We are Groceries for Seniors, and we're making you an offer you can't refuse: help us win a war against the rat.
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We know you tend to favor individuals and beginners over established organizations, and normally we'd agree we're not your best match. But we're established like an old kitchen table: a little worn, deeply useful, held together by history, and surrounded by people who show up to make sure everyone eats. For 26 years we've delivered free, fresh, culturally appropriate groceries to low-income, homebound seniors in San Francisco, about 1,200 bags a week, packed mostly by senior volunteers themselves, many from Chinatown. For most people we serve, it's their only source of food.
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Which brings us to our four-legged nemesis. Loved by cats, famous for cheese, undeservedly glamorous in NYC subway tunnels: rats. They do not belong anywhere near the food containers of homebound seniors who count on us weekly.
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We operate rent-free from the basement of Old Saint Mary's Cathedral, a gift that lets us spend on food instead of rent. Lately, that basement has attracted guests who never signed up to pack groceries. When rats get into a food-storage area, we must throw the food out immediately. That's not a charming inconvenience; it's a crisis. One rat can mean a homebound senior gets less food, or none, that week.
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This isn't glamorous. It's not a new fridge or a program expansion; foundations love funding those. Almost nobody wants to fund the wall repair that keeps a rat from getting behind the fridge. That's where you come in: a small, urgent, wildly achievable project with an absurd villain and a very real human outcome.
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Any trustee is warmly invited to visit Monday through Thursday at 8 a.m. at Old Saint Mary's Cathedral. See the coffee, the senior volunteers packing bags, and the small, stubborn miracle of neighbors feeding neighbors. We'll tape your best rat pun to the sealed hole.