Class News

Terry Holcombe ’64 updates the Sunrise Café story

March 14, 2020

Here is a message from Terry Holcombe which describes the work of the Sunrise Café. Below Terry's message is an article from the New Haven Independent which describes how Sunrise Café is adjusting to the COVID-19 pandemic.

At the recent Class Council meeting and later at dinner there was a good deal of interest expressed in the Sunrise Café. Some Council members had served breakfast there (see the story).

The Sunrise Café provides over 35,000 breakfasts annually to the homeless and people in need in New Haven, Yale’s backyard. We have had visitors from Asia and Europe to observe our unique program. We focus first on preserving and enhancing the dignity of our guests.

Terry Holcombe

Our facility is in a church three blocks east of the Green. Guests enter and are greeted with someone (often Marya Holcombe) who takes their order from a limited menu. From that a tray is prepared and delivered to them wherever they have chosen to sit. Almost all the work of the Café is done by volunteers, many of them Yale students, and the serving process encourages a great deal of personal interaction … to the extent that volunteer and guests may greet each other on the street.

We are open from 7:30am to 9:15pm every weekday. Our operating budget is about $120,000; food is donated by the Connecticut Food Bank, Yale, and many businesses. What is not donated is purchased with the gifts from volunteers and donors. We are 100% sponsored with charitable gifts, no grants or contracts.

Marya Holcombe

Perhaps one unique ’64 aspect of our effort is the direct participation of classmates and their families, including spouses, children, and grandchildren. If you are coming to New Haven and would like to volunteer, please let me or Ed Massey know so we might coordinate with days we are working.

While we have not been favored with support from the dues collected from classmates, many have asked about individual support. Gifts would be most gratefully received and would be acknowledged as part of the efforts to reach out to this important segment of the New Haven community by Yale and our Class. For more information please go to www.sunrisecafenewhaven.org. Donations may be made by check to Sunrise Café, 57 Olive Street, New Haven, CT. 06511 or by credit card using the form on the Sunrise Café website. 

Homeless Meal Lifeline Shifts to Take-Out

New Haven Independent

March 13, 2020

Homeless patrons gather outside Sunrise for meals to go

During these pandemic times in New Haven, there are three things the homeless population desperately need:

• A walk-up free test for COVID-19 (when it becomes available!), in a facility situated preferably near the Green.
• A clean, safe place to go to the bathroom — the unavailability of bathrooms in the libraries, which are closed, is creating a “disaster.”
• A safe place to recover if they have the virus and have to remain at home, because they have no home.

A brown bag take-out breakfast five days a week doesn’t hurt either.

Sunrise Café’s Ragsdale giving one of the new “take-out” bags to guest Benjamin

That was the urgent and well-informed word from Art Hunt and Thelma Ragsdale, the administrator and operations manager, respectively, of the much-loved Sunrise Café.

That’s the breakfast program, run like a welcoming restaurant cum counseling center in the basement community room of St. Paul and St. James Episcopal Church at the corner of Olive and Chapel streets.

The operation has shifted gears in just 24 hours.

The program, now in its fifth year, regularly attracts about 150 homeless folks, whom the volunteers always refer to as “guests” as they serve them, restaurant-style.

The daily in-person meal service has been suspended in keeping with the state’s directives, communicated locally through the city’s health department, to suspend gatherings of 100 or more, said Hunt.

Thelma Ragsdale said the decision was made Wednesday, after she received a call from the city’s health department. Ragsdale has been in charge of the program and its rotating group of dedicated volunteers since its inception with Liberty Community Services. (It is now its own independent 501(c)3.)

The result: On Thursday and on Friday, when this reporter visited, instead of the 150 regulars, more like only 110 showed up.

Instead of entering the large community room in the basement of the building, the visitors were greeted under a tent set up at the Olive and Chapel corner entrance and offered hot coffee while they waited for a bag full of breakfast items, such as sandwiches, granola bars, and juice, to be brought to them.

Sunrise Café volunteers off-loading a delivery from the Connecticut Food Bank

That’s going to be the plan for the foreseeable future, said Ragsdale, as long as the virus — and an absence of information about transmission — continues to accelerate.

“We want the breakfast to be as portable as possible,” she added.

Ragsdale attributed the drop by 40 or 50 guests both to the cold weather Thursday and the rainstorm Friday morning.

Sunrise, in addition to providing needed food, has “also become a social hub,” said Ragsdale, as she greeted Michelle Fang and Sarah Chang, two Yale undergraduates spending the break on campus and volunteering at the café. On this day bringing Kind bars and bags of other stuff to refill the café’s pantry.

When the meal is served with kindness, it fosters community. The necessary COVID-19 shift means some of the community feel is lost.

That was certainly the take of Benjamin, a homeless young man who preferred not to give his last name. He’s been out on the streets for five years, he said, and a regular at the Sunrise Café for the last two.

“I’ve grown to know the people,” he said, as he accepted the take-out bag from Ragsdale. “It’s a good community place.”

Ragsdale with Yale student volunteers Sarah Chang, left, and Michelle Fang, center

Also lost in the shift to take-out is the counseling offered by Columbus House and other groups that set up tables for one-on-one sessions with the breakfasters during the morning meal.

Hunt said that several times during the pre-COVID-19 sit-down meals, Ragsdale would make announcements about new services available or other news of interest to the group. That is no longer possible, although printed materials with pertinent info were tucked into the food bags on Friday morning.

In normal times, Ragsdale observed, “this is a social setting for a lot of guests. It’s almost an impromptu warming center.”

Not for now. Hunt said the café workers will continue to abide by the new way of serving breakfast until they hear from the health department that it is okay to resume.

Of course, when that might be, no one can yet answer.

Those interested in volunteering or contributing to the program, the best place for contact and to sign up is here.

Sample helpful notice stuffed into the take-out bags