Manna Partnerships
Community partnerships are essential to our work at MANNA because they foster collaboration and collective action, bringing together diverse resources, expertise, and perspectives to address local challenges. By establishing strong relationships and pooling our strengths, we are able to work alongside our community partners to maximize impact, amplify our community members’ voices, and create meaningful change in the city of Boston.
Barbara McInnis House
Sunday Worship
Every Sunday at 1pm, members of the MANNA staff volunteer their time to provide a worship service for the residents of Barbara McInnis House. The service is focused on recovery, resilience, and healing. A Eucharistic service, using MANNA’s own liturgy, is offered. In this space the community offers reflections on scripture readings, prayer, song, stories of their lives, and their journeys toward healing. The service is followed by brief personal check-ins with pastoral staff and community members alike. Staff provide blessings, spiritual literature, rosaries, and other spiritual materials by request. MANNA staff also provides one-on-one spiritual counseling to patients at BMH every Thursday morning from 9-11am.. This partnership with BMH better enables us to maintain relationships with MANNA community members who enter the facility as it deepens, too, our relationship with the wider unhoused community of Boston.
BACHome Council
Born out of MANNA’s Coffee Klatsch in 2017, Boston’s Advisory Council on Ending Homelessness (the BACHome Council), meets with City Hall to discuss issues pertinent to people impacted by homelessness in the City of Boston. The council is a collaboration of peers, all of whom have lived experience of homelessness in Boston. We gather bi-weekly at City Hall with the purpose of offering our wisdom to advise the Mayor’s Office to help shape Boston’s system of care for the homeless. We are also willful agents of change and participate in many advocacy efforts concerning homeless policy and procedures. Our mission is to be a voice for the voiceless, empathic for the suffering, to empower the powerless, and build hope for the hopeless. To read more about the BACHome Council’s partnerships and advocacy work, please visit our website.
Partner Parishes
For 38 years, MANNA has been fed by our faithful parish partners who prepare and deliver a hot meal every Monday for our community. Each week a different parish partner delivers a well-rounded home cooked meal to serve people experiencing homelessness in Downtown Boston. Often members of the sponsoring parish will help serve the meal at the Cathedral which helps nourish our relationship with those who work so hard to keep us fed. Even during COVID, our partners faithfully delivered a hot meal every Monday which felt like a miracle! We are enormously grateful to St. Michael’s Milton, Christ Church Needham, Trinity Church Concord, All Saints Brookline, and St. John’s Newtonville (Patti and George Thomas, too) for all the ways they nourish and feed us. Thank you!
Hear community member Bob share his story.
Winter Walk
MANNA has been a participant in the Winter Walk since its inception in 2017 as walkers and fundraisers. We have recently become a formal partner of the Winter Walk. The MANNA community has been involved in the opening ceremony as singers and speakers, providing messages from the BACHome Council and other members of the community. In 2022 the MANNA Community wrote and presented a community prayer for the walk in collaboration with Common Cathedral.
