See Beautiful Grant Recipient: St. Anne's Center/Lantern House

The feature below is brought to you by St. Anne's Center/Lantern House, an organization that is in the running to receive a See Beautiful Grant. For more information about our giving initiatives, please click here.
 
To learn more about the featured organization, please visit their website here.

Lantern House serves as a unique facility where we house men, women and families with children all under one shelter. We are especially grateful that we can provide shelter to everyone, but it plagues us with a different set of challenges. When the COVID-19 pandemic began we quickly had to adjust the operations of our shelter to accommodate positive homeless individuals and in turn relocate our families. For the last year we have had families living in an off-site hotel.

When the families moved to the hotel, we had to essentially extend the Lantern House to this hotel will all the service still readily available. Case management services, hygiene and critical supplies was easy to adjust, but daily food and meals to support our families became a struggle and we weren’t sure how we would be able to offer a warm, nutritious meal to our 17 families living in the hotels. As a I sat and rattled my brain about what we could do and consulted with other managers we struggled to come up with a solution. We then got together with the case management team and our Food Services Director, Michelle to see what ideas they may have.

I was in complete awe when in a matter of minutes into this meeting our team came up with the idea of daily prepared meal delivery and food boxes to supplement in between. The kitchen staff would prepare the meal and food boxes and the case managers would take it to the rooms of each family. The willingness to ensure that each family and their children had a warm, nutritious meal was amazing and the willingness of our staff to go the extra mile is just one small glimpse into the amazing work and the amazing staff we have at Lantern House. Through this pandemic they have continued to put the needs of the clients before the needs of their own families.
​
Each of our staff are dedicated to the mission and dedicated to ending homelessness and hunger in our community. Each day we continue to fight for food insecurity and work to ensure that no one goes hungry.

Here is a small letter that was written by one of our families who is benefiting from the daily meals and food boxes.

“I want to start by saying thank you for everything you and the rest of the staff do to help everyone. The meals you bring are always great and the time it takes to prepare them is very appreciated, and thank you for always including a little treat, my boys enjoy it.

Mostly I wanted to say how awesome you guys are with the food boxes every week it helps us so much it saves us from getting on the bus and hauling everything back and my youngest son is especially happy for the mac and cheese, just wanted to express this and so you do know that everything you all do is very much appreciated.”

Thank you to the See Beautiful Program for continuing to believe in the daily work done at Lantern House.

Submitted by: Lauren Navidomskis