From soup to jobs: How Boston’s Haley House builds community

Libby Federici loves her job at Haley House, a soup kitchen in Boston’s South End neighborhood. On a recent weekday morning she bustled between greeting guests, helping volunteers, preparing pots of fresh coffee, and answering endless questions. Butter? We have tons. Cups? I’ll grab some from the basement. 

The guests – some of whom face homelessness or live in low-income housing – bask in her warmth.

“Without this place there would be no me. These people are angels. They are my guardian angels,” says Linda Bell, a regular at Haley House’s free morning breakfast. On a typical day, the soup kitchen gives out anywhere between 50 and 100 meals. 

That feeling of home and connection is intentional at Haley House, a program that for five decades has approached social issues facing Boston’s South End holistically through its soup kitchen, affordable housing, urban gardens, and nutritional education programs. The organization welcomes people facing homelessness and formerly incarcerated individuals as a valuable part of the larger community. But instead of relying on volunteers or drive-by helpers to staff its soup kitchen, Haley House seeks out people – of all ages and backgrounds – interested in investing two years of their lives to support lasting solutions to societal problems. In exchange, they receive room and board, living “in community” above Haley House, running its kitchen, and caring for its guests. 

“It’s really important to know people as people,” says Ms. Federici, who also works as an outreach and development assistant for the organization in addition to serving on its board. 

Boston’s South End and nearby neighborhood of Roxbury have long battled homelessness even as the area has gentrified. The city’s largest unhoused populations are found in these neighborhoods, and community meetings have increasingly sought to address the transient populations heightened by an opioid crisis and a global pandemic. Haley House is hardly the only effort attempting to meet the needs of unhoused people; the Pine Street Inn, for instance, supports nearly 2,000 men and women each day, and St. Francis House welcomes 6,300 visitors yearly and offers 102 affordable housing units. 

But Haley House, which operates in both the South End and Roxbury, considers a wide range of needs – from youth programs, to job training, to elder support – as it seeks to address some of the root problems of homelessness and food insecurity.  

“There is that deep-seated connection to the community that [Haley House workers are] able to develop over their time here,” says Sean Ahern, operations director of Lovin’ Spoonfuls, a nonprofit organization that has delivered food to Haley House since 2011. “They are a really committed group of individuals who are really passionate about food, but more importantly, about people.” 

How it began

In 1966, Kathe and John McKenna started inviting people sleeping on the streets in their neighborhood to live with them in their South End apartment – offering food, shelter, and some connection. Their small efforts grew as they found funding and eventually purchased property and opened Haley House as a soup kitchen a year later, living in the rooms above. Inspired in part by the Catholic Worker Movement, which espouses the belief that to serve poor people one needs to live among them, they quickly saw the value of developing long-term connections with those they sought to help. The approach eventually developed into their model of a staff that lives and works at Haley House.

“The purpose of the live-in community is to become friends with those coming to the soup kitchen to develop relationships with them,” says Ms. McKenna, who is now retired from Haley House operations. 

“The biggest offering that Haley House has to Boston is, it’s an example of how all these pieces are linked – food, training, jobs, housing,” she says. “We couldn’t solve that whole problem of housing homeless people. We couldn’t give jobs to everybody. But what we did was we created models.”

How it works

Live-in aspirants who pass the first round of the application process work at the soup kitchen for two weeks, and then spend a week contemplating their experience. This gives both Haley House executives and applicants more time to decide if they are a right fit. 

“You can do a lot of different kinds of work that are aligned with your values or [are] mission-centered. You can also find different ways to live with people who share your values,” says Ms. Federici, who moved to Boston from Washington, D.C., for graduate school, and joined Haley House in 2020. “It’s rare that you get to do both of those things at once.” 

Haley House workers take on full responsibility for the soup kitchen operations from setting the menu, to connecting with community partners, to getting to know the guests. New live-in members are paired with mentors who offer guidance. 

On a typical day, one member is designated to be “the vibe of the day” by acting as a greeter and resolving any conflicts. After breakfast is cleared away, members retreat upstairs where they each have their own bedroom or one they share with a roommate, depending on the number of people in the cohort. There is also a kitchen, a dining room, and gathering spaces for the cohort to mingle, relax, and unwind. Although the soup kitchen stops serving food at 9 a.m., people arrive at all times of day and night, asking for food packets and blankets. 

It may be a 24/7 commitment but Ms. Federici has found the arrangement to be the perfect way to connect with the city outside her “graduate school bubble.” She has relished the opportunity to forge deeper relationships throughout her two-year stay. 

Branching out

The soup kitchen has been a permanent fixture of Haley House since 1967, but the organization has grown as it has responded to and learned from its community. It now operates 110 units of affordable housing, 24 single rooms for formerly unhoused individuals, an urban farm that delivers free produce to more than 60 community elders, and classes that teach cooking skills and nutrition to more than 350 students a year. It also fills up to 200 bags for a food pantry each week. Since 2005, the Haley House Bakery Café in Roxbury has offered a jobs training program for citizens struggling to find work after incarceration. (The bakery is currently closed for renovation.)

All of it adds up to a collective effort to battle systemic problems associated with homelessness, incarceration, and food insecurity.  

Since Haley House is rooted in community and relationships, goodbyes can be difficult, especially for the live-in members. As Ms. Federici prepares to complete her commitment this spring, she reflects on the significance Haley House has had on her own life.

“It’s pretty hard not to leave this place in a different state of mind than when you arrived,” she says from her perch at the door greeting guests. “The people I’ve met here made me a better person. I feel really lucky and grateful.”