Dorothy Day Center Observation

While volunteering through the Catholic Charities group, I got to experience both the Sanitation handout room at the Dorothy Day center as well as work in the prep kitchen at the faculty warehouse. While volunteering in the Day center we were placed in a back room that had two service counters on opposite sides of the room. Those counters opened into the bunk rooms of the center and were organized by gender, sorting the women onto one side and all the men on the other. Between the bunk rooms our room had shelves of supplies and handouts that the clients could request. Some of the supplies that we had were personal items such as deodorant, shampoo, body wash, lotion, etc. and we were aloud to give out one item from each section to each person. Along with the personal use items we were in charge of handing out towels and any spare clothing that we had behind the counters. In order to receive the towels a person would trade their Dorothy Day community card just in order to make sure that the towel is given back. …show more content…
While we were placed in the distribution room the workers were all in the check in areas. The community members were a mixture of inviting and unimpressed. Most of them were kind and only interacted with the volunteers when giving their cards for a towel or receiving any of the personal items. Others were split between not talking or interacting with the volunteers at all, and pushing for a full drawn conversation between the person and the volunteer. Many of them just wanted small conversations about life and events in the day, others were pushy and sarcastic as to why we were in fact volunteering. Many of the community members were ‘clean kept’ and would not fit the classic definition of homeless in a glance. It was one of the things that surprised me the most, is how well kept the members looked as well as how organized they'd keep their belongings and