September is a month of milestones for Hope’s Corner, the Mountain View nonprofit that provides meals, warm showers and other necessities to the unhoused and underserved.
On Monday, Hope’s Corner volunteers served their 200,000th meal at its headquarters, Trinity United Methodist Church at the corner of Hope and Mercy streets. On Sept. 16, the organization will return to serving sit-down, cafeteria-style breakfasts on Saturdays.
“Since the start of COVID, we’ve been providing breakfasts as to-go meals in takeout boxes,” said volunteer Mike Hacker. “However, we’ll go back to allowing our breakfast guests to take a tray, choose the food items they want, ‘take a load off’ around tables in the church sanctuary and socialize in a comfortable setting. Being able to eat in a relaxed, seated atmosphere fosters a feeling of community among our guests and volunteers.”
On Sept. 24, Hope’s Corner will celebrate its 12th anniversary since volunteers started providing breakfasts on Saturdays.
“We haven’t missed a Saturday breakfast ever since, even during the height of COVID,” Hacker said.
Hope’s Corner, which became a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2015, is a joint effort between Trinity and Los Altos United Methodist Church.
“We started serving meals in September 2011,” said Los Altos resident and LAUMC member Leslie Carmichael, who has been helping out from the beginning. “The folks in the congregation there asked for some help to restart their homeless ministry. Several of us worked with them – we formed a group (and) did some research on what else was happening in the area to make sure we didn’t just duplicate something already happening. It turned out there weren’t hardly any food resources on the weekends.”
Carmichael thought, that’s something they could do – a Saturday–morning breakfast.
“How hard could that be?” she said. “So, that’s kind of how it started – with the little cereal and yogurt for a couple dozen people in the beginning. Then it’s just kind of steadily grown and grown since.”
Prior to the pandemic, Hope’s Corner was serving approximately 200 meals per week. Currently, it is serving more than 700 weekly. Carmichael estimates 500 individual people were served more than 3,800 meals in July alone.
“COVID actually was a big turning point,” Carmichael said. “We work a lot with Community Services Agency (the Mountain View-based social services agency that helps the underserved). They asked us to add a meal on Wednesdays so they could have a chance to restock their food pantry because demand had gone up so much. A lot of people were immediately out of work. So we added that second meal right at the beginning of COVID (restrictions in March 2020). And then they asked us to deliver to RV communities, and we did that, like, on a week’s notice. And they asked us to help the Day Worker Center (of Mountain View) with a meal and we did that.”
Hope’s Corner serves hot breakfasts and bag lunches every Monday, Wednesday and Saturday. Showers and laundry service also are available on those same days. In addition, the nonprofit offers referrals, advocacy, bicycle assistance, clothing and toiletries.
The organization employs three part-time people but is helped by hundreds of volunteers, according to Carmichael. They range from students to seniors and tech executives.
For more information, visit hopes-corner.org.
