St. Francis House began in 1999 as an intentional residential Christian community in
a house overlooking downtown New London.
In 2002, we expanded to include the adjacent Victory House property to provide more living accommodations as well as office and meeting space. These two buildings at 30 and 32 Broad Street anchored St. Francis House.
The founding motivation to serve as a place of prayer, a house of hospitality, and a center for peace and justice ministry was informed by Franciscan tradition, Gandhian nonviolence, and the Catholic Worker movement. Through the years, St. Francis House evolved to include many people not in residence, as well as some with different spiritual paths but who shared values and social justice commitments.
Starting in 1999, we began to get to know our neighbors and their concerns. We had no preset “program” or never had paid staff; all residents contributed financially on a very sliding scale. Our yearly operations budget was about $60-70,000. Members of the St. Francis House community became involved in efforts responding to crises and opportunities with action. This dynamic, in some instances, led to the creation and/or critical support for new initiatives serving New London and the surrounding area involving homelessness, urban education, peace witness and anti-racism work, community gardening and food policy, youth empowerment, and exploring new ways to understand and change our local economy. Our newsletter Troubadour and YouTube channel (StFrancisHouseNewLondon)
document various aspects of this work.
The transition of 30 & 32 Broad to Hearing Youth Voices was covered by our local newspaper, TheDay.
Click here to read the article.
Thank you for coming out to celebrate
25 years of art, community and creation!
From November 8-11, 2024 at the Garde Gallery at 311 State Street, we showcased art, books, and other artifacts used, and in some cases created, by members of the community.
The pieces represented themes that were central to St. Francis House: peace & justice, housing,
food access, cooperative economics and spirituality. The Life & Art of St. Francis House exhibition celebrated 25 years of community connections and development at St. Francis House and was part of the process of completing the transfer of its two houses to
Hearing Youth Voices and the Southeastern Connecticut Community Land Trust.
This statue of St. Francis was given as a gift to St. Francis House in memory of
Emmett Jarrett, TSSF, who died in 2010.
The statue lived at the top of the driveway between our two buildings for many years, disappearing on mysterious missionary journeys for varying periods of time but always eventually coming home. The first time he was found by one of our neighbors at 127 Hempstead in nearby bushes; the second time by a social worker who found him adorning a coffee table in the apartment of one of her clients; and finally, after about a year’s absence, he was brought home from a house a mile away by a young man who remembered seeing him at the top of our driveway many years before.
For these many sojourns, the statue was known as “The Roving Francis.”