What does Bethel Center offer?

Bethel Center provides vocational training to person with developmental challenges.  This training is designed to enable clients to lean basic job skills, earn spending money, and to make a contribution to the local commmunity.

How is This Accomplished?

Each day Center participants gather to choose the vocational activity they prefer for that morning.  Clients are given the opportunity to choose among four options:

• Clerical Services
• Clean Sweep Program
• Recycling
• Hospital Visitations

Every client is given the choice to work off-site in other workplaces including offices, hospitals and the local neighborhood.  Clients receive a small stipend for each hour worked.  Participants use their stipends to augment their small monthly personal funds, enabling them to pay for transportation, clothing and some entertainment.

Clerical Services

For the past 23 years Bethel Center particiapants have provided clerical services to many non-proft organizations, including local churches, American Heart Association, Multiple Sclerosis Society, City College of San Francisco and the San Francisco Unified School District.

Jobs performed include collating papers, stapling, folding, stuffing and sealing envelopes, putting together booklets and assembling convention binders.

All jobs are closely supervised by Center staff, with one staff for every three workers.

Hospital Visitations

Bethel Center clients combine their love of creating artistic projects with offering a personal support to those who may be elderly and frail.  Each month a project is adopted, and created to be distributed to residents of local institutions.

Projects are seasonally designed around holidays such as Thanksgiving and Valentine's; or around seasonal changes.  Projects have included hand made placemats, table decorations, gift baskets, and simple cards. 

The clients really enjoy the projects, but perhaps even more, they enjoy delivering these items to the elderly in their facilities.

                         Clean Sweep Project

This project combines clients' skills and love of working outside with needs of local neighobrs.  Bethel Center workers don aprons, pushcarts, brooms, gloves, and litter tongs to walk the blocks around the Center facility picking up litter and sweeping the walkways of elderly neighbors.  The service is offered free to the community, although donations are welcomed.  Each donation is passed on to clients for their work.

A favorite benefit of this project is that clients are able to spend their coffee breaks at local restaurants, such as a nearby McDonalds.

Recycling

Bethel Center recycles both the usual and unusual.  Collecting and sorting newspapers, clients roll papers into bundles for flower vendors. Clients process several tons of paper each year.

Cans and bottles also provide work opportunities, and enable these clients to provides the local community with help to convert the discarded into the useful.

Where converting cardboard, material, buttons, or discarded clothing, Bethel Center seeks to make items useful for the San Francisco community.