The need becomes the seed.

Unbeknownst to anyone, the first seeds of the Mercy Coalition were planted beneath burnt timbers in 2010.

When a fire destroyed the day shelter at the Broderick Christian Center that summer, it interrupted a source of daily food and services to those experiencing homelessness in West Sacramento. The city's faith community mobilized in less than 48 hours to fill the gap, with more than a dozen churches agreeing to supply food, funding or manpower to provide daily lunches. With the Collings Teen Center acting as an ad hoc staging ground, food arrived from various in-kind directions each day and was immediately assembled and sent back out as free lunch bags.

As it turned out, it was only a foreshadowing of what was to come.

12 CHURCHES, 80,000 LUNCHES

By 2013, the coalition’s collaborative lunch machine had found a rhythm. Churches continued to provide all the resources necessary for free lunch bags that went out every single weekday from 2013-2020 - or more than 80,000 lunches before covid-19 interrupted services.

Volunteers from throughout the faith community provided all the manpower for those lunches. And they also mobilized in numbers again to serve as navigators in the City of West Sacramento’s innovative Bridge 2 Housing initiative in 2014, helping relocate 70 river campers into more permanent housing.

After seven years of operating as a handshake collaborative, the Mercy Coalition saw opportunities to expand its embrace of West Sacramento’s most impoverished and in 20178 formalized as a 501(c)3 nonprofit, Three pastors and six different West Sacramento churches were represented on the Coalition’s first nonprofit board.

WARMTH, REDEFINED

The idea, at first glance,, seemed risky and preposterous. What did a bunch of small-ish churches know about running rotating winter shelters for those experiencing homelessness? No overnight shelter for the homeless, of any kind, had ever been available in the city’s history.

“Honestly, we were getting frustrated in our attempts to lease a building to do some kind of overnight shelter,” said board member Helena Helmold. “But then the churches all looked at each other and thought: You know, we’ve actually already got buildings … “

Five different churches - two of them with less than 30 members - signed on to host nights for the rotating Winter Warming Centers that first winter, 2018-19. The WWCs emerged as a bold and innovative collaboration between all the Coalition churches, the City of West Sacramento, Yolo County, and nonprofit partners like Shores of Hope, which provided the daily transportation for our homeless clients.

Rotating every single night to a new location that first season, the Warming Centers provided 76 nights of shelter and 880 "bed nights" to friends who would have otherwise been sleeping in doorways or in their cars. More than 26,000 volunteer hours were the engine behind the a feat that felt more magical by the night. For these efforts the Mercy Coalition was honored with the Mayor's Civic Leadership Award in 2019.

GROWING INTO RESTORATIVE COMMUNITY

The covid-19 pandemic initially paused many of our congregate services in March 2020. But soon Coalition staff and volunteers were becoming key partners in West Sacramento's Project Homekey, providing interim housing and supportive services to more than 60 individuals in a repurposed West Sacramento motel.

Additionally, a new partnership with Yolo Food Bank allowed our volunteers to begin making semi-weekly food deliveries to more than 150 West Sacramental families who are homebound or elderly.

Out of these and other frontline programs, the Coalition in 2021 was able to birth a number of initiatives aimed at our goal of restorative community. Among these was the launch of our JAM Academy for Jobs and Mentoring, and the kickoff of our Thrive Lives life-skills support groups.

“It’s just been incredible to watch,” says food coordinator Lynn Phelps, who’s been with the Coalition since its first days. "You just keep taking the next step to help people in front of you, and more and more doors just keep opening up.”