Para Los Ninos stands by struggling families

Waif-like Violet Marroquin will turn 24 at the end of this month, but the well-spoken Los Angeles native, who lives with her three children and her brother, sister and mother in a tiny two-bedroom apartment she grew up in, is wise beyond her years.

She speaks of her ability to rely for help on her absent husband’s relatives, who live around the corner in Virgil Village, as “not nice, but convenient.” She constantly puts her children’s needs before her own, saying she frequently forgets the last time she showered. She ensures that her older daughter and son maintain perfect attendance in elementary school, cares for her baby and ailing grandmother, and studies for her GED at night.

To her twentysomething friends, who spend all week planning which clubs they will visit on the weekend, she has this to say: “If you guys were to live in my shoes for just one day, you wouldn’t make it.”

Still, for Marroquin and AnnMarie, 7, David, 5, and little Angel, 11 months, things were worse a year ago.

Marroquin’s husband was bringing home less and less money, and the couple were unable to pay rent on a nearby apartment. They argued often, prompting her mother to phone county social workers. After her husband threatened her, Marroquin called police, who found a gun in a closet and arrested him. He pleaded guilty to weapons possession and was sent to jail. She moved in with her mother and applied for welfare and food stamps.

But instead of threatening to take her children away, as she had feared, the county’s Department of Children and Family Services referred Marroquin to Para Los Ninos, a 28-year-old nonprofit that provides assistance to impoverished children and their families.

The organization, which serves 3,500 children a week at 28 sites in Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties, paired Marroquin with a caseworker, Jose Mendez, who visited her walk-up apartment to find out how he could help.

After talking with a pregnant Marroquin, Mendez tapped into a menu of 11 programs provided by Para Los Ninos and its partner organizations through its family services division. The 13-year-old division, created to help working-class families provide a stable home for their children so they can succeed in school, offers a range of services, including budgeting workshops, food and hotel vouchers, and substance abuse and domestic violence counseling.

Para Los Ninos is among a number of Southern California nonprofits supported by the Times’ annual Holiday Campaign, part of the Los Angeles Times Family Fund. The charity received $10,000 from the fund this year.

Marroquin took parenting classes from Para Los Ninos, talked to a counselor about her depression, and relied on food vouchers supplied by the nonprofit to help feed her children. Mendez also surprised the cash-strapped family with tickets to see the film “Wall-E” at Hollywood’s historic El Capitan Theatre. The caseworker referred Marroquin to programs through which she could finish her high school education, inspiring her to finally learn how to multiply, divide and do fractions.

“I didn’t have support from anyone,” said Marroquin, who now aspires to a career as a filmmaker. “He was really there when I needed him.”

Para Los Ninos’ 30-employee family services division relies on a fairly new model of social work, which is based on the belief that helping struggling families stay together is what’s best for their children, said Lisa Hirsch Marin, the division’s director. “Now dollars are being funneled toward prevention, when before it was intervention,” Marin said. “All of these issues are so linked to living in stress and poverty.”

Para Los Ninos has found that by giving parents immediate access to a variety of services in one place, and checking in with them over a period of months, the parents are less likely to repeat mistakes or reenter the county’s child welfare system. The family services are an outgrowth of the original nonprofit, which opened a small child-care center for children on skid row in 1980 and today operates a charter elementary and middle school as well as after-school programs.

But the nation’s worsening recession is taking a toll on the family services division, increasing the need for its services just as some of its funding sources are drying up. The state’s budget crisis, which led to cuts in some of the charity’s programs and threatens others, is pushing the group to look elsewhere for money.

“At this point, far more families require intensive, in-home case management and counseling than we have spaces available,” Marin wrote in a recent report. “This has resulted in providing families with a ‘light touch’ or basic needs on a one-time basis and referring them to other local agencies that are also impacted with high need that result in long waiting lists.”

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jennifer.oldham@latimes.com

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