Support the Bay Area Italian Community

At the Italian Community Services, we - like all nonprofits - are dedicated to our mission. Unlike other nonprofits, the focus of our mission has shifted a lot since our founding, especially in the last few years. While our mission has been and always will be preserving our culture and serving our community, it's taken on many looks since we began.

ICS was founded with the focus of fortifying the Italian community in San Francisco and the Bay Area, supporting immigrants who have come to forge new lives and take advantage of new opportunities.

Prior to the pandemic, our team's focus was on senior care, ensuring that seniors had the resources they needed and the community they deserved to invigorate them in their day-to-day lives. ICS was beginning to expand our reach into the greater community, providing resources and opportunities for all ages. However, when the pandemic hit, we dedicated our attention to helping the most in need, and that led us back to primarily focusing on senior care as their risk of infection, rate and impact of isolation, and numerous other issues and struggles soared through the roof.

Though we have continued to provide for seniors during the past year, we have also expanded our reach to other members of our community, albeit slower than we originally anticipated pre-pandemic.

Unlike most organizations, ICS's reach and impact have grown and continue to grow. We went from helping 31 families to 210 families, and our volunteer community went from 13 to 55. We could not be more thankful for our wonderful team of volunteers who've supported us in increasing our impact and supporting even more members of our community.

We were able to provide seniors in our community with tablets to break down the barriers the most isolated seniors faced as their access to and level of comprehension of technology was limited. In partnership with Samsung and T-Mobile, we provided these seniors with tablets that had a simplified interface and were pre-loaded with contacts, and we guided them on how to use the tablets to connect with their loved ones around the world.

One senior was brought to tears (as was the ICS team and volunteers helping to support her) as she video-chatted with her niece in Europe, seeing her face for the first time in over 10 years. Another set of seniors, best friends who migrated from Friuli to San Francisco with their families as children and reconnected thanks to ICS, were heartbroken by the pandemic when they were no longer able to visit each other on a daily basis due to safety precautions despite living only 3 blocks away. Thanks to the tablets, they rekindled their friendship and were back to constantly talking each other's ears off.

For those we didn't provide tablets to, we provided a Hotline for Friendship - or Friend-line as we call it - to allow our broader community to call and chat with our team or volunteers anonymously to ask a question, share or gather information, or just have someone to chat with.

Our commitment to North Beach and San Francisco led to finding a new tenant to call Club Fugazi home again after Beach Blanket Babylon left in 2020. Today, we have an international group - the 7 Fingers - calling Club Fugazi home with their “Club Fugazi Experiences" and debut show "Dear San Francisco: A High-Flying Love Story." With this new and invigorating tenant at Club Fugazi, North Beach is once again filled with theatre patrons that support our local, Italian-owned restaurants and shops.

In our mission to support and assist the community, we partnered with Refettorio-Farming Hope to prepare food bags that we delivered to seniors and community members in need. We are truly “using food to bring people together” which began with Massimo Bottura, the owner and chef at Osteria Francescana in Italy, named the Best Restaurant in World 2 years in a row.

In 2021, we also supported multiple Italian language education programs across the Bay with $40,000 in grants. As we continue into 2022, we are working to build out programs to continue supporting the younger generations in things like preparing for college and the workforce, learning and mastering skills for their careers or for career changes, taking on entrepreneurship, and more!

We've accomplished so much since the pandemic hit! Some of our biggest accomplishments include:

• 5800 care packages delivered since the pandemic hit
• 3400 volunteer hours
• 8400 wellness calls since the pandemic hit
• 3 Restaurant partnerships to keep our community members afloat
• $80,000 in support of Italian Language programs
• $160,000 in financial assistance to families in need
• Providing Isolated Seniors with Tablets
• Walking in the Italian Heritage Parade in its return to North Beach
• Assisting a senior in returning home to his family in Italy
• Hosting our Grand Re-Opening just in time for Thanksgiving
• Bringing joy and hope to our community

We are excited to continue our existing programs as well as create other opportunities to expand our reach and increase our impact in our mission to preserve our culture and serve our community.