Jackie Allen-Doucet: From Protesting with the Berrigans to Afterschool Mentorship in Hartford (CCW Ep 26)
In this episode of the Coffee with Catholic Workers podcast, co-hosts Theo Kayser and Lydia Wong speak to Jackie Allen-Doucat about the Hartford Catholic Worker’s work with kids and what it was like to raise her own kids in the Catholic Worker.
In this episode of the Coffee with Catholic Workers podcast, co-hosts Theo Kayser and Lydia Wong speak to Jackie Allen-Doucat about the Hartford Catholic Worker’s work with kids and what it was like to raise her own kids in the Catholic Worker.
The Hartford Catholic Worker is one of only a handful of Catholic Worker communities to focus their work almost exclusively on children and youth. Unlike other youth programs, they work with the children and teens who live right in their neighborhood, establishing deep, long-term relationships. Some of those relationships have spanned decades, with kids who first stopped by the “Green House” or “Purple House” at age five continuing to spend time there decades later, often mentoring a new generation of youth.
Theo Kayser and Lydia Wong interviewed Jackie Allen-Doucot for their Coffee with Catholic Workers podcast back in early spring. The episode aired in May; the transcript is finally available at CatholicWorker.org.
Jackie and her husband, Chris Allen-Doucat, met one another while working with the Sts. Francis & Thérèse Catholic Worker in Worcester, Massachusetts. Eventually, friends encouraged them to start a new Catholic Worker in Jackie’s hometown, Hartford. The couple spent a year praying and studying with a group of 10 people, including Brian Kavanagh, who eventually joined the live-in community with them. Along the way, they had their first child and managed to purchase a $150,000 house for $10,000.
It was “super hard” in the beginning, she said, “but every step we took was, we sort of realized that, okay, the Holy Spirit must want this to happen because good things would happen.”
At first, they opened up their home to unhoused people. in the early years, they ran a food pantry and a furniture pantry, too, but the neighborhood kids kept coming around. Eventually, they started an after-school mentoring program for those kids. Their work with the neighborhood youth expanded after one of the kids they had known from a young age was shot and killed.
“That really made us reevaluate how we were doing our work,” Allen-Doucot said. “And the biggest need seemed to us (to be) to hold onto kids. All teenagers…(need) connection and support and community and families.”
That’s when they purchased their second house, turning the backyard into a huge playground and a full basketball court. “And we started to kind of pay kids to be counselors and that kept the older kids in,” she said, “and that evolved into a beautiful thing where the older kids mentor the younger kids.”
They began partnering with the University of Connecticut’s Husky Sport Program, where athletes and students establish mentoring relationships with neighborhood children, teaching them about sports and nutrition.
“We always are real clear with (outside volunteers) that…you’re not there to give and the poor children are there to take,” Allen-Doucat said. “We break down why poverty and institutional racism exist together and what the need is to make right relationships and to make amends for what white supremacy has done to our neighborhoods and our communities.” The neighborhood is almost entirely Black, she said.
“We try to bring people in to break down that apartheid thing, to make the poor not be an anonymous thing, but people, you know, who are in the states they’re in because of the way we live—the way we’re ready to pay $114 billion over the next 10 years for 14 new Trident submarines….
“We teach people about (how) Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker is not just about doing good. It’s about…addressing the causes that make it necessary to have charity.”
They teach the neighborhood kids conflict resolution skills, and co-sponsor a summer peace camp with their sister organization.
“We get kids out of the ghetto and out into the country and they swim every day and run around the woods at night playing manhunt. And we do conflict resolution with them; we have this thing called the Hip Steps. And after a while, the bigger kids teach the younger kids, and it’s something that we really believe not just benefits our community, but these kids take it into their schools and their jobs and their work.”
It can be tough, exhausting work, she told Lydia and Theo. Kids who grow up in poverty and around addiction don’t always have the best coping skills, which can present problems. The Allen-Doucats’ two boys grew up in the Worker, which was also very challenging, she said. And now, as the founding members age, they are facing an uncertain future both for themselves and the community.
But all the work and hardship are worth it, she said, because it is a glimpse of the Beloved Community. “I think our community is really awesome because we do a great job of (building that community). When you look around our house on a Saturday, you see old and young, you see gay and straight, you see neurodivergent and genius people, and you see black, white, brown.
“We have so much variety and we tell people, that’s what the kingdom of God looks like, and when you’re in communities that don’t have that, you are the ones that are needy, you are the ones that are living with a loss, and you need to be made whole.”
Episode transcript
The following episode transcript was autogenerated by AI from the audio transcript and subsequently reviewed and lightly edited for accuracy and clarity. Filler words (ah, um, like, etc.) and false starts have been removed to improve readability.
[music]
Theo Kayser: Welcome to Coffee with Catholic Workers, a podcast made by and for Catholic Workers. I’m Theo.
Lydia Wong: And I’m Lydia. We’ve both been a part of the Catholic Worker for the last decade and we’re excited to bring you different conversations with Catholic Workers from around the world.
Theo Kayser: On this episode, we’re excited to get to talk to Jackie from Hartford, Connecticut, Catholic Worker. She tells us what it was like returning to her hometown to start a Catholic Worker and what their work looks like with kids and what it was like raising her own children in the Catholic Worker movement.
Lydia Wong: So let’s get to our interview with Jackie.
Theo Kayser: Jackie, welcome to Coffee with Catholic Workers. Thanks for joining us. We usually start the episode with asking folks about their Catholic Worker journey. How did you find the movement? How did you become the Catholic Worker you are today?
Jackie Allen-Doucot: Sure. I think I came a little bit off from the side of the Catholic Worker. My mom was a peace activist and she was a World War II army nurse vet and very active in the peace movement.
So I was part of the anti-nuclear movement and met the Berrigans at a very young age and was mentored by them. And the first time I got arrested at Electric Boat and non-cooperated and went to jail, I think I was 20. And I met these amazing women from the New York Worker and I was like, Catholic Worker, what?
I had never heard. I went to Catholic school for 12 years and had never heard of the Catholic Worker, which I think is a scandal. But I was totally fascinated by the story of what they did.
And then as being part of a couple of plowshares trials, I traveled a lot up and down the East Coast. So I visited Dorothy Day house, the New York house a bunch of times, made friends with Scott and Claire Schaeffer-Duffy. And so was introduced to Catholic Workers that had kids, which was kind of rare back in the eighties. That was kind of a new thing. So I sort of, I think I came into it that way. Chris and I, I met Chris in Worcester.
I was doing support for (inaudible) plowshares in Syracuse. I was living in Hartford, working at a woman’s shelter and taking art classes in Worcester, this crazy triangle of life. And he, the Catholic Workers in Worcester introduced me to Chris.
That was a kind of funny story. I got a speeding ticket cause I had Jonah House’s old 1968 Volvo caboose that got probably couldn’t go over 55, but I got a speeding ticket on the Mass Pike driving from Syracuse to Worcester. And I was so bummed.
And Scott said, “Oh, don’t worry about it. When you’re done with your class, I’ll come pick you up with a car full of people. And you can pick, you know, you can pick a partner,” some joke like that.
And it was great because it was a married couple, a gay couple and then Chris. So, and we ended up talking the whole night. That was like, our first date was like about doing billboards and we’re resisting and all that good stuff. So it was pretty funny.
But then I, you know, got, when we got married, we lived at the Worcester Catholic Worker for a couple of months. And then we had been meeting and talking with David O’Brien, who is a Holy Cross Catholic theologian. That’s sort of been a great inspiration to all the Catholic Workers that came out of Holy cross college. I think you might’ve met him up at the reunion at Holy cross, but he and his wife Joanne encouraged us to go back to Hartford and start a Worker there. And, you know, he said, Hey, there’s plenty of Catholic Workers in Worcester, but there’s none in Hartford.
So we really took that to heart and we went to Hartford and started the Worker.
Lydia Wong: So that sounds so easy and logical. Like you, you met Catholic Workers, you became a Catholic Worker and then bam, you, you started one. What was that process like to sort of found a new Worker?
Jackie Allen-Doucot: It was pretty crazy because the day we quit our full-time jobs in Worcester to move to Hartford, to start looking for a house, we found out we were pregnant. So we had a big, like, Oh my God, what the hell are we doing? And we had to talk about, okay, we’re not going to have health insurance.
We’re not going to have—but we kind of said, if we don’t do this now, we’ll never do it because once you have kids and you have jobs and insurance and all that stuff, I think it’s a really hard thing to let go of that. So we said, it’s kind of now or never. So we moved in with my family in Hartford—I’m from Hartford—and we met with like 10 or 11 people over the course of a year. And we used some of the materials that the Quakers used down in Central America for doing small Christian community development. And we read lots of books, Catholic Worker books.
And at the end of the year, there were 10 or 11 people. The only person, everyone else decided not to move in. The only person that moved in with us was the one person who had said at the beginning that they were sort of like a hermit and they didn’t really want to live in the community. And that was Brian Kavanagh, who is our amazing in-house artist. And Brian didn’t really, he said, I don’t really like, I’m not really great with kids, which is funny because our whole ministry is children. So it was kind of a scary, hard thing.
And then I almost died when I had the baby, and it was crazy. We also were looking at houses and we had put him for a mortgage on a house that was like $150,000. And I think we had like $5,000, some of which was wedding gift money, but it went to auction and somebody bought it for $60 and then that fell through. But we had written begging letters to all the real estate places and banks. And they called us one day to tell us, hey, that fell through, would you guys want it for $10,000? And we said, well, okay, they ended up giving us the house for like $10,000. They waived all the closing costs.
So the way we got our house was a total miracle too. So I think as it was hard choices and hard steps, but every step we took was, we sort of realized that, okay, the Holy Spirit must want this to happen because good things would happen.
And we have amazing extended community, even though people didn’t move in with us, our Catholic Worker has incredible support community to this day that we couldn’t do without them. So that helped make it easier as well.
And I had worked at a woman’s shelter for 10 years in the neighborhood, like across the street from where our house is, I had worked there for years and really struggled with the rules and the way people were sort of homeless or unhoused people were sort of dehumanized or almost like it was jail. Some people walked around with the keys hanging off their—and because I had been in jail, I just couldn’t—that was very hard for me.
So I think when we first started, we all had to have jobs to support the house and it took years for our newsletter to build up support. So there was a lot of processing together and struggles and it’s not easy to live with people, so we all drove each other crazy. We still do, to be honest, after 30 years, we all still drive each other crazy. But yeah, I don’t want to make it sound easy because it was hard at the beginning, super hard.
And it’s still hard to be honest. I’m telling the truth. It ain’t easy.
Lydia Wong: So what is your Worker like? Could you describe a little bit of what it’s like, who lives there? What are the things that you do?
Jackie Allen-Doucot: Sure. I mean, it’s evolved over time. I think when we first started, we thought we would do a homeless hospitality for unhoused people and for people in our neighborhood.
But as time went on, Hartford has a pretty decent shelter system. Now, in the last five or six years, it’s been crazy. I mean, the number of people that have nowhere to live has been crazy. But when we first started, we had a kid ourselves and we had a couple of dogs, so we found kids in the neighborhood gravitating to our house. And that became, over the years, we did a food co-op and we gave out furniture. We filled up our house with donated furniture and then people kept calling and saying, oh, we have furniture. So for a while, we had a furniture pantry. We had a food cooperative. We gave out soup and made foods. And then as time went on, a second house was offered to us. Our neighbor was very old and falling, so we called the landlord to talk to her. And she was the first person of color that was able to own property in the North End. And she was very elderly, and she said, if you guys pay off the back porch loan, I’ll give you the house for that. Because she was supposed to have repairs done and the person scammed her. So that’s how we ended up getting our second house.
And then we really intentionally started to grow our afterschool and Saturday mentoring and art and sports program. In particular, because right around that time, one of our neighborhood kids that had gotten to be 14 or 15, a lot of times when the kids got to that age, they’d split. And then sometimes we would lose them to the gangs.
And one of our kids that we really loved was in a gang and was shot and killed. And that really made us reevaluate how we were doing our work. And the biggest need seemed to us (to be) to hold onto kids…. All teenagers are very vulnerable to the culture and to needing connection and support and community and families. So we sort of took the second house on and we turned the backyard into a huge playground. And the other half was a full court basketball. And we started to kind of pay kids to be counselors and that kept the older kids in.
And that evolved into a beautiful thing where the older kids mentor the younger kids. And we ended up hooking up with (the) University of Connecticut, (which) has an amazing program called the Husky Sport Program where athletes and students who are studying education and business and it’s a whole group of school majors put together. They send their young people in the specific training thing to go to the inner city and work in schools and things. So we met them right when that program was first starting and they’ve been with us for over 15 years now. And they send young students down to mentor and it’s fabulous.
So we do a lot of trips where we bring kids up to the college and we go to games and they come down and teach kids nutrition and sports things. And so we’ve been able to develop really great relationships with a lot of schools and universities around us. And the local Catholic school has been supporting us since day one, so that’s really fabulous too. We get lots of young students from there.
And we always are real clear with people that when people come, it’s not you’re there to give and the poor children are there to take. We do kind of sit down with folks at the beginning and we break down why poverty and institutional racism exist together and what the need is to make right relationships and to make amends for what white supremacy has done to our neighborhoods and our communities. So it’s really important for people to know: you’re here to build right relationships. You’re not here to give to kids. You get as much as you give and you’re not whole because Hartford in particular is this crazy place where Hartford, like five blocks from the North end of Hartford, which is per capita, the third poorest city in the nation—Connecticut is I think the second richest state—but five blocks from the ghetto are these huge mansions and the juxtaposition of wealth and then complete ghetto segregation is rather incredible. There are no white people that live in our, when we first moved there, people thought I was a nun. They thought Chris was a cop because we had a German shepherd dog. I mean, it’s really very incredible and it’s not that different now. It hasn’t changed in 30 years.
So another big thing we do is we try to bring people in to break down that apartheid thing and to make the poor not be an anonymous thing, but people you know who are in the states they’re in because of the way we live and what, you know, the way we were ready to pay 114 billion over the next 10 years for 14 new Trident submarines, Columbia they’re called, but they have Trident missiles.
So we do a lot of things like teach people about Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker is not just about doing good. It’s about addressing the causes, you know, working for justice means addressing the causes that make it necessary to have charity.
So we teach the kids conflict resolution and non-violence, but we also do that at Electric Boat and at protests. We work with Black Lives Matters and Moral Monday. We’re, you know, trying to support the indigenous people near us with some land repatriation stuff.
And that’s kind of, you know, this holistic look at building the beloved community and what it looks like. I think our community is really awesome because we do a great job of that. When you look around our house on a Saturday, you see old and young, you see, you know, gay and straight, you see neurodivergent and genius people, and you see black, white, brown.
We have so much variety and we tell people, that’s what the kingdom of God looks like, and when you’re in communities that don’t have that, you are the ones that are needy, you are the ones that are living with a loss and you need to be made whole.
So you’re coming here, that’s what you get. Does that make sense?
Now I feel like I was blabbing too much. Next question! Don’t get me going.
Lydia Wong: (Laughs) No, it sounds like you do all kinds of great clarification of thought that’s just really integrated into the everyday work that you’re doing there.
Jackie Allen-Doucot: That must be why we’re so tired.
Theo Kayser: Can you speak a little bit more about what are these systems that make the charity necessary and what as Catholic Workers are you doing about it? And you’ve mentioned Electric Boat a couple of times and I don’t know what that is and probably a lot of other people don’t know what that is too.
Jackie Allen-Doucot: So Electric Boat is part of General Dynamics, which is one of the biggest military contractors in the country. And it’s located in Connecticut. And they have been building submarines since the Nautilus in the 1950s. And today, this past year, they were given a contract, $114 billion over 10 years to build 12 additional Columbia submarines. We have 14 already. At least one of them that we know of was sent when stuff began happening in Gaza. So there’s a connection between the very serious threat of escalation to nuclear war in the Middle East with this place in Connecticut. And we also know when we look at budgets that when you’re spending $114 billion on military weapons, you’re not spending it on mental health care. You’re not helping to keep people out of prison. You’re not having enough money for school. We end up donating books and paper and backpacks to the school in our neighborhood because there’s not enough money for the kids to have those things. That’s a disgrace.
So I think because we’re so kid-oriented, it becomes really clear to us that we live in a government that does not prioritize children in any way. I don’t know if that’s helpful. So we’ve been organizing, I’ve been organizing since I was 20 at Electric Boat. And our community is very invested. And we had an action in, now I don’t remember what date it was. It seems like it was yesterday. I think it was December, we did something where we shut down both the gates at Electric Boat and did a blockade. And then we’re doing another one sometime in March.
So we’re just trying to keep the pressure on and educate people about why we don’t have the things we need in this country. And also about how much money is being made by people in the military-industrial complex. I mean, it’s a crime by anyone’s standards. So the theft from the poor, I think Dorothy Day wrote a lot about that. And I know for ourselves, we talk about almost being able to see people coming to the door with missiles strapped to their back because there’s a direct connection between what they don’t have. And there’s such a great need. We haven’t taken care of the Vietnam vets, and now we have all these younger, newer vets. There’s so many ways that money needs to be used to provide for the human family, and we just don’t do that.
We try to keep a balance between protesting and advocating for people, and then meeting people’s needs and being present to people and building community with people. So that’s kind of the balance that we work at.
And I was very blessed to be mentored by Phil Berrigan, Dan Berrigan, and Liz McAllister. I mean, I think they’re three people that are just moral giants, and they helped form me spiritually, and I still feel inspired by them. And they still give me great strength. And I think that’s true of a lot of folks in the Catholic Worker Movement. Older folks, anyway.
Lydia Wong: So you’ve mentioned a little bit about sometimes being a little tired and the work being hard, and perhaps a reference to being an older folk in the Catholic Worker. What is it that keeps you going that helps you still be at this work years later?
Jackie Allen-Doucot: I think I was really blessed to have a big, generous heart. And I really love the kids in our community. I really love the young people.
We’re also really lucky in our community. We, you know, kids would start coming when they’re five years old, and we have people that either live with us or are in our extended community.
They’re 40 years old, and they still come and live with us and do the work and help us out. And to me, that’s really incredible. I think we’re probably one of the only Catholic Workers that has that experience.
That gives me a lot of hope. And I feel like, I don’t know, I guess I feel it is exhausting, but it’s also very life-giving to be part of work that you’re trying to make a space for people to be able to do good. That’s the whole gist of the Catholic Worker.
And there’s lots of joy and happiness and beauty and peacefulness that kind of can balance out the craziness. I have to get better myself at figuring some of that out.
But I mean, that’s everybody’s spiritual search: How do you balance yourself out? So I’ve been trying really hard in the last couple of years. I took a course through the Center for Prophetic Imagination to do spiritual direction for social transformation, and that helped me immensely be able to work on my own stuff and work on healing my own stuff, which is a real benefit of when you live in community, the healthier people are about doing their own work, the better the whole community works. So you really need a good balance. If you’re going to live in a Catholic Worker house, it’s important to work on your own stuff. Otherwise, you’re projecting it on other people, and then that causes a lot of friction. So I try to do contemplative prayer and be quiet because I have a big mouth and I’m around people all the time and I talk all the time, but really, I recharge by myself. I realize I seem extroverted, but I think I’m an introvert. So I really spend some quality time every morning, either with my sister Teresa or by myself just doing silence for 25 minutes every day.
I love art. I do a lot of art. Art gives me hope with the kids. They are amazing artists. And doing art with kids, when I was in high school, I wanted to be an art therapist. I never ended up doing that. But I feel like I do that all the time.
Doing art with kids is wonderful. They’re so funny and their art is beautiful. And I also do a lot of banner making and puppet making and stuff for protests. And I find that really enlivening and hopeful.
And I’m really hopeful about young people. I feel like in this country, I think things are turning around partly because the corporations have so taken over the government and they’re so greedy, they’ve pretty much eliminated a lot of middle class benefits. So there’s a lot more people without, and they’re not buying into the capitalist big dream. I think that there’s a lot of young people that know that climate death is going to happen unless we address the military industrial complex, because none of the militaries of the world even have to report anything for the Paris Accords. So the Paris Accords, which aren’t even being really enforced, they’re not going to work anyway.
So I see a lot of hope and I love to see how the young people are coming out about the genocide in Gaza. So I think I find a lot of hope in young people and that works for me because I get to be around young people all the time. So yeah, that’s kind of hopeful. Yeah.
And I hope someone comes to take over our Catholic Worker House because there’s a lot of old people. Brian’s 80, I’m 63, Beth, my other community member, the live-in people that started it, we’re all getting older. And so we need some young people to come. We’re constantly begging the young people in our house, but when you grow up in poverty, I don’t think voluntary poverty is a thing you want to embrace too much.
So it’s hard, but it’s great because they all stick around, even if they don’t stay Catholic Workers forever and they go and get jobs and do other fabulous things, they still stick around and help and support us. So that’s very beautiful. Yeah.
And I have to check my own maternalism and my white supremacy kind of mode of caretaking, and maybe that’s TMI, but so there’s a constant balance of that.
Theo Kayser: I think you’re the first person we’ve talked to whose Catholic Worker does focus on younger folks on youth. And you’ve alluded to it some, but I wonder if you have more to say about like if you think that work makes your Catholic Worker experience different, or if there’s specific joys or specific challenges that you all have that other Catholic Workers might not.
Jackie Allen-Doucot: Sure. I think because we take in homeless kids, our hospitality a lot of times is with children and minors. So that’s kind of a different level of commitment, I think. And lots of times people will come and end up staying for a longer period of time. So we don’t have as many people come through, but the ones that come, we really like to surround people with love and support so that they can really get on their feet and be healthy and move on.
And we have lots of kids that have come because a parent was killed or incarcerated—the prison-industrial complex is crazy. We have a lot of people whose families have been torn apart by addiction, and then the Department of Children and Families intervenes and takes them out of the home.
And then we try really hard to work with the whole family and do some wraparound services and stuff. We have an afterschool program and a Saturday program, which always involves feeding the kids. We have a food pantry where we try to support their families with food. We do a lot of holiday things—we do Easter and Christmas. We have a huge Christmas party and we do food deliveries for Easter and Christmas, Thanksgiving, give out like 200 family baskets of turkeys and stuff.
And then we run a summer peace camp in Ballentown, which is our sister community, Ballentown Peace Trust. We get kids out of the ghetto and out into the country and they swim every day and run around the woods at night playing manhunt. And we do conflict resolution with them. We have this thing called the Hip Steps. And after a while, the bigger kids teach the younger kids, and it’s something that we really believe not just benefits our community, but these kids take it into their schools and their jobs and their work, and really everyone in this country should be taking conflict resolution from the time they’re in preschool on, and they don’t, and it shows in our governmental policies. But I don’t know. Did I answer that question? Did I stray?
Theo Kayser: We’re just some Catholic Workers talking over a cup of coffee. Whether we answer the question or not, that it’s only so important.
Jackie Allen-Doucot: All right. There is a lot of joy and it’s a lot of hard work, and sometimes it’s brutal and difficult, and kids that have been abused and grown up around addiction don’t have the best coping skills and that can wear you out. But in a lot of ways, we’re really blessed and we get lots of support from our bigger community. And so that’s a good thing.
Like we have neighborhood women that come and cook that have been cooking with us for 20 years, and they’re like everybody’s mom. Miss Edna tells you, pull your pants up and do this and that, you’re going to do it.
Theo Kayser: And what was it like raising your own kids around this too? We get a lot, or I come across a lot of folks who wonder about being a parent and being a Catholic Worker. And what was that experience like? And again, it might be different than a lot of Catholic Worker kids experiences being around other kids.
Jackie Allen-Doucot: Yeah. Well, I mean, in some ways I’m sure it was good because we were both home and with them all the time and everything we did was kid-oriented. But in some ways, I think it was brutally hard. They were constantly having to share their parents with a million other kids who seemed needier. I think that was kind of hard, but like anybody, all kids are different. So Eamon ended up being okay and he’s still living and running the Worker with us. And Micah chose not to do that. Micah chose to have a different life and we totally respect that.
It wasn’t an easy life. Not only did we do Catholic Worker, but my husband, Chris, was part of Voices in the Wilderness and went to Iraq during the Iraq war. He traveled to Iraq a lot. He was gone a lot in Palestine and other places. He brought kids home, a little girl with a bullet in her head and a little boy whose brother had been killed in Iraq and had half of his hand blown off and he had depleted uranium metal embedded in his body. So my kids were exposed to a lot of things that other kids don’t see.
And one of my kids is super sensitive and I think that was kind of brutal for him. And we didn’t really realize it at the time, but it was probably very, very hard.
But in other ways, they’re both amazing human beings. I remember when Micah was like maybe 18 and he was giving somebody rides all the time, and I said to him, I hope you’re getting gas money for that. And he said—or maybe he was only 17?—and he said, “Ma, I think I can use my white privilege to give somebody a ride in my car.”
And I was like, damn, not bad, doing something right. But yeah, I mean, I don’t think Catholic Worker life for kids is easy. And I wished I maybe should have been more mindful of that when they were younger and cut back a little bit, but they’re both amazing human beings. And when I look at my own life, my mom, I came from a family of 10 kids and my dad died very slowly over four years, very ill and died at home. And that was hard. So I think lots of people have a really hard life and my kids were no exception and I was no exception. So I guess that’s sometimes going through hard stuff is what builds character and makes you a better person. But I would love to see them talk about that sometime. They’d probably have a lot more to say about it.
Lydia Wong: I think another discussion that frequently comes up is the idea of aging in Catholic Workers and what happens when people get older. Do you have thoughts on that as your community sort of also looks for young people who are interested in taking things on?
Jackie Allen-Doucot: Yeah, that’s a hard one. I think it’s really hard for Catholic Workers too. Like the first 15 years, we never paid ourselves, but when Chris started going to Iraq, the IRS went after him and they tried to say that all our donations were—so we had to become a nonprofit. We didn’t want to do that. We had this great group of priests and nuns that helped us to do that, who were on our board. We asked the Catholic church, can we be under your umbrella? And they were like, no, but in a way they were nice about it because they were like, your newsletter, you would never be able to do that if you were under our umbrella.
So we put together some great priests and nuns that were very close to us and worked with us and supported us. And they were very funny because the minute we set up the board, they said, you all have to give yourself some kind of income so you have social security, because we know from experience when you haven’t done that, when you’re 70, you’re going to be in trouble. So we did do that. Certainly it’s not a lot, we’re not going to get a lot, but it is a concern. And we really, we are just at the beginning of trying to figure that out and we don’t know. I mean, I know because I’ve had a lot of health problems.
I would love to say at 65, I’m going to not be there, I’m only there two or three days a week now, and Chris is there four days a week, but, and that’s because I had to pull back. But we really, like I said, if young people came and wanted to take over our ministry, you know, we would do it side by side with them for a couple of years, but then it would be great to be able to turn that over.
And we’ve talked about different ways that could happen. It could be Catholic Worker people that wanted to do that, or it could be our son Eamon with the younger people in the community, or it could be Husky sport program that doesn’t have a place to work, you know, live, set up in Hartford. We don’t know what’s going to happen.
We’re open to the Holy Spirit and we’re open to it not being what it is right now. I think it’s unreasonable to think anybody’s going to be as crazy as we are with all the different stuff we do, but so there’ll have to be some letting go. And it might not, I know—is it the Detroit Catholic Worker that just closed after many years? I was really reading that with a really heavy heart because we really don’t know. We’re just at the beginning. My husband’s six years younger than me, but he teaches college full-time. He’s an adjunct, but he teaches at two colleges and it amounts to full-time work, even though it’s not full-time pay.
I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but it would be great to have a Catholic Worker gathering about that for older Catholic Workers. I don’t know how other people solve that or figure that out, but that’s something that probably needs to happen. Yeah, I mean, Brian’s 80 and he still is with us and he still helps around the house and stuff, but I don’t know what other communities do for older people. I mean, I don’t know how that works. That’s something people haven’t talked about. So it’s a really very good question. I am open to anything the Holy Spirit or any other Catholic Workers want to share wisdom-wise. That would be a good podcast to get some of the older folks.
And one of the reasons I wanted to pull back a little bit and not be there all the time is that if you, if we don’t do that, then who can come forward and who can, you know, who can come into that space when it’s already—you know, so.
Lydia Wong: Yeah, it is interesting to look at the struggle that so many houses have. There’s like this dual piece of aging, of can the house continue, and then also like what happens to the individuals. And it seems like it’s often a struggle in both ways. Many houses seem to shut down after founders leave, or sometime shortly, soon after. That seems to be more the rule than the exception. And it does seem like there are more and more younger Catholic Workers who do have that concern of, okay, getting older, is it sort of relying on family members to take care of a person? And if somebody doesn’t have that, what happens then?
Jackie Allen-Doucot: One of the reasons I took the spiritual direction course is I thought, maybe that’s a way that I can earn money when I’m too old to be at the Worker, you know. It is a mystery though, yeah. And it’s, yeah, it would be a good thing to talk about at Catholic Worker gatherings too, maybe have a session on it.
Theo Kayser: Yeah, I mean, my impression of it all is that there are more questions than answers about all of these things. And there are a lot of people asking it, but not a lot of good solutions quite yet.
Jackie Allen-Doucot: Yeah, yeah.
Lydia Wong: It does seem to me that there are, it actually would be good to, I mean, this would be impossible to do, but to get a better sense of how many people do work in the Catholic Worker, like employed jobs. Because I do think that there are significantly more people who have employment and will later get social security than maybe first appearances seem. Everyone in my community works, well actually technically I don’t right now, but my wife does.
But yeah, we all do have employment in part because for most of us we don’t, I don’t think anybody who’s currently at our Worker would be able to be at a place if they were not working. And so that’s, it does make for an interesting dynamic because it definitely limits what we’re able to do, but also I think has allowed people to stay at the Worker longer than many people who, I don’t know, don’t worry about being able to support a family later on or something like that.
Jackie Allen-Doucot: Yeah, yeah. And that’s the thing too. I don’t, I think it’s only in the last, well I guess there were couples, but not couples with kids. Yeah, that’s very interesting. Yeah, yeah. It’s a hard figure. We’re still working it through. Hoping I have a few good years left of me to figure it out anyway.
Lydia Wong: Sure, sure. Well, are there other things that you’d like to share that we haven’t asked about yet? Things that we should hear about?
Jackie Allen-Doucot: I don’t know, maybe just putting it out to young people or, you know, people that listen to the podcast, that most Catholic Workers are very interested in having people come and work and try it for a year and that that’s a really worthwhile thing. And I think like gap year things for people that are done with high school, but aren’t sure what they want to do. I think a lot less people are willing to take on the crushing debt of college loans.
So there’s more openness. And I think, you know, living in a Catholic Worker house gives you time to work through your own stuff and maybe to do some resistance and to work with Black Lives Matter and Moral Monday and to try to do some real system changing work and be around other people that are like-minded and enjoy, you know, the benefits of community, you know, shared meals or common prayer or, you know, just fun.
We try to do some celebrating with the young people like we have for birthdays going somewhere and having a birthday party. And I mean, that’s part of the Catholic Worker mojo is making it a fun, good place for people to come and hang out. So I think sometimes we think about the works of mercy.
It’s like, we really pretty much know how to have a good time. And the work is really spiritually fulfilling and can be wonderful. So it’s a good thing. And it’s a cool thing to try out before you commit yourself to some kind of big, heavy full-time thing, maybe travel around a little bit and visit communities and help do some good work.
That’s a plea.
Lydia Wong: If there was a young person who wanted to come and visit you, how should they get in contact with you?
Jackie Allen-Doucot: They could go to the hartfordcatholicWorker.org or they could go to Jackie Allen-Doucot’s Facebook page and they could send us a message and talk about, we’d make plans for a visit and just see what it would be like. You have to like kids, you have to like dogs, and you have to like some chaos and you have to be ready to work hard, because the work, there’s a reason it’s called the Catholic Worker. We’re trying to get rid of a mouse invasion in our food pantry and everyone’s so fed up with it and sick and tired of cleaning, scrubbing, filling mouse, putting foam in holes.
But anyway, there’s a lot of shit jobs, but there’s also a lot of great things that go on too. We could use a couple of good cooks too.
Theo Kayser: All right, well, you all heard: talk to Jackie if you’re ready for your gap year cleaning up mouse poo and cooking at the Hartford Catholic Worker.
Jackie Allen-Doucot: But in the summer you could also go swimming every day and go to the movies and have fun, play limitless basketball. We’re into volleyball, basketball. How did I go from how fun everything is to cleaning up mouse shit? That was a big recruiting mistake. I’m going to throw that out there. That was a recruitment mistake. Edit that out you guys!
Lydia Wong: You know, it’s good to have some honesty so people don’t come into shock when they get there. I mean, I think we’re constantly dealing with our own mouse infestation, I think, for like the past like 12 months. We just cohabitate now, you know. That’s basically what it’s going to be.
Jackie Allen-Doucot: I know. One of our houses, St. Martin de Porres’ house and the other St. Bridget house, St. Martin de Porres was able to talk the mice that were in the rectory to leave and go live in the barn. We need that. St. Martin, where are you? It’s supposed to be well, and we don’t have mice at the Purple House. It’s only the Green House. It’s St. Bridget House. I’ll have to talk to St. Bridget about that. She wanted a lake of beer for the poor, so, so far we’re pretty happy with that.
Theo Kayser: I’ve heard mice like beer too, though, I think.
Jackie Allen-Doucot: Oh, that could be our problem. We’re probably the only Catholic Worker that makes homebrew, and we have Dorothy Day Draft and the label has her face and it says, “Finally a draft, you don’t have to resist.” And then we have Amon’s Anarchist Ale for people don’t, who don’t need a cop to tell them how to behave.
Lydia Wong: That’s hilarious. Amazing. So there are other benefits, apparently, by going to the Catholic Worker in Hartford, besides mouse poo, you know, sounds like a good time.
Jackie Allen-Doucot: The balance, the good and the bad. We try to be as non-binary as possible.
Lydia Wong: Well, thank you so much, Jackie, for being willing to come on the podcast and share a little bit about your story and all the really amazing things that are happening in Hartford and the providential way that the house came to exist. It’s been a lot of fun talking with you.
Jackie Allen-Doucot: All right. Well, thanks you guys. I appreciate it. And I want to give a shout out to all of the folks that come volunteer at the Hartford Catholic Worker, but at all Catholic Workers, because I’m sure that’s what keeps the machine running.
Theo Kayser: Definitely. Thank you.
Jackie Allen-Doucot: All right. Good talking to you guys.
Lydia Wong: All right. Thanks again to Jackie for being willing to interview with us. Fun fact, one of our housemates here at Emmaus House got started with the Hartford Catholic Worker volunteering there. Our housemate Hope is from Connecticut and was significantly influenced, obviously, in joining our house from the work that’s done there in Hartford.
Theo Kayser: Yeah. I was talking to a Catholic Worker friend recently, and he was saying to me, in his opinion, that the Catholic Worker is more than just like a philosophy, and it’s certainly not like a set of rules or a certain way having to do something. He was suggesting that like the Catholic Worker is a community foremost. And so, you know, the fact that we have folks like Hope who start in Connecticut and then wind up in Chicago doing the Catholic Worker, and now are connecting us with Jackie, or, you know, all these relationships around the movement, I think is something that’s really fun.
Lydia Wong: Yeah, yeah. And there’s ways in which, I don’t know, having such a community, I think, builds with ideas and inspiration, and in many ways, being able to hold each other accountable for the work that we’re doing.
Theo Kayser: Yeah, yeah. And for me, I mean, it also helps me keep it going to so many great friends as well.
Lydia Wong: Jackie did mention that she thought that it was a little bit more unique that their Worker focuses so much predominantly on kids. And that’s kind of interesting, because I often feel like when people are doing like traditional volunteering, that kids and like work with kids is sort of an easy point that people jump into. And so that did make me think a little bit of it just being a little more unique that Catholic Workers are not all that involved much of the time with kids.
Theo Kayser: Yeah, I was thinking about this too, a little bit. Because there are other Catholic Workers that work with kids. And there are some houses that, you know, will house families or moms with kids around the movement and stuff. But like, when I lived at the Los Angeles Catholic Worker for like seven years, like, I almost never even came in contact with kids. We didn’t have any that lived in the house. There were very few that would come to the soup kitchen on skid row.
You know, a lot of the people at the Worker were either younger people who had not yet had kids or people who were child free, who had been around the movement longer. So like, yeah, like, maybe I don’t know if at a certain point, it becomes like detrimental to not be exposed to kids or something like that, if it limits our imagination or our understanding of what life looks like in the world. But yeah, we almost never came in contact with kids at the LA Worker, but here *Hartford Catholic Worker) are, and that’s the main population they’re working with.
Lydia Wong: It did seem like it perhaps brought about some unique opportunities to be able to really see and shape people over time, or provide some, maybe a buffer to other stresses, maybe that they were seeing in the neighborhood to allow kids to have that long-term relationship in formative years.
Theo Kayser: Yeah, yeah. And she talked about being able to develop those relationships and then, you know, they’ve been there long enough and part of that local community for long enough to have the kids from 20 years ago or whatever are adults now and come around. That must be something to experience to have that kind of long-standing and relationship building in one neighborhood.
Lydia Wong: Yeah. The other thing that I think was very interesting that we touched on a little bit in the conversation was this idea of like succession planning within the Catholic Worker, of what do you do when the people who have predominantly been running a house or running the initiatives are no longer interested or able or need to, for whatever reason, phase out of it? And I think that’s a really difficult thing because if you look at what they’re doing, they’re pouring so much of their lives into it, it’s hard to find—I think it’s very intimidating for someone to move in and to think about trying to do those things.
Theo Kayser: It is difficult. I mean, this is something that comes up, you know, around the movement again and again. You know, how do you do it well? You know, how much new ideas is too much new ideas for the older folks? How much things need to stay the same? Is too much things staying the same for the newer folks? Yeah, I mean, it’s difficult. And then sometimes, you know, a lot of our Catholic Worker identity is involved in the work that we do. And what do we do when we can’t, you know, physically can’t do that work anymore? And how do we understand our value to the community in that scenario? And it’s, I mean, it’s a huge question. It keeps getting asked. I don’t know that anyone’s come up with a good solution. But we need to keep talking about it, I guess.
Lydia Wong: Yeah. Is it something that you all have talked about in planning your future Worker of like, what will happen when you’re all old? Or if in five or 10 years, people are transitioning to something else?
Theo Kayser: You know, it is not something we’ve really sat down and figured out as we’re getting the St. Louis Catholic Worker going. Right now, just the questions of getting going feel big enough and busy enough, you know, where are we going to have this Catholic Worker, you know, being primary on our mind? But, you know, we’ve been visioning a St. Louis Catholic Worker for a little more than a year now. And as I’ve traveled, I’ve asked friends now and again, like, what advice do you have to somebody starting a new Worker? You’ve been doing this for 15 years, you’ve been doing this for 20 years at a place, and that is one of the things that some people have thought about some is like, when we were starting, we didn’t have a vision for that. And now that we’re here 20 years later, and have grandkids and stuff, like we’re now we’re trying to play catch up. So I think we hope to talk to figure some of that out, or at least come to like common goals. But yeah, I mean, in the day-to-day Catholic Worker life, it’s just easy to put that kind of thing on the back burner when you’re busy doing the works of mercy and everything else too.
Lydia Wong: Definitely right. There’s always so much to think about, so many more conversations to have, and hopefully we’ll keep having them here, here on this podcast.
But for now, that wraps up another episode of Coffee with Catholic Workers. If you want to reach out to us with comments, suggestions, clarification of thought, you can email us at coffeewithcatholicWorkers@gmail.com. We want to thank our Catholic Worker audio engineer, Chris, as well as David Hayes for our music, and Becky McIntyre for our graphic.
Theo Kayser: Thanks again for joining us for another episode of Coffee with Catholic Workers. We hope today’s conversation was enlightening, and maybe even that you’re encouraged to go out and help build a world where it’s easier to be good.
[music]
Coffee with Catholic Workers is a podcast by and about Catholic Workers. Every two weeks, join Lydia Wong and Theo Kayser for a conversation with some of their favorite Catholic Worker folk. Special thanks to sound engineer Chris of Bloomington, IN.
