by Katie Patrick
In case you missed our Celebration of Hope event Sunday, March 27, please enjoy my speech from that evening. We hope to see you there next year!
Good evening. I am extremely happy and thankful to see all of you here tonight! After nearly two years of virtual events and cancellations, it’s great to be in person again.
I want to thank Bishop Conley, Father Fulton, our Board of Directors and you—all of you—for your prayers and financial support.
At CSS, we spent the past couple of years serving those hardest hit by COVID.
This included single parents who struggled to pay rent because their work temporarily shut down or went out of business. We helped families who never needed our services before pay their utility bills.
We delivered groceries to the elderly because they were unable to get to the grocery store and we kept up with sanitizer, mask mandates, and school closures at St. Gianna’s, where stress and anxiety from domestic violence already runs high.
And with all that—the staff and volunteers at CSS were resilient.
We offered online nutrition classes in the evenings to the women at St. Gianna’s. We transitioned our emergency services program to phone interviews only, which actually allowed us to reach more families.
We partnered with other agencies to deliver home cleaning kits to veterans. We reached out to the owner of a local catering company and have been purchasing 20 breakfast burritos a day for our homeless friends. And we recently welcomed 130 Afghan refugees to Lincoln.
Watching my staff give so much of their time and seeing their teamwork and love for the work that they do reminds me of one of my role models, Dorothy Day.
Day was a social and political activist, Catholic convert, and co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement and she said:
“Do not give to the poor expecting to get their gratitude so that you can feel good about yourself. If you do, your giving will be thin and short-lived, and that is not what the poor need; it will only impoverish them further. Give only if you have something you must give; give only if you are someone for whom giving is its own reward.”
Give only if you are someone for whom giving is its own reward.
Just as Dorothy Day and her friend Peter Maurin of the Catholic Worker Movement served meals to the homeless, at CSS we have not only our staff—but our own frontline crew of volunteers serving the poor.
It is my honor tonight to present the Heart of Christ award to some of our most cherished volunteers at CSS.
Before I invite them up here to receive their award, I want to tell you a little bit about the Msgr. Helman Council Knights of Columbus from St. John Parish in Lincoln.
Two to three times per month, these men get together to slice meat and make sandwiches for our homeless friends and others in need of a meal. While doing so they often pray the rosary and share updates on family and Church life.
But what Dennis, Gary, Jim, Rich, Tom, Pat, Mike, Henry, James, Mike P., Mark, Greg, Mike W., Brian, and Joel bring to the table at CSS, is much more than lunch.
In 2021, these men came 26 times; gave more than 278 hours of service; and made a total of 7,938 sandwiches for the poor and those in need.
As one of the Knights recently put it, “The sandwich program is really a perfect service opportunity. CSS provides the location where those in need can be served while also supplying substance (meat/peanut butter/jelly) for the sandwiches. And it keeps a bunch of old guys who prepare the sandwiches out of trouble for a while.”
And so, as I’m often sitting in my office or walking through the pantry when they are working, I overhear their laughter and know that these men truly give because giving for them is its own reward.
