The Mosaic Village
When MercyCo opened the Recovery Cafe in October 2022, we thought Community Lutheran Church in West Sac would be a nice little interim home until we found someplace permanent for the cafe.
But then weird stuff started happening.
The cafe membership fell in love with the vintage, brick-based church site. The church membership fell in love with the cafe. Recovery Circle support groups grew. An onsite School of Recovery brought classes in health, healing art, recovery principles, relationship building and mindful living. Our Jobs And Mentoring (JAM) Academy found new traction and new possibilities.
All around us, we could see the tangible meaning of the cafe’s mosaic cup logo - a picture of diverse, broken lives coming together to form a vessel of warmth and wholeness for all.
And then we began to dream a little. With our many partners and friends, we began to consider what a whole campus of trauma-informed services and supports might look like, with the cafe at the center of it all. We began to imagine an interdependent, inclusive ecosystem of health, hope and healing, where every part contributed to the wellness and vibrancy of the next.
We began to call that dream the Mosaic Village.
And as 2024 dawns, it’s not a dream anymore.
THE CAFE SITE: Though no religious programming happens at Recovery Cafe, the Community Lutheran site has proven to be a warm, perfect home for those impacted by the traumas of substance-use disorders, mental-health diagnoses, grief, homelessness, domestic violence, and more. In addition to being a safe, healing space, the cafe is a ready hub for our many nonprofit partners to meet our friends with resources like housing, healthcare, healing art, legal services and more. MercyCo has signed a long-term lease agreement with CLC now and is pursuing funding for major upgrades to the kitchen, roof, landscaping, and more. Our member pictures are on the wall.
Yeah, we plan to be here awhile.
THE NEW RESOURCE STATION: With a timely boost from our friends at Sutter Health, we have signed a new lease for 3,000 square feet of space across the street from the Recovery Cafe, at 929 Drever Street. This will be the new home of our Mercy Resource Station, which has lived in the Collings Teen Center in various forms for a decade.
This new site will give us a programming center from which to continue sending out food, clothing, and hygiene items to various outlets around the City, including Project Homekey. It’ll give us additional meeting space for Recovery Circles, the School for Recovery, and the JAM Academy, and an administrative hub for all our programming. And it’ll create one-year paid internships for our recovery population - from warehousing, to transportation, to administrative, and more.
THE URBAN FARM. In December 2023, MercyCo joined Community Lutheran and the Center for Land-Based Learning in a new partnership to bring an urban farm to church property alongside the cafe site, on the corner of Drever and Jackson Streets. The new urban farm will provide fresh produce for the cafe (and many other places), and it will host gardening and growing classes as part of the School of Recovery. Plans also call for CLBL to host one of our paid JAM Academy interns for a year.
The Mosaic Village is more than a grouping of West Sac social services. It’s designed to be an interdependent, restorative community with a holistic, inclusive, compassion-first atmosphere from end-to-end. Some who utilize the cafe as a Third Space of belonging and healing can also work in an internship across the street. Those who intern may drive a transportation van picking up their recovery friends, or help prepare clothing and food that goes back out to that same community. Those who help with the cafe food can help bring in fresh produce from the urban farm next door - perhaps grown by friends in a School of Recovery class.
Diverse, broken lives, fitting together to create a vessel of warmth and wholeness for all.
That’s the Mosaic Village in its greatest expression. And we think that expression is just beginning.
“You’re talking about an interdependent ecosystem of health, hope and wholeness, where one part drives the other.”
Mercy Coalition staff celebrating their signed lease to bring their resource station to 929 Drever Street, across the street from the Recovery Cafe. The new location will provide more meeting space for support groups, job-training classes, and the School for Recovery, as well as a location for some paid internships through our Jobs and Mentoring (JAM) Academy.
Our partners at the Center for Land-Based Learning were out with their tractors on Dec. 16, 2023, preparing the ground for a new urban farm coming in alongside the Recovery Cafe site.