About Us

Our Vision

Compelled by our faith, love and conviction that every person is sacred, we envision a new social order, a world transformed with mercy, justice, solidarity, and compassion and rooted in respect for the inherent worth and dignity of every person. We vision a world in which everyone is welcome as one with us in the common humanity we share

Our Mission

The Oakland Catholic Worker creates hope and opportunity with homeless immigrants and their children, empowering them with transitional housing and life-building resources to become self-sufficient and thrive.

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Our History

Founded in 1986, OCW was begun by Bay Area community activists in response to the urgent need for short term emergency housing for the hundreds of homeless immigrants who were fleeing the war in El Salvador. A member of the national Catholic Worker Movement co-founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, the Oakland Catholic Worker’s mission of hospitality, charity, and justice is rooted in the Gospel call to do the works of mercy and to walk in solidarity with the most marginalized.

Over the years OCW has grown from offering simple shelter to becoming a trusted, multipurpose community center where immigrants and their children, from not only East Oakland, but all over the Bay Area know they are welcome, supported, and advocated for. These immigrants, who arrive at our front door often with only the clothes they are wearing, come to us after making treacherous journeys fleeing the unrelenting poverty, violence and oppression in their home countries of Mexico, Central and South America.

With our hospitality, which welcomes everyone, we offer to the immigrant community transitional housing, a large food security program, comprehensive social service/legal/medical/educational and job supportsm and leadership/advocacy opportunities to become self-sufficient and thrive. We do this in partnership with immigrant leadership and many faith-based and community organizations. We also organize community -building events that celebrate the strengths, diversity and cultural heritage of the immigrant community.

Our Why

OCW’s mission has been deeply shaped by witness of the lives of both our co-founders, Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, and the Jesuit martyrs of El Salvador, who saw the crucified Christ in the suffering poor. Believing that these people have inherent worth and dignity, these witnesses to God’s mercy and justice gave their lives to taking the crucified persons down from the cross of poverty and oppression to which systemic injustices had consigned them.

This rich spiritual legacy compels not only what OCW does, but how we do it. While we offer shelter and comprehensive life-building resources to the immigrant community, OCW is much more than a social service agency. We accompany our immigrant families, walking side by side and living with them in community, sharing our common humanity on their challenging journeys to self-sufficiency in a new country and culture.

In this process, each of us is changed and transformed, with the giving and receiving going in both directions. We become more to each other than service providers and clients. We are companions, the solidarity of our daily life lived together showing us how much we need each other and how much we have in common, no matter what our differences may be. We discover that we really do belong to each other, brothers and sisters all, in the one interconnected, deeply interdepended One World Family God has created us equally to be part of.

Our core conviction that we belong to each other shapes everything we do and are at OCW. It is why we chose to practice what our co-founders Dorothy and Peter called the “personalism” of the works of mercy, and never rely on government solutions to solve the problems of our brothers and sisters in need. The works of mercy enable us to take personal responsibility, to roll up our sleeves and work face-to-face with our brothers and sisters, who are hungry, need medical care, are unhoused, and/or who have in anyway been pushed to the margins. As we do, we discover Christ’s favorite hiding place is always among them

Doing the works of mercy also is the best way we know to show our, and God’s, unconditional love for these our brothers and sisters- the God who only wants that they have abundance and thrive. As we do so, we reflect back to them the inherent dignity and worth of their humanity, which is so often denied to them. Our biggest hope here is that they will feel significance and inclusion where before all they had known was great insignificance and exclusion.

At OCW, we also advocate for change in response to the Gospel mandate that more than just tending the wound, we must also eradicate its’ cause. We work for the justice, then, that will not only eliminate injustice but will also create a new social order, a new culture of caring and equity among us.

Dorothy Day tells us that with each of our acts of mercy and justice, we build the bridge of love and compassion between people on which they can cross to a new, resurrected life. At OCW this bridge supports and empowers our immigrant families’ journeys to the human rights, equity, respect and justice they risked everything for in their challenging journeys to, and within, this country.

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