PROVIDENCE — Like many Rhode Islanders, Claude-Anthony Pierre is celebrating Christmas with his family. He and his wife, son, daughter and mother-in-law will breakfast together at their home in Washington Park, and this afternoon more relatives will join them for dinner. They’ll watch football and exchange gifts. They’ll attend Mass. They’ll be merry.

But for a while today, Pierre will celebrate with another family. Come noontime, he will drive to an old store on North Main Street that has been transformed into a gathering place. There, he will greet colleagues and friends and help serve a turkey dinner. This will be his Christmas gift to them — a gift of his time.

Pierre is executive director of MHCA/Oasis, a state-financed private agency that serves more than 2,000 people who have been or are being treated for mental illness. He won’t get paid for visiting the Oasis center, and he wouldn’t want to be.

“I never miss a holiday without being here to wish them a happy holiday myself,” Pierre says. “This is the essence of caring.”

Several dozen people are expected to dine at Oasis today. Some will come for the company, and when dinner is done they’ll return to loved ones. But without Oasis, some would spend today on the street. Some would be alone in their apartments.

Like most such organizations that serve the mentally ill, Oasis survives on a limited budget — $336,000 last year to staff the center and serve its consumers, or “members,” as they are called. Open every day all year, Oasis serves daily meals and offers a variety of rehabilitative, educational and related support programs.

“This is my family. They’re all beautiful. I love them all,” says Carolyn Schwartz, a woman in her 60s who has bipolar disorder. “They’d do anything for you.”

Like Thanksgiving, Christmas can be particularly difficult for people like Schwartz, whose diabetes and fibromyalgia further complicate her life — a fact that compels Pierre to be with the people he serves on these occasions, if only for part of the day.

“You can see the joy in their faces seeing me coming here to wish them happy holidays,” he says. “They know that I care. They see me as part of their family.”

TIGHT FINANCES have not hindered the center’s holiday spirit. Members have put up a Christmas tree and placed a wreath over the front door. They’ve painted a Christmas scene on the front window and wrapped the interior posts in red garland. Greeting cards and paper snowflakes decorate walls and shelves. They provide a festive contrast to the fluorescent lighting, linoleum floors and old furniture.

One recent morning, a half-dozen members assembled for the weekly meeting of “Double Trouble,” a support group for members who have been diagnosed with mental illness and are also recovering substance abusers. Mark Mathieu, 40, who has a dual diagnosis, was leading the group. The topic was Christmas — past, present and future.

Mathieu asked members to name a Christmas gift they’d wanted when they were children but never received. Some members mentioned certain toys. One woman said she’d wanted a wishing well. Another woman recalled her abusive and alcoholic father. “All I wanted was for him to come home before 11 o’clock so we could open our gifts,” she said. “We couldn’t open them until he came home from the bar.”

And what about New Year’s resolutions? asked Mathieu, who holds a master’s degree in social work from Rhode Island College.

“I really hope to lose weight, stay on my diabetic diet and calm down,” said Schwartz.

Mathieu’s own objective was to get back in shape. “My goal is to rejoin a health club so I can physically exercise every day, which is the No. 1 way to chase depression. I tend to get a little down.”

Mathieu closed the session by asking members to list on slips of paper their “coping mechanisms” for the holiday. “Sex fantasies and looking at the lights at La Salette Shrine,” someone wrote.

“You need more help that I can give you!” Mathieu joked. “We’ll talk!”

His own advice was to avoid alcohol and volunteer for some charitable cause. “If you’re out there helping others,” he said, “it’s you that’s really being blessed, not the other person.”

BORN IN HAITI, Pierre, 49, moved as a child with his family to Boston, where he graduated from Dorchester High School. At the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, he dated a woman who was mentally ill — with schizophrenia, as he later learned.

“I didn’t know what it was,” he says. “I come from a culture where mental illness is very, very badly misunderstood.”

The relationship ended but Pierre was inspired. He took a job at McLean Hospital, the esteemed psychiatric hospital in Belmont, Mass., and later worked helping to settle Haitian refugees in the Boston area. He went back to school, earning in 1995 a medical degree from Ross University School of Medicine, in Dominica. After four years as an associate director with the Urban League of Rhode Island, Pierre joined the staff of Mental Health Consumer Advocates of Rhode Island, as the Oasis agency is formally known (Oasis also runs a program in North Kingstown). Two years ago, he became executive director.

With his Ross University degree, Pierre hopes to become licensed to practice medicine in Rhode Island — most likely in psychiatry, he says. Meanwhile, he is hardly killing time.

“I am very, very interested in the mental health arena because I have seen too many people left behind and too many people forgotten and too many who have fallen through the cracks because no one really paid attention,” he says.

And while he undoubtedly could improve his economic circumstances by leaving Oasis, money is not his prime motivator.

“I would rather make a dime and be happy than make $100,000 and be unhappy,” he says. “When I go home, I want to make sure that my day was spent doing something constructive — something I could die and say, ‘I did well.’ ”

That, he maintains, is the essence of his work, and of Christmas. And that will be among his reflections today as he helps serve dinner to his second family.