Agency Emphasizes Help for Homeless Over Holiday Frills : Social services: Ventura’s only organization for those who live on the streets offers nourishment, showers, support and companionship.

Christmas may be around the corner, but at Project Understanding in Ventura you’d never know. There are no trees or decorations, and no Christmas carols to be sung.

With resources stretched the thinnest when they are needed the most, the biggest Christmas presents that Ventura’s only agency for the homeless can offer are a shower, a cup of coffee, maybe some takeout food and, most of all, support and companionship.

“When it gets cold, we definitely have more people here, and they’re here earlier, waiting to get inside,” said Carol Ward, a Project Understanding staff member. “With more people here, it’s harder to meet people’s needs.”

So there will be no Christmas celebration at Project Understanding, and the street people who feed, clothe and bathe themselves there will be invited to attend celebrations elsewhere.

“Certainly, the homeless are aware that Christmas is coming and it’s hard on them,” said Rick Pearson, the agency’s director. “But survival needs today are so demanding that planning for Christmas is impossible. Just to continue to do what we do all year is as much as we can manage.”

Although there might not be enough money to celebrate, the doors will remain open Christmas, as they have all year, in the old building of faded white walls that used to be a fire station, and is now home to Ventura’s homeless.

At Project Understanding, thousands have been helped since the agency opened in 1977. Financed by a coalition of churches, with help from the city and other groups, Project Understanding has served more than 120,000 meals since starting a meal program four years ago.

The organization has also run a winter shelter for a dozen homeless families and helped thousands of others with money, counseling, job referrals and school tutoring.

At Christmas time, however, the agency’s shortcomings are more evident than its successes. For every person that gets help, scores of others are turned away because of the agency’s limited resources.

“Every month, we help about 12 or 13 families who are trying to stay off the streets,” said Pearson, 40, a Methodist minister with a long, red beard and an easy, gentle smile.

“But for everyone we help,” he added, “we have to turn five or six away.”

In the lobby one recent morning, a dozen street people sat in dead silence, with trash bags full of rags at their feet. They sipped hot coffee and devoured English muffins, saying nothing.

Nearby, in the steamy bathrooms, men put on the fresh clothes that they had just pulled out of the always busy washing machines. Bathed and clothed, they reappeared in the lobby, smiling.

At the pantry in the back room, volunteers Denise Abdun-Nur McBreen and Carlton Nebreklievski chatted while they filled hundreds of plastic bags with two scoops of oatmeal each.

Every day they hand out a week’s food supply to a long line of people. Each client gets no more than four packages in one year.

“They have so much dignity,” Nebreklievski said. “Did you know one of them came to my liquor store last month begging for money and when he recognized me he was so embarrassed he never came back again?”

For all their efforts, Pearson said, Project Understanding can’t even make a dent in the county’s homeless population, estimated at 4,000 to 6,000.

Powerless to win the war, the agency’s volunteers cherish their small victories. Rudy Alarcon made his way that morning to Project Understanding--not unlike dozens of other homeless, hungry and poor--and got a small piece of what he needed.

On this particular morning, the 46-year-old Alarcon--unemployed, and homeless for more than 20 years--was seeking neither food, shelter or money. All he was seeking was a little understanding.

Alarcon has been living in his car lately, a beat-up blue Datsun loaded with all the little gadgets and mementoes that Alarcon picked up along the way: there are three mini-fans hanging atop the windshield; a dozen buttons with psychedelic designs pinned to the doors and visors, miniature cars on the dashboard, stickers on the roof and a small tape recorder on the steering wheel.

But for all the souvenirs he carried in his car, Alarcon said his life was empty.

“What’s happening? Life is what’s happening, brother,” he told social worker Bob Costello. The two men sucked on cigarettes as they leaned against a garbage dumpster near the agency’s back door.

“I’m just learning to live, but it’s kind of hard,” he continued, encouraged by Costello’s friendly nod. “Some of us have to drink or take drugs to get through it, or steal or cheat--anything to get through the moment. We’re not afraid to die, we’re afraid to live.”

For Costello, who has been helping the homeless for years, Alarcon’s confession was as unusual as it was encouraging.

“It was a real pleasure,” he said afterward. “A lot of them are too much into denial and frustration to take that kind of look at themselves. They don’t understand why they can’t get back to where they once were.”