God’s Extended Hand

This is a local soup kitchen in downtown San Diego. It is a great atmosphree and is a place worth volunteering at. Very professional.

I’ve been volunteering at this place for 4 years. Unlike Father Joe’s Village it is not a homeless shelter, although it does have some apartments located to the rear and above the dining hall, they are reserved for full time homeless volunteers. I think it used to be a bed and breakfast back in the days before SD was a large city.
When Center City Development Corp started the gentrification of East Village to make way for all the swanky new high rises downtown there were 2 places that kept them from being able to push the problems of homelessness out into East county, one was Father Joe’s Village and the other was God’s Extended Hand Mission. The mission predates zoning laws that would allow developers to relocate this soup kitchen so that it could effectively rob from the poor and redistribute (for profit) to the rich. When the city relocates services (like they did the Salvation Army building) it often alters that ministry ability to serve.
One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that the face of homelessness has changed in San Diego. More and more there are Caucasian families showing up. families with young children. They aren’t homeless yet, but they’re barely scrapping by, and need a few good meals provided for them just to be able to pay the rent. With the housing crisis, and financial meltdown of the economy, and record foreclosures that need will only grow. GEH does this by providing over 140,000 meals a year.
I personally organized it so that Kaleo church monthly service directly coincided with food donations from a Brazilian BBQ place called Rei Do Gado’s. The food they serve is usually $ 40 a plate, but because I’m friends with the owner twice a month the homeless get treated to some seriously good meat and vegetables!
Rev. Curtis Bernstein is the minister who runs GEH, he he a kind and humble guy and though he’s not as well known as Father Joe he is a San Diego city treasure.
Although the Brazilian BBQ meals are still served we gave up our spot to other churches who wanted to volunteer their time. If you’re looking to volunteer just to let you know they have an abundance of people who want to pass out food, what they really need are volunteers to do the less glamorous behind the scenes job of sorting through the clothes donations.

This is the kind of place that makes San Diego a greater city, not just for the homeless but for families falling upon increasingly harder times.

If you keep heading east from the glittery sky scrapers and thumping sounds of Gaslamp, you begin to notice a profound change in the neighborhood. The gaudy colors fade to worn paint-​marked storefronts, and the high-​heeled jetsetters are replaced by down and out men and women in faded clothes and carrying cardboard signs or pushing shopping carts. Keep driving, and you’ll hit the fringes of ‘urban renewal’ by 13^th or 14^th street, and the still extant signs of neglect and urban decay are everywhere.
That is, until you hit 16^th and Island. There, a strange sight hits your eyes. A building that, despite its age, looks well-​kept, well-​loved, and constantly inhabited. Bright paint and hand made mosaics mark its walls, and the corner, a dark patch of despair so near the shiny manufacture of Downtown, is briefly lit on this corner.
That’s God’s Extended Hand, a community outreach and homeless shelter in one of the roughest parts of the East Village area. For nearly eighty years, GEH has been a place of hope and refuge, or at least a place of love and encouragement, reaching out to the community in meaningful ways.
I first became acquainted with GEH through a friend of mine, Anna, who worked as a staffer with Intervarsity Christian Fellowship at San Diego City College. Anna is a fierce believer in social justice as an integral part of Jesus’ message, and her convictions are nothing short of contagious. Soon, she had several of us coming in once a month to help sort through the immense amount of clothing donations for the homeless that GEH received constantly. There’s somethig bizarrely enjoyable about slapping on a pair of latex gloves and spending hours in a small room sorting between clothes for men, women, and children and organizing them by size and suitability. I’m not igornant enough to assume that I’m changing the world, or to feel self-​righteously important, but it is amazingly humbling to see that there is a place that in a small way, dedicates itself to loving the people most marginalized in the community. And I want, in some small way, to keep contributing.
As one of the volunteers there said, far more eloquently than I:
«To argue as to why a person is homeless detours our vision from helping another person from living in an unhuman way.»
– God’s Extended Hand Volunteer «Brother Ray» Zeher
I have to agree with Brother Ray. And I am so glad God’s Extended Hand is there, reaching out.