Pockets of restorative community. Everywhere.

From our beginnings as a handshake interfaith collaborative in 2010, the Mercy Coalition has been shaped and driven by the concept of restorative community.  It begins with “Mercy Helps”: emergency food, shelter, clothing, and resource referral. It takes a more sustained form in our supportive services programming, including food, clothing and laundry services with the 60-bed Project Homekey operated by the City of West Sacramento.

From the Mercy Helps and supportive services flows a number of avenues for real restorative community to take root. Weekly life-skills support groups become joyful mini-communities of their own - a place to unpack challenges, learn new ideas, and be inspired and encouraged. Our JAM (Jobs And Mentoring) Academy creates income, accountability, and the daily gift of positivity and affirmation. Rotating Winter Warming Centers offer not just warm beds and meals, but a traveling “family table” of belonging, sharing, and encouragement.

All these concepts and more are embodied in the development of our latest project - the Recovery Cafe West Sac, tentatively slated for opening in early 2023. Here, food, friendship, growth and support knit together in one ongoing mental-health strategy for those recovering from addiction, homelessness, abuse and trauma.

Powered by thousands of volunteer hours from around West Sacramento and the region, the Mercy Coalition is impassioned about creating pockets of restorative community in innovative and even unlikely models. Recent partnerships with Dignity Health, the City of West Sacramento, Yolo County Children’s Alliance, and the Sacramento Regional Community Foundation have helped rocket some of these dreams forward. But the need remains greater than ever.

And so does the opportunity.

OUR VALUES

CULTURAL HUMILITY. We want to hear and understand, not dictate and assume. We seek to identify and harpoon our own entitlement.

DIVERSITY. We are awed by the richness, beauty and strength of the full human kaleidoscope. We seek to live and work in its nexus.

EQUALITY. We are allies and advocates for the marginalized in any context.  We consider ourselves to be agents of change wherever there are disparities.

INCLUSION. The unseen, rejected and dismissed are our family. We have a seat at the table for all whose identities have been marred by culture or circumstance.

ENCOURAGEMENT. We see and speak the good.  We see and speak the beauty.  We see and speak the noble, the laudable, and the admirable.

RESPECT. We honor others. We appreciate alternative viewpoints. We meet people where they are, rather than judging where we think they should be.

ADAPTABILITY. We take joy in our agility when things don’t go as planned. (And let’s face it: things rarely go as planned.)

FAITH. We believe in possibility, in each other, and that earnest love unlocks the spiritual, and vice-versa.