Today, House of Yahweh sits off of Marine Avenue near the 405 Freeway, about a mile from its original location. They ended up with 10 spaces.īob Breen of American Martyrs Church in Manhattan Beach volunteers at House of Yahweh as a fill-in cashier. An appeal in local Catholic parish bulletins asked for donated trailers to be used as temporary shelters. One of the guests who regularly came by for hot meals worked at a trailer park a few blocks away and had empty spaces. She launched a soup kitchen and makeshift thrift store. She went fundraising and soon found property across the street from Lawndale City Hall, left behind by another nonprofit that had moved. “The spirit moved me to name it right then and there,” said Morris, who soon came across a graphic artist who created a burning-bush logo to represent the inspiration. The last line read: “My home, the House of Yahweh, forever.” ”īut its permanent name came from another spark - a moment when Morris and her assistant, Lyndon Reid, were praying with a Jerusalem Bible translation of Psalm 23. Through her connections at various local parishes going back to her teaching days in the 1960s, Morris was able to start a 501c3 nonprofit named “ South Bay Outreach Center. You’re irresponsible if you try to wake the people up without giving them something to do.” “Those renewal weekends were intense, but it was the perfect moment. She recruited the local deacon and two others to start brainstorming through the parish council. “That was a wake-up call, and I was the one to wake ’em up,” said Morris, who was working at St. The pastor came across a homeless person sleeping where the program took place, something she described as “the spark” for the program’s genesis. Morris still remembers a renewal weekend retreat more than 40 years ago at St. Sister Michele with current House of Yahweh director Donna Quirk. Raymond Church in Downey and happened to have a common interest in animal care. “And I’ve been in this pair of roller skates ever since,” said Quirk, who first met Morris when the two were parishioners at St. She took over as executive director in 2018. Joseph of Carondelet Los Angeles has left much of the heavy lifting these days to Donna Quirk, executive director, who first joined House of Yahweh in 2015 to lead its transitional housing program. Since retiring five years ago, the Sister of St. In the words of its mission statement, House of Yahweh seeks “to serve the economically disadvantaged, especially women and children, so they can attain greater fullness of life.” That’s been a motto of sorts for Morris, who founded the House of Yahweh in 1982 to help residents in the South Bay who experience food insecurity, lack of clothing, and difficulty in applying for vital services. You go step by step and things just evolve, one miracle after another.” “I only work in the present with the light I get from God at that moment,” she said, eyes gleaming as she sat at a meeting-room table in the organization’s office trailer recently. After 40 years worth of creating, growing, and reinventing the House of Yahweh in Lawndale, you would think Sister Michele Marie Morris had an iron-clad template for how the nonprofit can continue its success for the next four decades.īut the 90-year-old doesn’t operate that way.
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