Autumn 2025
Happy 2026, all, and welcome to our Autumn 2025 blog post. We’re excited to share with you all that we’ve been working on in the few months since our last update, as well as our currently- developing plans for the future.
If you’ve been a follower of ours for a year or more, you’ll know that we’ve held a Holiday Meal event that has progressively fed more unhoused and underserved neighbors each year. The first two years of the event were held in partnership with local shelters like Homeless Youth Alliance, Asian Women' s Shelter, Larkin Street Youth, Eddy Street apartments and more. This year and last year, however, we’ve taken the effort directly to the streets and spread our pass-outs over the course of a week or more to feed as many mouths as possible during the holiday season.
This year’s Holiday Meal event, to that end, is ongoing. Last year we fed over a thousand people over the course of ten days, and we’re aiming to land at around 1500 meals this year. Extending it into the new year has also given some unexpected relief to some of our unhoused neighbors who are accustomed to returning to back-of-mind after the holiday giving season concludes each December. It’s been a crucial reminder that the unmet basic needs of our community members are an ongoing issue, and they depend on our continued perseverance to address and end the health-and-wealth crises.
October saw the conclusion of our first-ever support group for people with Chronic Health Issues, which we conducted at LYRIC’s Felicia Flames House for trans and nonbinary transitional-aged youth. Aside from having meaningful discussions around what it means to be chronically ill in the current health landscape and helping connect the youth to relevant local health access points, the support group provided an avenue to test our San Francisco Resource Pamphlets with direct feedback from community members surrounding efficacy and reach.
We’ve sought similar constructive criticism to our New Orleans pamphlets, which are passed out by our contractor Angie in churches, community spaces, housing courtyards, schools, Wal-Mart and Save-A-Lot parking lots, and at our Mutual Aid Pop-Ups. Between the feedback we’ve received in New Orleans and San Francisco, we have more than enough information to get started on the 2026 iterations of the Resource Pamphlets for both cities.
This brings us to the future of the organization and its programming. Because the Resource Pamphlets provide direction for folks to find the services we’ve been providing in our other programs (meals, water, narcan & harm reduction, mutual aid and support groups), the pamphlets will be our main focus moving forward, with the Shelter & Unhoused Support Program and Mutual-Aid Pop-Ups acting more as auxiliary programs and avenues to distribute the pamphlets.
The pamphlets represent the niche gap in health accessibility that we’ve been trying to help fill in our communities, as there are already so many good people and organizations doing the work to meet basic health and wellness needs— folks just need to know where to find them. We’ve so loved practicing harm reduction and mutual aid with our neighbors and that will continue to be true, but without much manpower those activities are more functional as means to an end (the pamphlets), and it’s comforting to conduct them with the knowledge that we’re giving our neighbors the information they need to find those services on-demand (or close to it) rather than waiting for our next pass-out.
That said, there are often isolated pockets of unhoused folks who are next to inaccessible, even to the larger-scale harm reduction and basic need services in San Francisco, so if you know of a group in need please reach out and we’ll deliver them narcan, food, water and pamphlets directly.
Similarly in New Orleans, if you know of folks who are in immediate need of mutual aid items (clothes, toiletries, etc) and don’t have the means or information to travel to find them, let us know. We’ll pull up with the pamphlets, whatever they need urgently, and help them navigate a physical path to a community center, shelter, church or loved ones, where they can then access the various services outlined in the pamphlets more easily.
As always, if you’d like to make a donation to our mutual aid inventory in New Orleans, please email powell.hannah@motherangelas.org. If you’d like to make a cash donation to support more prints of the pamphlets, food, clean needles, water bottles and other supplies, you can do so at motherangelas.org/sharewhatchagot. Buying a tshirt or hoodie never hurts either!
If you’re a social media user, we encourage you to follow @motherangelas_foundation to see our posts and stories too. That’s also where you’ll find out first about volunteer opportunities if that’s of interest to you or your loved ones!
Thank you all once again for your continued support as we navigate the way forward in this meaningful work, both to those who have been here since our humble beginnings as well as those who’ve started following along in the past year or so during our rapid period of growth.
We hope all of you had a lovely holiday season, continue to take care of yourselves this winter, share whatcha got whenever possible, and remember to leave room for your own health, healing and pursuit of happiness.
