Catholic Parish Outreach (CPO) Food Pantry serves those in need with emergency food assistance treating them with the dignity and respect they so deserve. On each visit, families receive a week’s worth of groceries, helping to fill the gap that families experience once their resources have been exhausted and before they receive their next paycheck.  Once their immediate need for food is addressed, CPO and Catholic Charities staff and volunteers often connect families to other critical services that aim to remove barriers to self-sufficiency, increasing access to opportunities and creating hope for a better future.

Project Information/Opportunity to Serve:  Create a Birthday Bag for CPO client families with children up to 10 years old, and help give a child a birthday party and a smile! Join us at Francis Blessfest to get details on how to create these bags yourself.

The Hispanic Family Center of Raleigh is dedicated to helping low-income Hispanic families in need by empowering them to become more integrated into the community, improving their quality of life through financial assistance, programs of education, health, job training and referrals, providing services of counseling, case management, and immigration, and a host of other programs including homework help and a summer camp for children.

Project Information/Opportunity to Serve:  Create a Health/Safety/Beauty Kit for families in need.  Join us at Francis Blessfest to get details on how to create these kits yourself.

Oak City Cares is a multi-services center serving individuals and families experiencing homelessness or at risk of becoming homeless.  With many community partners, Oak City Cares provides on-site life-sustaining and life-rebuilding services, as well as hospitality, welcome and community with the goal of ending and preventing homelessness and without the barrier of transportation and resources. When people remain homeless for long periods, they become isolated and lose hope. Normally they must travel from agency to agency searching for answers and services to meet their many needs, often receiving little to none.  In the process their sense of self as children of God worthy of dignity and respect is diminished and may even disappear.  Oak City Cares changes all of this.

Project Information/Opportunity to Serve:  Create a Basic Needs Bag for clients of Oak City Cares. Join us at Francis Blessfest to get details on how to create these bags yourself.

The Helen Wright Center for Women, a program of Urban Ministries of Wake County, has been providing warm food, genuine care and safe shelter from the weather and violence to single women without children in their care, for years. Guests of the center are offered an opportunity to break the cycle of homelessness and achieve self-sufficiency through intensive case management services. The women establish well-defined goals and objectives, are connected to services in the community, and are provided increased access to medical and psycho-social services, life skills education and skill building. Case managers also help with finding jobs, saving money, and finding a home.

Project Information/Opportunity to Serve: Create a School Kit and/or Boredom Kit for guests of the center. Join us at Francis Blessfest to get details on how to create these kits yourself.

Families partner with Habitat for Humanity in the U.S. and around the world to build better lives for themselves and their children.  Alongside volunteers, Habitat for Humanity has long been committed to helping these low income families build their own beautiful, single family homes and pay for them through affordable mortgages. Habitat houses are made from quality, locally available building material and are modestly sized. In the triangle area, the lack of affordable housing has reached crisis level.  Through supporting Habitat for Humanity with resources and volunteers, St. Francis helps alleviate this crisis.

Project Information/Opportunity to Serve:
Join us at Francis Blessfest to learn about the at home and in person opportunities for volunteering.

With an estimated 80 million people around the world forced to flee their homes, and over 26 million refugees, half of whom are under the age of 18, the problem is immense and the solutions complicated. But St. Francis has refused to sit idly by amid this crisis. As we have done in the past, in partnership with the US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI), in the fall we will welcome a refugee family into our community and will come together to resettle them into a warm and welcoming home.

Project Information/Opportunities to Serve:
Your help is needed in many ways! Join us at Francis Blessfest for more information.