Charities Report Drop in Toy Donations : Giving: Some agencies say contributions are down 50%. Fear of fraudulent solicitations gets much of the blame.

The donation of toys for needy children in Orange County has plummeted this year, with some organizations reporting a 50% drop in contributions, according to several local charities.

“People either don’t have the resources to chip in toys or they just don’t want to,” said Ellen Schneider, an office manager at the Feedback Foundation in Anaheim, a clearinghouse for toys donated to the Marine Corps Reserve’s Toys for Tots program.

Schneider and officials from other charitable organizations attributed the drop-off in donations to worries about fraud and disarray in charitable organizations.

Maureen Williams, chairperson of Charities for Truth in Giving, a consortium of five children’s charities in Orange County, said the continuing problem of fraud has made many prospective givers so wary of charitable-solicitation efforts that they simply don’t give at all.

“A lot of people have heard about a lot of charitable fraud, and they don’t give because they just don’t know who to trust,” Williams said.

The scams start with “boiler-room” operators who set up banks of phones and instruct solicitors to fraudulently identify themselves as representatives of a legitimate charity, Williams said. The callers almost always ask for cash contributions, which legitimate charities almost never do. The solicitors will often say that they need the cash to buy toys or clothing or tickets to sporting events for needy children, she said.

“It’s a major issue in Orange County,” Williams said. “According to the district attorney’s office, $9 million a year is given to fraudulent charities in Orange County.”

One recent scam was perpetrated by solicitors based in Orange and Los Angeles counties, who telephoned homes asking for cash in the name of the Marine’s annual Toys for Tots program, which distributes about 7.5 million gifts nationwide.

“An investigation found that it was an intricate organization, doing about $70,000 a day in donations,” said Marine Staff Sgt. Lionel Neder, a coordinator of Toys for Tots at the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station. “Most of the people (who contributed) thought it was going to be coming into the program.”

Neder said the scam was exposed and operators in Pasadena and Anaheim were arrested. Police investigators working on the cases were not available for comment Friday.

Neder said the scheme left some people so wary that the El Toro branch of Toys for Tots has collected only about 30,000 toys for this year--half of its goal.

At the Feedback Foundation, which collects the toys from the Marines and passes them on to county charities for distribution, Schneider said what few toys there are have been spread thin.

“I think everybody that’s requested toys this year is getting them, provided they did so (in a timely manner), but they’re only getting a certain percentage of them, maybe 50% to 80% of what they’ve requested,” Schneider said. “We’ve tried to spread it out among everybody.”

Schneider also said that communications problems among the county’s charities was another cause for the drop-off in contributions.

“I still have no idea about the organization, and I don’t have a set guideline of rules I’m supposed to follow,” said Schneider, who started running Toys for Tots at the foundation last year. “I call them and ask if there’s a central headquarters, and they know as much as I do. Nobody seems to know whom to contact.”

Neder admitted that there has been some confusion about the Toys for Tots program because “it’s all done on the reserve side of the Marine Corps. A lot of the numbers that people call are of active bases. A lot of the different units don’t know who it exactly is, so sometimes people will be chasing a few numbers.”

Community workers in Los Angeles also reported problems with the Toys for Tots program. While nearly 100,000 needy children there will receive toys, thousands of others will get nothing on Christmas, partly because of a decline in donations and disorganization in the program, the workers said.

Requests for toys have gone unanswered, longtime recipients have been put at the end of priority lists, and some organizations say they believe that they were simply forgotten in the confusion.

Gunnery Sgt. Charles Gaston of Los Angeles Toys for Tots said the program was thrown into disarray after the shutdown earlier this year of Donor Service, a nonprofit group that helped organizations apply for toys and screened applicants for the Marines. When the group closed, many organizations did not know where to go with questions, and the Marines found themselves ill-prepared to handle the screening process.

Had to Buy Toys

The Los Angeles International Airport Optimist Club was depending on Toys For Tots for a Christmas party at Orthopaedic Hospital last Saturday.

The group had been promised 300 toys, but when the time came, there was nothing for them. Club members scrambled on the day of the party to buy $1,500 worth of toys for the children, said Optimist Bly Schwierking.

“This is the first time in 30 years that I can remember not getting anything,” he said. “I have no idea what happened.”

But heads of charities in Orange County said the scams and the organizational problems at some charities should be no excuse for not donating toys for Christmas.

Wilhelm de Nijs, a retired psychologist who runs the Bright Light Center in Santa Ana, an organization that services “at-risk” children in poor neighborhoods, said the spirit of giving simply is not what it used to be.

“In the ‘60s and beginning of the ‘70s, many people felt like they were winners and would take care of the losers,” de Nijs said. “Now, everyone feels like they are victims, and no one gives. The answer generally is: ‘Why should I give? I have needs also.’ ”

Still, de Nijs, whose group received just 120 of the 200 toys it requested from Toys for Tots, said he made up the difference through the generosity of high school and college students.

“I really want to emphasize how great it is that young people are giving, not that people are giving less,” he said. “A new trend is coming up among the young people.”