At Dorothy Day House our vision is of a faith based community of hospitality and resistance: “in house”, we provide accommodation for "destitute refugees”, who are not able to claim Housing Benefit or NASS (National Asylum Seekers Support) which all other housing and hostels depend on. Compared with, for example, living with "domestic" homeless people, this is much simpler and possible to combine with a significant level of outreach and non-violent resistance work. Our outreach work consists or running Peter’s Community Café and the Urban Table soup kitchen. In terms of resistance we aim to be vigilling somewhere each week, and to either take part in or organise some bigger non-violent act of witness roughly once a month. During Advent we vigilled weekly outside the Home Office reporting and detention centre at Old Street. This week (January 08) we start an anti war-on-terror vigil on the high street in Dalston.
We are committed to being in London because it is one of the three centres of global power, economic, political and military, along with Tokyo and New York/Washington DC. We believe this city needs a witness to a different set of values and this power needs resisting.
We were meeting, praying, working and acting together for over five years before we got this house. We were able to start a house when we were offered a substantial donation which could run such a project for a couple of years. Also, Martin Newell cp was missioned by his order to this life and work for at least five years and Steve Barnes said he wanted to live in a community of hospitality and resistance! 
We started a year ago, temporarily in a rented council flat in the Isle of Dogs. We were bordering on illegality because we were overcrowded with an average of five of us living in a three bedroom flat. We now have a bigger house near Dalston, five bedrooms with nine beds. Even an overcrowded house is better than the streets, and a secure bed is better than "sofa surfing". We have had up to ten people here for a week when we had two volunteers staying and a short term guest waiting to move to the CW farmhouse. Currently (January 2008) there are three Catholic Workers living here, five guests, and another moving in tomorrow.
Our house guests have been referred mainly by other refugee projects in London, such as the Migrant Resource Centre in Pimlico, the Jesuit Refugee Service, the Refugee And Migrant Project(RAMP) in Newham and the Hackney Refugee and Migrant Support Group. 
We have also had referrals from the Passage Day Centre for homeless people who meet refugees on the streets in central London and one or two other informal connections. About half our guests have been short-term and about half long-term.
We provide basic food supplies in the house, most of which is donated, for example we get a weekly pickup from a local ethical supermarket and another from a farmers' market. Although we don't buy any meat, occasionally we get it in the donations and guests buy some if they have any money.
Since Zelda moved in, we now have a kind of basic rota for cleaning, but we still don’t really have a system to organise the cooking: sometime a meal is cooked for everyone in the house, other times people cook for themselves, or just cook more than they need and leave it for others, as every one more or less has different timetables. But it seems to work out okay.
We have had our arguments and personality clashes, as well as problems caused by lack of mutually understood languages, but overall we get on well like some kind of multinational family.
Because the house is also the main base for the London CW, we have quite a lot of visitors, both daytime and overnight, and our house guests seem to take it in their stride and are very welcoming.
It seems - and Penny agreed with me - that whatever are the vices and virtues of our society, we are pretty inhospitable and protective of our private space, and we can learn a lot from our guests from other parts of the world in this regard.
At times, especially with the young men (I was 40 recently), it can feel a bit like being a parent (which I'm not!) - switch the lights off, separate the recycling, clean up and clear up after you and put things back where you found them, only use the washing machine when you've got a full load! And above all-the phone. We don't have a payphone, but we do have a landline. So we had to get a call barring feature, since we had a 400 pound phone bill one quarter. Currently we have a flat rate deal for UK landlines so everyone can call them, but mobile, overseas and premium rate calls require a code. 
On the other hand, with the women who have stayed here, it can feel like having a mother in the house. One of the male guests said a while back "the kitchen belongs to women" and the women present agreed! I had to point out at that point that if that was the case, the men should do what the women told them in the kitchen, which was a point of conflict at the time.
Most of our guests have been African, and many of them church going. For me it has been a blessing to occasionally pray with them, but also a trial - especially for Steve who is not a Christian - to have all-day Premier Christian Radio going in the background. Still, it could be Radio 3 or hip-hop, and the latter would definitely be worse
We also run a Sunday afternoon soup kitchen and have just started a community cafe, through which we hope to be able to offer cheap, and some free, meals to destitute refugees as well as other local people who struggle to cope. Two of our current guests have been helping us in the cafe, and two others have helped to leaflet the area for the cafe.
I think one of the best moments for me has been my recent 40th birthday, when the guests organised a party for me, and bought a cake with candles and a present - a new mobile phone, as I've been constantly frustrated with the previous one (even though I never wanted one in the first place).
To me this is a political act as much as an act of "charity". The borderline between the so-called "First World" and "Third World" are the new and real class barriers. Which side do we want to be on? If I come from a position of relative and/or absolute privilege, it is very difficult to enter the world of the undocumented migrant or the destitute refugee seeking to find a way to survive, or just to find a way here into fortress Europe across the battlements and invisible barbed wire.
It is all too easy to be comfortable behind the safety net of employment and health and social security systems. I believe that, for me at least, it is vital to enter into the "community of destiny" of those that we would keep outside, if I am to play a real role in the process of liberation and repentance.
And for me, that is in the end simply about remaining and becoming human.