Dorothy Day House started out in the early 1980s as an informal group of parishioners from North Berkeley’s St. Mary Magdalene Church who distributed sandwiches a few times a week at Peoples’ Park on the South side of Berkeley. This project grew and, by the early 1990s, we began serving free daily breakfast in the People’s Park neighborhood. During the struggle to keep People’s Park open to the public the early founders of Dorothy Day House worked out of an illegal trailer – called the People’s Café.

In the mid-1990s, municipal funding allowed us to move indoors for meal preparation and service of breakfast. In the late 1990s, we began recruiting community groups to prepare dinners for the Berkeley Men’s Shelter as well. Even though the City of Berkeley subsidizes some of our services, we are completely dependent on volunteer labor and have no office and minimal paid administrative staff.

In 2003, we began hosting the Berkeley Emergency Storm Shelter at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. During the worst of the winter storms, a dedicated team of staff and volunteers welcomes up to 50 people each night who have not been able to get into any other shelters.

We believe in providing a consistent, caring presence for the poor and homeless. We are a hospitality group, not an agency. We subscribe to the Catholic Worker philosophy as expressed by Dorothy Day,”. . . we are our brother’s [and sister's] keeper and. . .we must have a sense of personal responsibility to take care of our own and our neighbor, at a personal sacrifice.”

**If you are interested in learning more about Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement might we recommend http://www.bookrags.com/biography/dorothy-day/