Giving Where It Helps
It’s hard to believe it’s been five years since the Great Recession officially ended—according to economists. Yes, unemployment is finally back to pre-2008 levels, and Wall Street is hitting record highs. But a poll conducted by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal in August found that 50 percent of Americans don’t believe the economy is getting better, and almost as many believe the U.S. is still in a recession.
For the neediest in Santa Cruz County, there has been no recovery—in fact, the nonprofits that serve them say it’s been getting worse every year since the recession for the most desperate cases of homelessness and hunger.
Those are exactly the people that the Packard Foundation wants to reach by participating in the Good Times Holiday Giving campaign. Their criteria complements our desire to support local nonprofits providing basic needs—not only in Santa Cruz proper, but also in the underserved areas of the county. Our partnership with Community Foundation Santa Cruz County was instrumental in choosing the five nonprofits we’re focusing our campaign on this year.
Community Action Board of Santa Cruz County maintains a number of programs, and is one of the only nonprofits to serve the northernmost area of the county; Mountain Community Resources provides to the chronically underserved in San Lorenzo Valley and Scotts Valley; Pajaro Valley Loaves and Fishes feeds 14 percent of the population of Watsonville; Grey Bears delivers food to elderly residents around the county; and the Homeless Services Center is at the center of one of the most-talked-about social issues in downtown Santa Cruz.
For the next month, Nov. 26 – Dec. 26, we’re asking you to help out those who do so much to help our community, by donating to one or more of these five nonprofits. Since 1996, GT readers have raised nearly $1 million for more than 60 local nonprofits, and we hope this will be the Good Times Holiday Giving’s biggest year yet. Read the profiles our staff has written about these five groups, and go to their websites to donate, or find a link on SantaCruz.com. Your donations will be supplemented by the Packard Foundation up to $30,000.
Let’s make this a happy holiday for everyone in Santa Cruz County. PHOTO: Teens with Davenport Resource Service Center’s North Coast Teen Center, at UCSC.
COMMUNITY ACTION BOARD
Maria Elena De La Garza is her own success story. Born and raised in Watsonville, her first job was through the Community Action Board (CAB) of Santa Cruz County, watching over the children of migrant workers when she was 16. Today, she’s come full circle as the anti-poverty agency’s executive director.
It isn’t a job that allows a lot of downtime. Speaking on the phone from Sacramento where she’s fighting for CAB financing, De La Garza explains why the position, which she’s held for just over a year, is so important to her; “When my father died, my mother didn’t know how to drive and didn’t know how to speak English. She was a young widow and CAB had a class to teach women how to drive, in Spanish,” she says.
Since it began in 1964, CAB has been offering programs like this to help combat the causes of poverty, helping people attain the skills, knowledge and motivation they need to live a dignified life. CAB’s programs cover all areas of need: the Davenport Resource Service Center, for instance, provides meals, youth tutoring, teen programs and seasonal events like an upcoming coat drive.
“Our mission is to help people who live in poverty towards the path of self sufficiency,” says De La Garza.
According to their website, the six CAB programs assist more than 9,000 low-income residents with services and resources, and more than 7,000 with referrals and information.
Funding comes from all over: a community services block grant, federal money through the state, foundations and donation support.
When asked if it’s enough, De La Garza laughs. “The need in our community is huge, and we’re always trying to secure funding to be able to provide,” she says, sounding surprisingly unfazed. “Our programs are effective and our programs are very, very lean and some are very bare bones. But the services are there.
“For me to be here now as the executive director means so much to me because I see the stories—I see the folks waiting to see our staff and they’re there first thing in the morning. They come with their questions and their paperwork, and they need help,” she says.
When Rachael Ellis’ car broke down in 2012, she couldn’t afford the repair. CAB affiliate CalWorks, a state welfare program that serves families lacking parental support or employment, gave her an emergency payment so that she could get back on her feet.
“That was my only transportation for me and my children to get to work, to get to school,” Ellis says, “and they got me the check in the same day to fix my car. I wouldn’t have been able to do that on my own.”
CalWorks also helped her with the deposit on the apartment she currently lives in. It’s not uncommon to see those who have been helped by CAB to reciprocate by helping others, and Ellis is a prime example. The single mother applied for a position at CAB so that one day she could do the same for someone else, and she is now vice chair for Watsonville’s low income sector of the CAB board of directors.
“CAB gives people a start; it gives them a chance to be successful in life and it breaks down the barriers that people come across all the time—‘I can’t pay my water bill, I can’t pay my electricity, I’m having my electricity shut off—basic necessities that people need to live, to survive,” says Ellis.
CAB systematically targets specific areas of importance to ensure basic necessities for the underserved in Santa Cruz County: Before someone faces the prospect of losing their home, the Shelter Project works with landlords to prevent evictions and provides financial aid.
“It’s cheaper and easier to keep someone in their home than it is to try to get them back into a home,” says De La Garza.
While Shelter Project works to keep people in their homes, CAB has a program that makes sure they can stay in them legally without fearing possible deportation, and the Santa Cruz Immigration Project offers free immigration services to those working toward naturalization.
Another of their programs, Alcance, pushes people to thrive by working with underserved adults and youth within the justice program.
“We teach what it is to look for a job and keep a job, build leadership, talk about career goals and educational goals,” says De La Garza. “We also offer subsidized training for our clients; so, for example, if there’s a business in town that wants to hire a receptionist, they could talk to us, we could send over some people to interview and if there’s a match there’s a subsidy for the business to train that client.”
Similarly, CAB’s Day Worker Center in Santa Cruz also facilitates connections between businesses and possible employees.
“We have over 400 day workers registered, and I think about 500 employers registered—some of them home owners—that call us when they need someone to do their landscaping or paint or someone to move their student into UCSC,” says De La Garza. The center pairs workers with jobs in addition to offering English tutoring and teaching basic job skills.
For people like Ellis, CAB has given them hope.
“I have two jobs and Christmas is coming up,” says Ellis. “I’m looking at the barriers: am I going to be able to get what my kids need and what they want? Maybe I’m not able to get everything that they want but I’m able to get them what they need.” AH. CAB Executive Director, MariaElena De La Garza, at a Cinco de Mayo event at the Davenport Resource Service Center. PHOTO: Mockingbird Photography
GREY BEARS
Jennetta Zulim shows up to Grey Bears on Chanticleer Avenue every Friday in her white GMC Acadia to load up on bags of food. Each bag has seven kinds of produce and one nonperishable staple, like beans, rice, or lentils. Then, Zulim, a medical coder for Sutter Health, spends her morning driving around Santa Cruz County, delivering the food to elderly Grey Bears members who are not well enough to pick up the food themselves.
“You get really well-acquainted with these people, and they wait to see you each week,” she says. “In fact, I have a man who stands outside and waits for me every time. It’s really sweet. He lives from Friday to Friday, he said, so he can see me.”
He isn’t the only one living for Fridays. Zulim does too.
“Different people along the route will say really nice things: ‘God bless you,’ and ‘Thank you for all you do.’ ‘You’re going to heaven,’” Zulim explains. “I really look forward to Fridays.”
Tim Bratton, Grey Bears director, says many drivers connect with their recipients in that way.
“It’s life-changing when you start doing it. They make this connection,” Bratton says. “It’s not just about the food. It’s about a personal relationship with each of their recipients. It’s a reciprocal kind of thing.”
Through its Brown Bag program, Grey Bears distributes about 3,300 bags of food each week, 48 weeks a year, and it costs only $20 for seniors to sign up as members.
“I can tell you, ‘We do this much food, we do it this often, we do this much tonnage,’ but the truth is it’s about human relations,” Bratton adds.
When Zulim first began looking for places to volunteer years ago, she chose Grey Bears, partly because of the scope of what the organization does.
She had already been taking her recycling to the organization for years. In addition to the normal cardboard and glass drop-offs, Grey Bears’ extensive recycling program takes appliances—even ones that don’t work—for free, items that the landfill would charge to receive. Most are sold for parts, but skilled volunteers repair many of the broken televisions that come in and sell them in their thrift store. Grey Bears also composts almost 150 tons of waste—Brown Bag food that goes bad before it can be distributed—each year.
It sounds like a wide-reaching mission, but Bratton says pretty much everything Grey Bears does falls under “resource conservation.” Volunteers get excess food from local grocery stores for nominal fees, or they glean produce from local fields, after they’ve been picked. On the recycling end, workers also repurpose many of the materials they can’t fix and don’t recycle—often turning scraps of glass into art.
Grey Bears makes good use of volunteers, too, many of them retirees with spare time looking to put their experience to good use. Even that, Bratton says, falls under the conservation management umbrella.
“We repurpose retirees into volunteers. It’s resource management. It’s human resource management,” Bratton says. “It’s people giving back after they’ve had a great life, or they have some time, and they want to do something for their community.”
Grey Bears is currently raising money to continue its Brown Bag program, which grows more expensive as the price of food goes up. In addition to that, the nonprofit is trying to figure out how to replace the 2,700-square-foot storage facility that burned down over the summer, putting a squeeze on the already-crowded facility. Unfortunately, there’s no timeline for the project.
“I would like it to be done yesterday,” Bratton says of plans to rebuild, “but it’s going to take a little while, because we’ve got to raise some money.” JP. PHOTO: Food distributions for the elderly are still a focus of Grey Bears’ mission.
HOMELESS SERVICES CENTER
Carolina Rocha Perez, 36, sits in the living room of the three-room flat she rents with her family on Pearl Street in Santa Cruz. Between smothering her 3-month-old grandson’s fuzzy head with kisses, she tells me about her family’s harrowing two-year journey through homelessness over a year ago, followed by several more months earlier this year.
“My kids really wanted to stay in school in Santa Cruz and graduate,” says Perez. “I couldn’t let them down.” So, staying with her sister in Berkeley, her family commuted to Santa Cruz every day for the entire school year of 2011, dropping her husband off at work in Pescadero on the way. “We were in the car for about five hours a day. We’d leave the house at about 5 a.m. to get the kids to school by 7:30 a.m. That was really hard. But we were determined. I mean, this was their life, this is what they wanted to do.” Her four teenaged kids stayed in school—the eldest graduating high school at the end of those nine months commuting.
In June of 2013, Perez and her family found themselves homeless again, after an unpaid car registration fee set off a downward financial spiral that ended in eviction. For six months, they paid $416.67 a week for a room in the cheapest hotel in the county.
With no refrigerator or microwave, the family lived on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and food that could be kept in a cooler—a feat that required changing the ice three times each day. After Perez was hospitalized for a severe bone infection, she called the Homeless Services Center (HSC), and, to her surprise, her family was admitted to HSC’s Rebele Family Shelter, just in time for Christmas of 2014. “The fact that we could have hot meals every day was really nice, and our own space, because we had a one-bedroom apartment there at the shelter, with our own bathroom.”
On a rainy evening, the grounds of HSC are brimming with people trying to stay dry while waiting in line for a hot meal. Aside from their Daytime Essential Services Center, which offers low-cost laundry, hygiene services, and hot meals, HSC also operates the Paul Lee Loft—50 beds for men and women, a 100-bed Winter Shelter (just opened on Nov. 15 and open through the cold months), a 40-bed Page Smith Community House, and a Recuperative Care Center which provides 12 beds for homeless individuals who have been discharged from the hospital with nowhere to go.
But the HSC does not merely house and feed people; their 60 employees and numerous volunteers work to help facilitate reintegration back into society; helping participants apply for benefits, attain employment, save money and maintain sobriety.
“I think that case management is really the key to our success in helping people be able to sustain their housing, plus the support that we provide that allows, like with the 180 20/20 program, the 96 percent retention rate we’ve seen,” says Executive Director Jannan Thomas, who took over for Monica Martinez just over a month ago.
It takes 24 volunteers each day just to keep the HSC functioning, and donations are crucial to helping participants with everything from housing deposits to move-in kits—the basic essentials needed to go from street to home, including cooking and sleeping amenities. But the HSC’s goal to eliminate homelessness completely depends largely on the surrounding community as well.
“Not only [are they] looking under every nook and cranny for available homes, but they’re also developing relationships with landowners and homeowners to be able to change the hearts and minds of those who have some control over housing in our community, and it’s happening. We’re really developing some strong relationships,” says Director of Programs Shelley McKittrick of the housing navigator volunteer team—which is mostly made up of HSC board members.
Perez took full advantage of the services offered at HSC—from medical and dental services for her kids to grief support services when her 16-year-old daughter was tragically killed in a car accident during their time at the shelter. Her family was able to save up enough money to pay off their DMV debt and move into their current rental, where they’ll be able to sustain their stability.
“We’re safe, we’re OK,” says Perez. “And as long as we’re together, that’s all that matters.” MG. PHOTO: The Rocha Perez family in their new home. From left to right: Destinee, Carolina, Adrian, Leo Sr., Leo Jr., and the family dog, Spooky.
PAJARO VALLEY LOAVES AND FISHES
The inside of Pajaro Valley Loaves and Fishes’ headquarters is like some kind of optical illusion. Despite the fact that the group serves most of the food-assistance referrals made in Santa Cruz County, it is tucked away in a small Victorian on a Watsonville side street. The inside has been refurbished to make maximum use of every square inch. Volunteers work at desks pushed together in front of pantry shelves in one room, while others prepare meals in the kitchen nearby. The entirety of Loaves and Fishes’ paid staff—three people—sits in what is more or less a glorified hallway in between.
And yet, each and every weekday, without fail, the hungry in Santa Cruz County will line up on the sidewalk out front. In the morning, volunteers hand out bags of food staples and fresh produce to needy families, and at noon a nutritious lunch is served at the tables out back. They provide food for about 350 people on an average day.
Even Kristal Caballero, who started as executive director of PVLF just three months ago, hasn’t completely wrapped her mind around how the community has pulled together to make this happen.
“Despite our small size—you know, we’re in this tiny house, in this not-that-well-known area of Watsonville—we’re providing 80 percent of service to the [Second Harvest] food hotline, which is countywide,” says Caballero. “Our numbers show that we’re serving 14 percent of the population of Watsonville. It’s crazy—we’re small, but we’re big. We’re the largest emergency food provider in the entire county.”
Only 24 years old, but coming from a background in food aid that includes serving hot lunches to children in Ghana and doing nutritional education in Watsonville with the Food for Children program as an Americorps volunteer, Caballero has a clear vision for the future of the organization.
“We need to rethink food assistance, and food aid,” she says. “We put a lot of time and effort into serving quality, good-tasting food that’s nourishing in the full sense of the word. I think it’s important not just to provide emergency food, but healthy food that will help people thrive in the world.”
Though she’s new to the group, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, she’s inspired by the dedication and attention to detail she sees in Loaves and Fishes’ longtime volunteers, like kitchen manager Maria Gonzales.
“Maria is amazing,” Caballero says. “She’s been here 11 years, and she’ll stay until 4:30, 5, 5:30 just cutting vegetables. Anybody who uses a lot of vegetables knows that it takes a lot of time. You could just grill a sausage, and that’s enough. You could just make pasta, and that’s enough. But she steams and cleans and cuts them small, and sneaks them into these meals. She’ll steam Romanesco, green beans, all these kinds of cauliflower and chard and kale, and put it into the salads, and feed people this amazing organic, fresh produce—and they don’t even know!”
“A lot of people, they don’t have a home, and this is the only meal that they eat,” says Gonzales. “So I want to make it special.”
Even after a decade of preparing these meals, usually with a staff of five or so other volunteers, she says she doesn’t tire of the work.
“They eat everything,” Gonzales says of the people she makes meals for each day, “and they always say ‘thank you, Maria, that was very good.’ That keeps me going.”
“She’ll sit there and do it, just because that’s the standard she has created for herself, for the people that she serves,” says Caballero. “This is how she wants to touch their lives.”
That’s also the standard Caballero wants to build on, and she hopes to raise the group’s budget by 14 percent next year. Though originally affiliated with St. Patrick’s Church, PVLF is now a fully independent nonprofit; only 6 percent of their budget comes from government funding, while the other 94 percent comes from donations. The biggest item on the group’s wish list right now is a truck, to improve transportation of food as Caballero works on partnering with more local farms, and with area farmers markets.
“When you’re hungry, that’s all you can think about,” Caballero says. “And not only that, but we can all relate to being on a healthy diet versus being on an unhealthy diet. I know I can. It changes your whole life.” SP. PHOTO: Kitchen manager Maria Gonzalez at Pajaro Loaves and Fishes
MOUNTAIN COMMUNITY RESOURCES
Living in the remote areas of the San Lorenzo Valley brings with it a sense of peace and quiet not found in the surrounding cities. But living off the beaten path comes with its own set of hardships, especially for underserved families.
“Because of where we’re located in the valley, it’s really hard for people to know what the services are, let alone get access to them,” says Jennifer Anderson-Ochoa, program director of Mountain Community Resources.
When torrential rains fell for days in January 1982, the ensuing mudslides left 10 San Lorenzo Valley residents dead and many more homeless, and residents banded together to help each other through the tragedy. After the sky had cleared and the disaster had taken its toll, those living in the mountains decided they needed a resource center of their own for disaster relief. Soon after, Mountain Community Resources was formed.
“It grew out of that emergency response,” says Anderson-Ochoa. “That’s where we got our start, and then from there we realized there was a need to offer a place for people to find services and support.”
Mountain Community resources still offers emergency preparedness training as one of its core programs, but offers to help with virtually any problem a resident of the San Lorenzo Valley may have—from financial and food assistance, to help with unemployment benefits and health insurance.
“Whether someone is going to lose their house, or their heat is about to be turned off, we help people with issues using what we call advocacy,” says Anderson-Ochoa.
After her marriage of 15 years ended in divorce, SLV resident Sue Waters found herself struggling to raise her teenage son as a single mom. With nowhere else to turn, she consulted the help of an advocate at Mountain Community Resources. After six months of working closely together, Waters got her life back on track. She was so grateful for the help she received from Mountain Community Resources that soon after putting the pieces of her life back together she became the center’s receptionist.
“She is in a much different place than when we first met her, and that’s what it’s all about,” says Anderson-Ochoa.
Beyond its one-on-one advocacy programs, Mountain Community Resources offers parent education workshops and training, and holds a “Together in the Park” meeting each week, which gives parents a chance to connect while their children play.
Mountain Community Resources also has computers open for those without internet access, offers event spaces for community groups in need of a home, and is a food distributor for the Second Harvest Food Bank, among its many other services.
“We don’t turn anyone away,” says Anderson-Ochoa.
Although Mountain Community Resources is able to help residents with a variety of issues, there are still areas of need in the San Lorenzo Valley. Because some residents lack personal transportation and there are no urgent care facilities in the region, Anderson-Ochoa and her staff are seeking ways to help residents who are ill and can’t make it down to the city.
“Right now, I think the biggest pressing issue we see is a lack of low-cost medical facilities,” says Anderson-Ochoa. “We see that day after day where people are coming in and they are critically ill but they have no transportation to get to the doctors in the Central County. That’s a big frustration for us right now.”
Although no specific plan is in motion to help alleviate the lack of healthcare facilities in the San Lorenzo Valley at the moment, Anderson-Ochoa and her staff at Mountain Community Resources are working to come up with a solution.
“We are seeing the need, and are seeing the gap, and we just have to build a critical mass of people to make a shift,” she says.
Anderson-Ochoa appreciates all of the support Mountain Community Resources has received from the residents of the San Lorenzo Valley, and looks forward to giving back that support and empowering community members in any way she and the service center’s advocates are able.
“I believe that the community has the answers, they just sometimes need the resources or the small bit of assistance to actually help themselves,” she says. “That’s the philosophy at Mountain Community Resources: we’re here to help people help themselves.” AS. PHOTO: A volunteer sorts radishes and broccoli at Mountain Community Resources.
