Indians Get Help From ‘Family’ at Candelaria : Social service: The agency offers job counseling and emergency food and helps clients trace their family roots.

Delora Wright found out about the Candelaria American Indian Council the same way many other Indians in Ventura County have discovered the Oxnard social service agency.

Word of mouth.

Wright, who is part Cherokee, had no idea that special services are available for Indians in the county until she took her son for a checkup at a clinic and a nurse told her about Candelaria.

“I probably could find help closer but the atmosphere here is so much friendlier,” said Wright, who drives to Candelaria from her Fillmore home once a month to pick up food the agency offers to needy families. “They don’t make you feel like you crawled out from under a rock. They’re like family.”

Tucked away off the Ventura Freeway in a nondescript building on Wagon Wheel Road, the nonprofit agency offers job counseling, provides emergency food assistance and helps its clients trace their Indian family roots.

To many of the county’s estimated 12,000 to 14,000 Indians, it is a familiar source of help.

With an influx of Indians into Ventura County, the need for Candelaria’s services is burgeoning, agency officials said.

Although the 1980 Census put the county’s Indian population at about 6,000, Candelaria executive director Jessie M. Roybal said the figure was an underestimate. She estimated there may be well over twice that number now.

The influx over the past decade has included many Navajo from Arizona and Colorado, some of whom went to work for Egg City, an egg ranch in Moorpark, as well as Indians from many different tribes who have moved from Los Angeles, Roybal said.

Ventura County has gained a reputation as a hospitable place for Indians seeking work, in part because of a Candelaria program that encourages Ventura County employers to hire Indians, said Roybal, who is a Creek Indian.

“They have more recognition here,” Roybal said. “They don’t get lost as they do in Los Angeles County.”

But unemployment and poverty remain high among Indians. Nationwide, about 48% of all Indians are unemployed, and 28.2% live below the poverty level, according to a 1989 Department of the Interior report.

Candelaria, which receives state and federal funding as well as private donations, is expanding its services, and has recently added a part-time family counselor to its staff, a program for the elderly and a chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Candelaria has also become well known among military families at naval bases at Point Mugu and Port Hueneme.

For much of the 1980s, Candelaria helped run a program at Port Hueneme’s Naval Construction Battalion Center offering surplus government food, including cheese, butter and other staples, to military families who needed it, Roybal said.

The Fleet Reserve Assn. Branch 120 in Oxnard took over sponsorship of the program several years ago, Roybal said.

“When that cheese program first came out the military wouldn’t let them have it,” Roybal said. “We said, ‘If you’re not going to help your families, we’re going to get it for them.’ ” She said the military had a difficult time admitting some of their families were eligible for welfare benefits.

The program was organized by Matilda Ahearn, a Candelaria staff member whose husband was in the Navy. Ahearn, her husband and several other Naval wives voluntarily ran the program for the Fleet Reserve Assn. once a month on weekends in their own time, Ahearn said.

As a military wife, Ahearn said she recognized that there was a need for assistance among some of the lower-paid servicemen. “The thing was all the civilian people were getting it that were low income,” she said.

Mike Cofter, information and referral coordinator of the Construction Battalion Center’s Family Service Center, said the food giveaways were advertised in newsletters and papers at both naval bases. About 60% of the 7,500 military families--about 22,000 people in all, including dependents--were eligible for the food, he said.

“Some of them, especially in the lower pay rates, are a lot poorer than some people in town,” Cofter said.

But for the past four months, Ahearn said both she and her husband have been too ill to pick up the food from an Oxnard warehouse and taking it to Port Hueneme for distribution, so the program has been suspended.

But the need is still there for military families, Cofter said.

“We still have service members who qualify for food stamps,” Cofter said. “If it’s available, there’s always a need for it.”

Jewel Pedi, executive director of Food Share Inc., a food bank that provides goods to 153 nonprofit agencies across the county, including Candelaria, said no other group currently provides food to the military bases.

In addition to Ventura, Candelaria serves 12 other counties, including Santa Barbara, Kern, San Luis Obispo and Monterey. All but two of the group’s nearly 30 employees are Indian.

Candelaria deputy director Bruce Stenslie said the agency’s services “are targeted to those most in need,” or about one-third of the county’s Indian residents.

Although word of mouth is the way many Indians learn about the council, the group also advertises its services on television, in bus ads in Ventura County and at social gatherings like powwows, Roybal said.

“There’s so much need in the Indian community, but the Indian people won’t come out to get services,” Roybal said. She attributed their reluctance to seek help to a mistrust of government and a suspicion that they may be discriminated against.

“That’s what we’re trying to get through to them,” Roybal said. “To come out and get help.”

Wilfred Bia, the chairman of Candelaria’s board of directors, said the group needs more funds to expand its programs, particularly those offering educational skills for young people.

“They really need the help, especially the young ones,” Bia said. “They need skills and education.”

For Candelaria’s older clients the need is just as acute.

Genaro Ruby, 83, a Mission Indian who lives in Montalvo, first came to Candelaria 10 years ago. “Whatever little we get, it helps a little,” he said as he loaded groceries into his car. “Candelaria is a good thing to have in the community. We would do all right, but it would be hard to get by without it.”