Brother, Can You Spare a Coupon? : Skid Row’s Weingart Center Cooks Up a Novel Way of Assisting Hungry People of the Streets.

Maxene Johnston had come downtown for dinner and a movie when the panhandler approached her, begging for money.

“I felt assaulted, insulted,” she recalled. “I thought, ‘This makes me feel uncomfortable.’ ”

As president of the Weingart Center Assn. and doyenne of the private, nonprofit group’s 600-bed service facility at 6th and San Pedro streets, Johnston is surrounded daily by poor people, and she understands their problems.

But as a well-dressed, successful businesswoman, she also understands from personal experience what she calls the “assault on the conscience” that panhandlers pose for the public.

Johnston mulled that discomfort along with other problems she was brainstorming--how to feed hungry street people and get them to Weingart Center for job counseling or health care, and what to do about a $200,000 annual deficit in the center’s food program.

“Then I just sort of woke up one morning and said ‘Food coupons!’ ” she said this week in her 12th-floor office overlooking Skid Row.

Selling coupons to businesses for distribution to their employees, she thought, could accomplish three things:

- Help the public (the employees) feel good by handing out a free meal instead of money, which a panhandler might use for drugs or alcohol.

- Help the panhandler by assuring him a free nutritious meal, and motivating him to visit the center where additional help is available.

- Help the Center Cafe break even.

So, she launched a pilot program last spring, asking center board members to distribute coupons through their downtown businesses or law firms.

When the results were tallied at the end of June, 1,390 of the $2.50 coupons had been sold to businesses or individuals, and 555 had been redeemed for breakfast, lunch or dinner in the spiffy Center Cafe.

Johnston knew she had a winner when she offered some change to a panhandler outside the Ketcham YMCA atop Bunker Hill one day and was asked by the disappointed beggar: “Don’t you have one of them Weingart coupons?” Center food service director Jane F. Sieck found that the coupons brought new faces to the food lines, which could eventually lower production costs. She said each complete meal, priced at $2.50 to walk-in customers, costs about $3 to produce. Now serving 300 to 700 meals a day, Sieck said the cafe could easily serve 1,000 with the same labor force, reducing the per-meal cost.

Because even the unredeemed coupons were paid for, the coupon project helped defray the deficit for meals actually served.

And, her worst fear was allayed when the coupons were redeemed only a few at a time.

“It turned out very well,” she said, “because they didn’t all come in the next day and say, ‘Let’s have lunch!’ ”

Now Johnston and her board are brainstorming again about launching a full-scale coupon program, or, as she puts it, “How to get the word out and the money in.”

She is ready to tailor the program to any group’s wishes.

The downtown office of the Federal Savings & Loan Insurance Corp. employees said they wanted to help, but did not particularly want to hand out coupons to panhandlers. So she worked out a plan in which the employees will raise $30,000 to buy food coupons and give them to Para Los Ninos, a Skid Row service agency, for distribution to needy children and families.

During the pilot program, some businesses paid for the coupons but chose to donate them back to Weingart Center. Because most of the center’s programs provide beds and counseling but no food, Johnston put the coupons to good use.

A typical recipient was Pascale Summers, 20, a Parisian who had moved to New York to start school, then married an American and came to California with him. Homeless and penniless, the couple obtained beds at Weingart Center but still needed food.

“I was looking for a job, and my stomach was growling,” said Summers, who has subsequently found work. “I was ashamed.”

A man waiting for counseling at the center, who did not give his name, looked with interest at a sample coupon Johnston showed him.

“The majority would use them,” he said. “Some would sell them to somebody else who would use them to come down here and eat. It may go through about five people, but people would eat with it.”

Sieck said a few of the coupons received had been tattered, indicating that they may have gone through several hands. But she believes that most of the people fed were the original coupon recipients.

Those handing out the coupons seemed even more enthusiastic than the recipients.

Center general counsel Timothy F. Ryan said his law firm, McLaughlin & Irvin, bought coupons and distributed them to employees--particularly females--to hand out near their office at 8th Street and Grand Avenue.

“A lot of our female staff are intimidated by the panhandlers,” Ryan said, “and we thought this was a way we could help them.”

Both individuals and companies in the pilot program agreed that they would buy more coupons, although Ryan suggested that companies could better afford the cost.

“The $2.50 might be a lot for an individual who would ordinarily give a panhandler a quarter,” he said. “But for a firm, this is a nice way to make a contribution.”

Judith L. Sweeney, an associate with the financial management firm McKinsey & Co. at 400 S. Hope St. on Bunker Hill, bought 20 of the coupons and handed them out at lunch or dinner hour near her office over a couple of weeks.

“Some were receptive,” she said, describing the panhandlers’ reaction. “When I said the coupon was good for a free meal, they were very, very excited and they said, ‘Really?’

“Others were clearly looking for money,” Sweeney said. “They just looked disgruntled. And a couple of people did refuse to take them. They just said no.”

Sweeney said she occasionally gives panhandlers food but never hands out money.

“I have a firm belief that the best way to deal with the homeless in Los Angeles is through institutions,” she said. “By handing out the coupons, you are supporting the institutions, and not the habits of the homeless that I might not approve of, like drinking and drugs.”

“Some people don’t want to give out cash,” said her colleague, Rick Beckett, who found 19 buyers among the 20 people he solicited in their office. “But most people want to do something. And this is a good alternative.”

Center board member Dean Weiner, a partner in the law firm O’Melveny & Myers on Bunker Hill, said he never gives panhandlers money but he felt good handing out coupons.

“I am a bit of a soft touch and don’t just like walking away from someone without giving him anything,” he said.

“The conventional wisdom is that it is not a good idea to give cash to a panhandler because it doesn’t . . . help him get off the street. But the coupon directs him to a place where the goal is to help him reach self-sufficiency one way or the other.”