Hit-and-Run Help : Skid Row Residents Get Gift Food but Some Doubt It Fills a Need

They come to Skid Row late at night and on Sunday afternoons, when things are quiet downtown and the homeless have the streets to themselves.

Within the downtown Skid Row area, a little-known and small group of private individuals work to fill in the gaps that shelters, welfare programs and rescue missions cannot always reach.

Working quickly, they pull over to a curb or into a vacant parking lot and begin handing out coffee, doughnuts, baked chicken, rice and beans--whatever food they were able to gather up that day. And within an hour, they are gone, leaving behind a few words of encouragement and a promise to return.

On Sunday, a group calling itself “People Helping People” celebrated its first anniversary of providing meals on Skid Row with a dinner for about 400 in a vacant parking lot at 4th and Los Angeles streets.

“People Helping People” is really only four individuals--Keith Hatcher, his brother, Tom, Tita Dominguez and Kathy Kanishiro--who solicit food and donations from anywhere they can in order to feed some of the city’s 30,000 homeless.

And Sunday evening, a long stream of quiet, orderly people waited patiently for food across the street from the Midnight Mission, where the Hatchers and Dominguez, assisted by members of their families, had set up an impromptu serving line.

Many greeted Keith and Tom Hatcher by name, exchanging handshakes and friendly slaps on the back. And around a fire of cardboard boxes, they ate and drank, a mixture of bag ladies, transvestites, old and young men.

Some of the five or six small groups that bring food to Skid Row in their cars are members of churches, such as “People Helping People,” whose members attend St. Benedict’s in Montebello. Others are simply individuals fueled by their own desire to help in some small way.

There is no doubt that they provide a well-intentioned service, but some workers on Skid Row question just how much they actually help. Food is simply not enough, they say.

“It’s a funny, strange phenomenon,” said Alice Callahan, director of Las Familias del Pueblo, a community center downtown that aids Skid Row families. “It’s not connected to anything else on the row. It’s done sort of oblivious to anything else.”

“It’s strange,” Callahan added, “because they come down and do their little hit-and-runs and leave. It may not be filling a need. There’s already adequate food on the row. It’s a strange use of resources.”

Callahan suggested that such services might better serve the homeless if they were integrated into existing programs or broadened in scope to provide longer-lasting benefits than a full stomach.

Her point is not lost on Keith Hatcher, a teacher at El Sereno Junior High School who began “People Helping People” a year ago when a similar group he was involved with split up. “Sometimes food isn’t important,” he said Sunday. “But we’re also ears to them, it’s that contact that they depend on that gives them hope.”

There was a different sort of gathering earlier Sunday, a few blocks from where “People Helping People” held its 5 p.m. dinner.

On the grounds of what was the old State Building, site of last year’s Tent City encampment of street people, the Homeless Organizing Team culminated its 19-day vigil staged to protest the county’s welfare requirements.

Specifically, HOT--a coalition of service organizations and street people--wanted an increase in the county’s $228-per-month relief payments and the abolishment of a 60-day penalty period imposed on welfare recipients who fail to comply with aid requirements.

The grounds at 1st and Spring streets had become home to about 75 street people during the vigil. A rally and press conference planned for Sunday, the day the group’s permit expired, was canceled after an unfounded rumor that barbecued ribs would be offered for lunch brought about 150 homeless people to the site.

“We didn’t want anyone to think that we had gathered these people for the rally under false pretenses,” said one group official.

Several of the homeless milling about said they would have no place to go when the grounds closed. “The shelters are always full,” said one man. “And now it’s raining.”

Observing the tents and cardboard boxes that had been assembled as makeshift homes during the vigil, Carl Graue, a member of HOT, shook his head at the plight of those who lived in them.

Providing a temporary place to sleep, albeit on the grounds of the State Building, “is great, but it’s not enough,” Graue said. “Giving them food, that’s good, too. But it’s just not enough.”