Bringing People Together: Pasquale’s Story

A large part of our mission is to bring people together to embrace the transformative power of community. 

While most of our efforts revolve around the logistics of transportation, planning events, and collaborating with other organizations and businesses in North Beach, San Francisco, and the greater Bay Area, we have also helped many seniors in our community reunite with their loved ones both virtually and in-person. Last year, we helped Carlo return home to his family in Italy. This year, we were recently able to reconnect one of our community members, Pasquale, with his family in Italy after having been out of touch for nearly 40 years!  

This all started when we learned that Pasquale had lost touch with his family in New York after experiencing multiple challenging times, including homelessness, over the years. Pasquale had no idea how his family had fared over the years. Were they still in New York? Had some of them passed away? His family also had no idea of what Pasquale had experienced and whether he was even alive after all this time.  

With the help of Miracle Messages, a local nonprofit, their team was able to quickly track down Pasquale’s family in New York as well as in Naples. After a week of processing the news that his family desperately wanted not only to reconnect and catch up but have him back in their lives, we helped Pasquale call his family in Napoli. 

Pasquale, like many of our community members, was not sure exactly how he could connect with his family virtually. Not only is he not on Facebook which many people use to stay in touch with family, but he also had never heard of WhatsApp or used Zoom before both of which many people use to communicate with family and friends around the world without having an international phone plan. 

We helped Pasquale navigate the technology needed to reconnect with his family. He was able to video chat with his siblings, and it was heartwarmingly beautiful to see their interactions, even with barely recognizing each other after so much time. 

We are working to help more people in similar situations to Pasquale by creating opportunities for seniors in our community to receive training on how to use various technologies many of us use daily to connect, such as Zoom.  

Bringing people together is a huge part of what we do. If you’d like to support the transformative power of community and connection, please consider donating to our 2022 Giving Tuesday campaign.