Agency Survives by Adjusting to Changing Needs : Social services: El Proyecto del Barrio is the oldest community-based drug treatment program serving the Valley’s minority communities.

Articulate and friendly, Vera Smith, 36, of Northridge would not seem to fit the profile of a woman whose six children were taken from her, who has served jail time for repeatedly stealing from supermarkets and is pregnant again.

She had never taken drugs until she was 30. But when Smith discovered cocaine, she said, she lost interest in almost everything else.

Even when she became pregnant with her sixth child, she continued using drugs. “I had to tell the dope dealers I wasn’t pregnant because a lot of them won’t sell you drugs if you’re pregnant,” she said.

Smith tried to ameliorate the effect of the drugs on the baby by drinking lots of water and eating lots of food. But when the baby was born, the drugs showed up in his system.

“The worst feeling was having him and having somebody come to the hospital and take my baby away,” she said.

Now the mother sits listening to a counselor, who is trying to make sure that the next baby is born clean. That may not solve all of Smith’s problems, but it will be one more small victory for an agency that once seemed unlikely to survive the Nixon Administration.

El Proyecto del Barrio began life as a self-help project established by former prison inmates who decided that it wasn’t enough to simply parole ex-drug users onto the streets where they picked up their habits.

Unfortunately, the Pacoima halfway house set up to help reform junkies became a gathering place for them instead.

The pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps program stumbled and fell flat on its face.

But 20 years later, El Proyecto del Barrio, which translates as the Neighborhood Project, is still in business. Gone is the halfway house, replaced by a $2.7-million drug treatment, health care, employment training and AIDS education program that will shortly move its offices into a four-story building in Panorama City.

Overcoming its troubled birth, El Proyecto has survived as the oldest community-based drug treatment program in the minority communities of the San Fernando Valley.

It has become such an institution that its 20th anniversary Friday was marked by a $75-a-plate black-tie dinner. Embossed invitations boasted a dinner committee that included Reps. Howard L. Berman (D-Panorama City) and Edward R. Roybal (D-Los Angeles), newly elected County Supervisor Gloria Molina, state Sen. Alan Robbins (D-Tarzana) and Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley.

“The test of this organization is that it’s been here, adjusted and accommodated to changing needs in the community,” said Fausto Capobianco, administrative assistant to Berman, a staunch supporter of the agency.

To reach this point, the organization has had to overcome not only its early problems but also outsiders who persist in thinking that the Valley is a “Leave It to Beaver” suburb free of urban ills.

“They don’t think we have problems,” Corinne Sanchez, El Proyecto’s feisty director, said of people in downtown Los Angeles.

The clientele is 70% Latino, 20% black and 100% poor.

El Proyecto receives money from contracts with county, state and federal governments to provide a range of medical and counseling services, including outreach to IV drug users in danger of contracting AIDS.

The clinic, with two full-time and two part-time physicians on its staff, fills an important and unique niche, according to the agency.

In the past, addicts were men who spent their paychecks on getting high and left their wives at home alone to raise the children. Now the agency is treating such people as Arlene Castillo, 28, a bright-eyed woman with high cheekbones who comes in twice a week for counseling.

“I want a normal life,” Castillo said. “I want my kids back.”

Castillo’s three children were taken from her by the county because of her drug use. She is seven months pregnant and, without the clinic, her prospects would not be very good. Many private doctors are reluctant to treat people like her for fear of lawsuits should the baby be born with serious medical problems.

Would-be social engineers argue endlessly over whether society ought to prevent such women from having children. But for the clinic, the concern is an immediate one of trying to make sure that they stay off drugs during pregnancy and that their children are born healthy enough to have a chance of making something of themselves.

Castillo has been coming in for counseling for five months. “They ask me how I feel about myself, my self-respect. They talk to me about my husband and my marriage.”

Her husband, now incarcerated, has abused her in the past, she said. Additionally, she is a victim of cerebral palsy and has difficulty getting around.

Marital problems can be especially sensitive territory for Latinas, who are often brought up to believe that the husband’s word is law, said Rochella Ventura, chief of alcohol and drug program administration for Los Angeles County.

As opposed to mainstream agencies, counselors at El Proyecto understand this difference, Ventura said. While a traditional therapist might advise middle-class women to simply leave an abusive marriage, that might not work in a Latino household, where the wife has been more passive, she said.

El Proyecto counselors may try to get help from other family members or get a friend of the abusive husband to have a talk with him.

Sanchez, who has been director for nine years, is intimately familiar with stories such as Castillo’s. Her brother was a drug user, and she began working with prisoners as a college student.

She came to the agency in its infancy, entrusted with finding jobs for ex-offenders. The problem, she learned, was not finding employers willing to hire them but convincing offenders to “show up for work.” Her idealism was sobered but not shattered.

After the halfway house failed, the agency became an outpatient treatment center. Gradually, it expanded services to include health care, job training and youth work as counselors realized that drug use often masked deeper problems.

“The problem our community faces,” Sanchez said, “is our poor self-image.”

Sanchez is something of a rarity in community-based drug and alcohol treatment agencies. “As a woman, and a minority woman, I’ve had to be more vocal,” she said. “Many times, I’ve had to go and testify” at government hearings “without being asked.”

But Ventura and Capobianco said Sanchez’s professionalism has made her stand out. “She doesn’t get caught up in the competitiveness” that sometimes erupts among the various community agencies, Ventura said. She has brought a level of credibility and respectability to the agency that was missing in the early days.

“I don’t have any doubts about having her meet with the federal agencies,” Ventura said. “She won’t embarrass you.”

Sanchez has also surrounded herself with a cadre of counselors who know the community they serve. Mary Hernandez, program coordinator of the outpatient drug-free rehabilitation program on the second floor of the clinic, said the agency has kept up with changing needs in the minority community.

One of the most pressing is assistance to drug-using mothers. “We try to get them to stay off drugs and deal with reality,” Hernandez said.

Dealing with reality is a lesson that El Proyecto itself has learned over the years.

“Proyecto has pretty well established itself,” Sanchez said.

She recently picked out mauve and ocean-green carpeting for the new building, a far cry from the days of the halfway house.

“We are here to stay.”