage] payment.”
    But miracles seem to occur on a regular basis at A Friendly Place. The shelter, which is open every day from 8:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., receives no government funding and survives on private donations and the daily charity of many in the East Bay.8 Breakfast is served every morning and lunch (when they have volunteers), all with food donated by local merchants and individuals. Every day doughnuts arrive courtesy of Daily Delectables on Grand Avenue; a group of volunteers called “the muffin persons” picks up groceries from Trader Joe’s or Safeway. And there’s always Peet’s or Starbucks coffee.
    “We get quite a bit,” says Sister Maureen, “eggs, oranges, lunchmeat, milk that didn’t sell, yogurt. It’s amazing,” she says of the food that shows up. Some morning they get as many as three carloads of groceries. And even in these tough economic times, people often stop by on their way to or from Costco asking if the sisters need anything and returning with toilet paper, pens or shampoo.
    Downstairs, the sisters run a drop-in shelter, where the women shower, do laundry, use the phone or computer, socialize or nap. The large main room is bright and cheerful, with tablecloths and real flowers on the tables (courtesy of a volunteer known as “the flower lady”) and art on the walls. On Wednesdays, there’s a masseuse, Sister Catherine of St. Francis, who sets up her massage table. On Thursdays, there’s bingo.
    Upstairs, there’s a transitional housing complex for 26 women who have completed a drug and alcohol recovery program. The women at A Friendly Manor live here for two years, though Sister Maureen says that’s “kind of negotiable. If they’re still working on their lives, going to school, then we make an agreement that they can stay longer.” In the 12 years since the housing opened, the sisters have had 234 women come to live and have 96 success stories—women who have lived clean and sober and moved on with their lives.
    For the past several months, Sister Maureen has been holding down the shelter without Sister Carol Ann, who’s been recovering from an illness. But Sister Carol Ann calls frequently. “She wants to know what’s going on,” says Sister Maureen. “She misses it very much.” The women miss her too, and ask every day when she is coming back. Last year, the two nuns were honored with a Jefferson Award for their community service.
    Over the years, Sister Maureen has seen many women come and go; some are regulars like Cho Ann, who has been coming in since 1992, and who sleeps at night in a foreclosed Victorian house. Others are prostitutes, like the ones Sister Carol Ann sympathetically depicts in her novel; many are addicted to drugs. No woman is turned away unless she is obviously high. But what pains Sister Maureen are the young women who have children, though those children are no longer with them. “They come in and say, I’m pregnant, and I say, you’re what?” says Sister Maureen. “How could you again? It’s very sad.”
    Not surprisingly, A Friendly Place is busiest during the winter months, especially around the holiday season. The sisters do their best to celebrate the holidays, holding a special dinner a few days before Christmas, complete with personalized gifts, courtesy of St. Joseph Basilica and St. Philip Neri Church in Alameda. “We make a list that says, Christina loves perfume. Would like something with a fragrance,” explains Sister Maureen. “Marylou has no socks; she could use some.”
    When asked how the shelter has helped her, one woman, whose tired and worn face suggested she’d been out all night, replied, “It helps us a lot, because it gives us a place to go first thing in the morning.” And with that, she went to get a cup of Peet’s coffee and find refuge from the hustle of life on the streets, at least for awhile.

—By Christina Boufis
—Photography by Lane Hartwell