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Deacon likens giving out socks to washing feet
Giving socks to marginalized people on the streets of Seattle becomes a way to love the people in front of the volunteers and Operation Nightwatch chaplains on the streets every night.
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Volunteers at Operation Nightwatch receive and sort socks. |
“It’s a way to start a discussion, said Frank DiGirolamo, the executive director of Operation Nightwatch. “Giving people socks has become a way to help heal the people who are experiencing homelessness, showing forgiveness and mercy as the start of human relationships.”
Often in his 13 years of volunteering with Operation Nightwatch as a deacon at St. Monica’s Catholic Parish on Mercer Island and in his four years as executive director, still going on the streets, people would ask him—because they could not bend over—if he would change their socks.
“It is like foot washing. Sometimes people have worn their socks so long without changing them that they peel off skin when they take them off,” he said. “So we started a medical clinic to care for foot wounds.
“While changing someone’s socks, we also ask if they have a safe place to stay,” he continued.
Operation Nightwatch serves a meal each evening to 150 to 170 people. It has shelters to house 40 men and women.
Mercer Island Congregational UCC is among 95 faith communities in the Seattle area that provide volunteers to help serve the meal. Other UCC churches who support Operation Nightwatch are Fauntleroy, Magnolia and Plymouth. Before it closed, Broadview was also involved.
Many who visit the Operation Nightwatch shelters, meals and other programs are caught in a cycle of chronic traumatization that begets substance addiction.
That’s where our shelters come in.
“We get 40 men and women off the streets each night and involve them in case management, chaplaincy and a free medical clinic,” said Frank.
“We see more young adults on the streets, disenfranchised by traditional programs or rejected by their families,” he added.
“We seek to heal people experiencing homelessness with forgiveness, mercy and human relationships along with housing,” Frank explained.
Frank feels privileged to be inviting people to help out as a way to change society.
“There is something profound and simple about a pair of socks,” he noted.
The deaths of Frank’s mother during his first year at Grove City College in Pennsylvania and of his father after he graduated ingrained in him a commitment “to love the person in front of you while you have the chance.”
He started a career in business, coming to Seattle in 1998 to work in the administrative offices of Starbucks and realizing in 2007 that he was called to serve his parish, St. Monica’s, as a deacon. He was ordained in 2012, working as coordinator of parish and outreach ministries,
For Frank, going out to the streets, offering socks is the means to open conversations that invite people to share their desires and frustrations, and to listen to their stories about their hopes and hungers.
Operation Nightwatch has a full-time director of outreach, Disciples pastor Michael Cox, and two part-time street chaplains who walk in given areas of the streets with 12 volunteer street ministers, men and women, mostly lay.
Frank said he visits the churches like Mercer Island to share the street stories to draw gifts of socks, funds and volunteers.
“We rely on 1,000 volunteers over the year to serve the nightly meals,” he said.
Each December, Operation Nightwatch holds its annual Sock It to Homelessness open house as a target time for congregations and agencies that have collected socks to bring them.
For information, call 206-890-4536 or email frank@seattlenightwatch.org.
Pacific Northwest Conference United Church of Christ News © January 2026
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