Who are we?
We are community members who care. Moved by the suffering that homelessness causes, we are striving to make a positive difference in our community.
Joining with the unhoused neighbors who reside in the Amistad backyard to find out what is truly useful for them, we are committed to help improve their safety, and quality of life. Among us are faith leaders, mental health professionals, business leaders, lawyers, people experiencing homelessness, writers, scholars, and students.
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AMISTAD HOUSE
“The only solution is love, and love comes from community.”
–Dorothy Day
Mark and Luz Colville have operated their house of hospitality for nearly 30 years in New Haven. Advocating for, working alongside, and living with the homeless, they have deep personal knowledge of the crisis and it is in their backyard where the Rosette Neighborhood Village will be built.
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Named New Haven Register's Persons of the Year
“For their sustained, compassionate approach to building and supporting their community and for their lived opposition to war and violence”
“The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us.”
--Dorothy Day
The Amistad Catholic Worker is a community of faith dedicated to the daily practice of the Works of Mercy, voluntary poverty, personalism and prayer. As Catholic Workers, we strive to follow Jesus in seeking justice for the poor, an end to all wars, and a new way of life grounded not in the endless, exploitation-fueled accumulation of material things but rather based on solidarity, nonviolence, and mutual love.
Located in the Hill neighborhood of New Haven, Connecticut, our home is open as a house of hospitality offering sustenance and companionship. We seek to be a safe haven and a public nonviolent witness in our neighborhood, and always try to blur the distinction between the people who are serving and those being served. Houses of hospitality are centers for learning to do the acts of love, so that the poor can receive what is, in justice, theirs, the second coat in our closet, the spare room in our home, a place at our table. Anything beyond what we immediately need belongs to those who go without.
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BENINCASA COMMUNITY
Benincasa Community is a lay community named for Catherine (Benincasa) di Siena, the peacemaker, mystic, theologian, and reformer. Dedicated to the works of mercy and justice in an era thirsting for humanity's collective recognition of unity and interdependence within all of creation, members of Benincasa are grounded by faith, an emerging understanding of the new cosmology, the development of new economic models in our world, and the need for deepening relationships with the land and one another.
Established in New York City in 2015 by three, young lay catholics desiring a more inclusive, diversity affirming way to live out their shared faith, Benincasa has grown to include over 600 engaged individuals from around the world who are committed to our most pressing peace movements for racial, environmental, gender, and economic justice. Now, our community’s “green” motherhouse in Guilford, CT is changing the way a radical faith life is practiced and understood.
