‘Bittersweet milestone’: Loaves & Fishes marks four decades serving Sacramento’s homeless

Loaves & Fishes, Sacramento’s largest homeless services organization, on Tuesday marked 40 years of delivering “radical hospitality” to the city.

The nonprofit, founded in 1983, offers Sacramento-area individuals and families experiencing homelessness a breadth of services, from free meals to school to showers.

As the homelessness crisis in the city has grown, so has the organization. Today, its 80 staff and 4,000 volunteers serve more than 10,000 guests annually at its North C Street campus in the city’s River District.

The anniversary was a “bittersweet milestone,” said Angela Hassell, the organization’s executive director. The founders, husband and wife Dan and Chris Delany, respectively, “never anticipated that there would be a need for Loaves & Fishes for 40 years,” Hassell said.

“It’s a little bit disheartening that there has been such a need for so long for services like ours,” she said.

Still, on Tuesday, a balloon arch and special barbecue meal marked the four decades with celebration. Eight staff chefs prepared to serve up to 800 meals of tri tip, ribs, potato salad and cupcakes between 11 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. Staff and volunteers handed out cool washcloths and clean socks. At Friendship Park, a blues band played.

“I think anyone who has visited Loaves and Fishes really can feel the magic and the sacred space that has been created here,” said Shannon Dominguez-Stevens, who directs the organization’s drop-in day center for women and families. “We serve unhoused folks who are told day in and day out that they don’t matter, that they’re not worthy, that they need to shoo and find another place to go. But it is here on this campus where we look them in the eye, we see them, we hear them, we create a safe space for them.”

Shekiah Sams’ 3-year-old daughter played under the balloon arch. She comes for the “loving and warming” staff and environment, meals and clothing giveaways, Sams said.

Ruby Lozoya, 54, has been homeless for two decades and now lives in a trailer in Miller Park. She started coming to Loaves & Fishes for formula and diapers for her babies. One of her daughters now comes to Loaves & Fishes for her own babies.

Lozoya volunteers in the Loaves & Fishes kitchen. It’s nice to have “something productive to do with my time,” she said, and to give back to other homeless people. She also uses the Maryhouse mail service, which allows for nearly 2,000 people use of the address for secure mail delivery.

Four decades of ‘radical hospitality’

Chris and Dan Delany — a former nun and priest, respectively — were heavily involved in California social movements: during the United Farm Workers Movement of the 1960s, they organized alongside Cesar Chavez. In the 1980s, when AIDS patients were denied basic healthcare, they opened their homes. And in the early 2000s, they protested U.S. wars in the Middle East.

In 1983, they began serving sandwiches out of their car trunk to Sacramento’s hungry. The organization quickly grew, expanding across a 4.5-acre campus and adding 16 programs delivering showers, a school for homeless children, mental health services, a legal clinic, veterinary clinic and a women’s shelter, among others. They provide these services “in a spirit of love, radical hospitality and generosity to all,” per their mission statement.

Loaves & Fishes has never received government funding, a choice made to avoid some of the bureaucratic hurdles that could divert resources away from clients, Hassell said. Instead, individual donors and community foundations keep the operation afloat.

The organization also engages in advocacy work. Sister Libby Fernandez, executive director until 2018, drew national attention for her protest techniques, which included sleeping at homeless encampments and staging Christmas Eve vigils at the Capitol. She advocated for the establishment of a “tent city” for people unable to get housing in shelters in 2016.

Seven years later, the city is still struggling to establish places for homeless to live: none of the 20 shelters and safe sleeping sites proposed last year were approved. The city council is still looking to establish more as pressure to clear sidewalk encampments mounts.

Today, the organization is still advocating for policies that secure more types of housing in Sacramento, especially permanent supportive housing that provides wraparound services for residents.

“Safe camping, safe parking, transitional housing, shelter options — there’s no one size fits all solution to homelessness. And from our perspective, we need more at all of those levels in order to allow folks the opportunity to navigate those choices,” Hassell said.

A total of 20,000 people in Sacramento County were expected to experience homelessness at some point in 2022, a federal report said. More than half may visit Loaves & Fishes — in 2022, the organization served 10,827 individuals.

A growing crisis

On the same day that Loaves & Fishes marked the anniversary, the fight between Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg and Sacramento County District Attorney Thien Ho over how to address the homelessness crisis escalated, with the DA demanding the city comply with demands including a citywide daytime camping ban. Since 2017, the homeless population has tripled.

Dominguez-Stevens said that many of her clients ask, “Where can we sleep?”

“Local government refuses to answer that question, but they are very willing to tell them where they can’t sleep,” she said. Local government, she added, has “become more hostile toward unhoused folks.” She has worked with unhoused people in Sacramento since 2007.

All of the staff at Loaves & Fishes see the impact of a strained and inadequate service network. When Hassell started working at Mustard Seed School in 2003, the average stay at the school was two to three weeks. Now, Hassell said, it’s more like five or six.

“We’re seeing people become homeless and have a much more difficult time moving out of homelessness than 20 years ago,” she said.