FrancisFest
You’re Invited to FrancisFest!!!
Annually, we spend the day in celebration of our patron saint. It’s a fun day meant for everyone in the parish community. Watch for the date in early October and a mark your calendar.
Join us for BlessFest 2021 on Sunday, October 3rd from 1-3pm.
In the Spirit of St. Francis, be a blessing and come to St. Francis of Assisi, Sunday afternoon Oct 3rd , for our pandemic-adapted version of FrancisFest!
Join us with or without your pet and drive through to receive a blessing for your pet and your family. Then continue on, or come without a pet and from the safety of your car learn ways that you and your family can give a blessing by virtually volunteering with a number of organizations in the Raleigh area, caring for creation, signing up for upcoming in-person opportunities to serve, and donating to our brothers and sisters affected
by the recent hurricanes.
We have some remaining information sheets on how to volunteer at home as well as Kitchen Counter Composting Pails and Milkweed Seed Ball Packets. These can be found in the Stewardship Center while supplies last.
Receive a Blessing!
Bring your family. Bring your pets. Father Jim will bless them all.
Last year we had all kinds of pets including dogs, cats, turtles, chickens, hamsters and even a hedgehog.
Give a Blessing!
At Home Volunteering
Care for Creation
More details and information will be available about these volunteer opportunities at Francis BlessFest.
Catholic Parish Outreach Birthday Bags
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.
Hispanic Family Center
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
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.
Helen Wright Center for Women
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.
Learn more about caring for God’s creation with our St. Francis Care of Creation Ministry.
Help Combat Climate Change: Begin Composting
According to the Wake County recycling program, 34% of the average trash can is food and yard waste that can be composted. By composting, you reduce the amount of waste going to the landfill and the amount of methane emissions. This improves our air quality. Compost enriches the soil and helps it retain moisture. It nourishes plants and lawns so they grow stronger, and it helps suppress plant diseases and pests. Compost is the brown gold of gardening. You will be amazed at your gorgeous plants.
How You Can Help: Begin composting by collecting kitchen and garden wastes for a compost pile in your your backyard. Join us at Francis Blessfest for how-to’s and where you can get a compost bin. You migh get a free pail for collecting your kitchen scraps.
Help Save the Monarch Butterfly: Make a Milkweed Seed Ball
The beautiful monarch butterfly is in danger of disappearing. Every spring, they leave their winter homes in Mexico, California and Florida and fly north in huge numbers along monarch superhighways to lay their eggs. Milkweed plants are their only food and the only place they lay their eggs. Without milkweed plants, there are no monarchs. Clearing of land, climate change and herbicide use are causing a drastic reduction in both milkweed and monarchs. 90% of the monarch population has been lost over the last ten years. You can do your part to protect this small part of God’s creatin by planting milkweed seeds.
Here’s How You Can Help: Join us at Francis BlessFest to pick up a free kit to make Seed Balls as well as directions to make your own gorgeous milkweed flowers.
Help Save the Eastern Bluebird- Build a Nesting Box
People in America have always loved bluebirds, so much so that they have become a symbol for happiness. Their numbers are unfortunately declining due to loss of nesting habitat, competition from imported house sparrows and the use of insecticides. As many as 90% of these lovely songbirds have disappeared. Due to conservation efforts by homeowners and farmers, the bluebirds are making a comeback, but they will always need our help.
Here’s how you Can Help: Francis BlessFest will have some free kits to make a nesting box (a “birdhouse”) for drive-thru guests as well as directions to make or buy your own. Join us to start enjoying the song of the bluebird.
Opportunites to Serve
Hurricane Ida Relief
More details and information will be available about these volunteer opportunities at Francis BlessFest.
Habitat For Humanity
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.
Refugee Resettlement
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.
Ida, the category 4 storm with maximum sustained winds of 150 mph, made landfall in Southeast Louisiana on the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. It is estimated that over 14,000 people have been displaced as a result of Ida. This storm not only devastated the Gulf Coast region, it made its way north bringing torrential rain and flooding to many Northeastern states as well. While much of Ida’s toll in terms of human suffering will continue to be made known in the weeks and months to come, it is clear that Ida took an especially destructive path through major population centers. The destruction story is also about dollars and loss of infrastructure, climate change and coastal land loss as well as inequity with low-income communities of color most at risk.
St. Francis has set up a disaster relief fund to help: https://membership.faithdirect.net/givenow/NC674/20994
We will work through the diocese and Catholic Charities and Catholic Relief Services whose disaster response teams have a long history of mobilizing quickly to meet the need of victims of traumatic events like Ida. Thank you for any help you can provide.
