Private Sector Helps Make Orangewood Shelter a Home With Good Foundation

‘What happened was that they got hooked with these children and their problems.’

William G. Steiner, foundation director

The year was 1979. Orange County’s chronically overcrowded emergency shelter for battered and abused children again was bursting at the seams. Children slept in hallways, porches--anywhere a mattress could be placed.

The campus school at the 68-bed Albert Sitton Home in Orange was forced into half-day sessions to accommodate growing numbers of children. Running out of hot water was a frequent problem.

Faced with criticism from the county grand jury, the county’s Juvenile Justice Commission, lawsuits and judicial orders to alleviate the problem, the Board of Supervisors approved temporary measures and launched studies. But by July, 1980, supervisors concluded that the county could never afford a solution to the dilemma and instead appealed to influential corporate leaders, builders and private individuals.

Enter Orangewood, a nonprofit corporation formed solely to raise money for a new children’s shelter of the same name. The plan was for the coalition of business and community leaders to tap private sources for about $6.4 million of the $8 million needed for the new shelter, oversee its construction, then disband when the goal was reached.

But when the 166-bed Orangewood Children’s Home was completed in November, 1985--hailed at the time by President Reagan as the most successful private-public venture in the nation--the coalition did not retreat. Today, the corporate entity that evolved into the Orangewood Foundation is flourishing and raising still more money to help abused children.

“What happened was that they got hooked with these children and their problems, and they then realized that there was more to do with solving the problem of child abuse than simply building the Orangewood Children’s Home,” said William G. Steiner, former Orangewood director and now the foundation’s executive director.

In the past two years, the foundation has raised more than $1.2 million. It has retired the last of the private debt for the construction of Orangewood, next door to the old Sitton Home. It has begun a variety of programs aimed at improving services for children and has provided the little extras that make Orangewood look more like a quiet campus--complete with a gymnasium and well-kept cottages--than an institutional shelter.

Its success has inspired similar efforts in three other California counties. And at home, the foundation continues to attract the donations and efforts of a widening circle of community leaders.

What inspires such commitment?

For Elizabeth Carr Tierney, an Orange County activist for the arts and charitable organizations, it was knowing firsthand the agony of finding suitable environments for abused and neglected children.

In her hometown of Bakersfield, where Tierney was a schoolteacher and later a social worker, it was her duty to place such children in unfamiliar homes and shelters.

Shelters Were Terrible

“Most of the shelters we had back then were terrible,” said Tierney, who now is one of 19 prominent Orange County citizens on the foundation’s board. “I had to take those children to places I didn’t want to take them.

“I used to go home and just cry.”

The initial core group of the foundation, mostly influential developers, was headed by William Lyon and Kathryn G. Thompson. Both have continued with the foundation and now serve as chairman and vice chairman, respectively.

Lyon himself contributed the first $1 million for the construction of Orangewood in the form of a challenge grant.

For Lyon, whose company is the 14th largest home builder in the country, the decision to help form the foundation after Orangewood was completed was a natural extension of the group’s accomplishment.

“The building of the home was a great source of pride for all of us,” Lyon said. “The story may never end . . . meeting the needs of abused children. We felt we had an oversight responsibility to Orangewood. And we had to do what we could to raise the consciousness of this whole issue in this community.”

From the beginning, the foundation and its work have been unique. Steiner, who worked 25 years in children’s services before assuming the directorship of the foundation in 1986, said the “private-public partnership” was the first of its kind in the state, perhaps the nation.

“I travel all over the country and I have never seen anything like this,” he said.

Because of the success in constructing the home with mostly private money, groups in Santa Clara, Ventura and San Diego counties are working to establish new shelters for children with private funds, said Steiner, who has served as consultant for the groups.

“Santa Clara and Ventura are well under way, and San Diego County is conducting a feasibility study. All three are using the Orangewood model,” he said.

Since the foundation was officially established in April, 1986, the organization has focused on child abuse prevention programs, recruitment and training of foster parents, administration of a Children’s Trust Fund and lobbying for public policies to help abused children.

The foundation also has awarded about a dozen grants to other nonprofit organizations working with abused and neglected children in the county.

One benefactor of the foundation has been the Adam Walsh Child Resource Center in Orange, a private group that searches for missing children and provides counseling services for crime victims.

“We have received about $20,000 from the Orangewood Foundation for (children’s) safety education programs,” said center director Susan Davidson. “We go to them often for resources. But even when they turn us down, we are not unhappy, because we know it is going to another group helping kids.”

Barbara Labitzke, the county’s foster care facilitator, said the foundation’s financial and moral support have been key in a more than 20% increase in private, licensed foster care homes in Orange County in the past two years.

Labitzke said the county now counts on 620 foster parents, an increase of 120 from two years ago. Money from the foundation, she said, has enabled her to publicize the need for foster parents and recruit them more vigorously.

“The most important thing they did, after building Orangewood, was heighten the awareness of child abuse, the shortage of foster parents and the need for the community to help,” she said. “That energy would have dissipated if the foundation had not continued after Orangewood was completed.”

Harvey Englander, who runs his own political consulting agency, recently has become a contributor to the foundation. He said the prominence of its members gives the foundation instant credibility and the ability to raise funds.

“They are very pleasant to deal with. They almost shyly ask for contributions, and that is a welcome relief from some other organizations,” Englander said. “There are a number of prominent people in the organization, but it has gone beyond the development community.”

Although the foundation has strong lobbying power, Englander said the foundation has kept its focus on helping those children who have become wards of the county.

“What we need is more help for children who are abused, and we don’t get that out of laws,” he said. “That’s where the Orangewood Foundation helps tremendously.”

The Children’s Trust Fund perhaps has become perhaps the foundation’s brightest achievement. In the past two years, about 70 former abused children have been helped with grants for college and other necessities they cannot afford.

At 18, a child is no longer a ward of the county. But many have no family to turn to for financial help and must survive on their own. The fund was created especially to help those no longer eligible for public assistance.

Tierney, who sits on the four-member subcommittee that makes the grant recommendations to the full board, said the Children’s Trust Fund is necessary to “assist kids who are out of the system. There is absolutely no public resource for them. We can’t turn the faucet off for them.”

Still, the group’s top priority remains the Orangewood Children’s Home.

The county provides most of the shelter’s $5.1 million annual budget, but all the amenities are provided by the foundation and from other private donations.

For Orangewood director Robert B. Theemling, the foundation’s contributions “have made this place not look like a shelter, an orphanage. Before we had the foundation, to get a color TV took an act of God.”

More important, Theemling said, the foundation can achieve swift results when undertaking any project to help the home.

“The fact of who they are, well, it’s hard to argue with that kind of influence,” he said. “But they are never heavy-handed. They always come across as advocates for the children. Everyone wins in this deal, and the county knows that.”

Gene Howard, the county’s director of Children’s Services, agreed.

“The foundation is a vital part of our service system,” he said. “They are filling in the gaps in service. Without them, a lot of kids would not be getting what they need.”

But despite the private-public partnership and the foundation’s success the past two years, the problems of child abuse are still great in Orange County.

There remains a shortage of qualified foster care homes. All private group homes in the county are filled to capacity. Even Orangewood is usually filled beyond its 166-bed capacity. About 190 is the usual number of children residing at the shelter, but as many as 207 children were counted one recent night, Theemling said.

But Theemling said the crowded conditions are more a direct result of the county’s population increase than any other factor. He said a recent county study showed an average of 14 more children need the services of Orangewood each year simply because more people are now living in Orange County.

“And many of the kids are staying here (at the shelter) longer, and that hurts. But we can always find the space for them somehow,” Theemling said.

Recently, however, the Board of Supervisors approved a proposal to allow Orangewood to enter into agreements with private facilities for additional space when the home is full. Spring and the Christmas season are the periods when the home is filled beyond capacity, Theemling said.

Steiner said that despite the always-present scramble to house neglected or abandoned children, the child abuse situation has improved significantly in the past two years.

‘Turned the Tide’

“We have turned the tide in protecting children. Just the decline in child deaths is one indicator,” he said, adding that only five children died at the hands of abuse last year in Orange County. San Diego County, with about the same population, recorded 17 such deaths, officials said.

“It’s still five too many. But something is going right, and we are providing better protection for these kids,” Steiner said. “It’s a lifelong healing process (for abused children).”

But it is one that “starts to happen at Orangewood,” he said.

Presiding Juvenile Court Judge Betty Lou Lamoreaux, who often decides whether to remove children from abusive home environments, agreed that the foundation’s efforts have helped bring public attention to a generations-old problem.

“Child abuse is an overwhelming problem, and the fact that they are out there willing to help is encouraging,” Lamoreaux said. “It makes (the community) aware of the needs we have and the needs we are going to have in the future.”