Shelter’s Supporters Feel Right at Home With Their Message

The Scene

Elbow to elbow, toe to toe, about 100 young professionals gathered at a local restaurant Thursday night to mix and mingle and spread the word about the YWCA South Orange County Hotel for Homeless Women. Yuppies--you can call them that, they don’t mind--with a social conscience.

Stand and Deliver

The mixer, hosted by the support group Y2000, filled a couple of after-work hours and every square foot of real estate in the bar area of the Trocadero restaurant in Irvine. Arriving from their offices, health clubs, and other restaurants, guests waded into the sea of humanity at the door and headed for a booth that doubled as the check-in desk. There they made small donations, plastered name tags on their chests and got to the business of networking. An hour after the party started you couldn’t walk the length of the bar without shimmying through a thicket of business suits; after two hours you couldn’t hear yourself think.

“ Loud? “ said Marvin Oishi, a real estate agent from Mission Viejo. You could see a vein pop out in his neck as he strained to be heard. “I go to parties three times as loud as this!” he said, grinning. “You just have to learn to tune it out!”

What They Said

If you tuned out the party chatter, you could hear a few voices with something to say.

“What I have learned from the homeless women (at the YWCA Hotel) is that you can be going along fine in your life and then one unfortunate twist of fate puts you out on the streets,” said Suzanne Theal, who co-chaired the party with Nedra Kayashima. “I know that women earn a fraction of what men earn. A lot of women live from paycheck to paycheck. All it takes is the loss of a job or the breakup of a marriage, and suddenly there’s nowhere to go.”

Kayashima agreed. Recalling an elderly woman she met at the shelter, she said: “It reminds you that even though you think you’re secure now, you aren’t necessarily set for your whole life. Something could happen. You could be out there, too.”

The support group was founded two years ago by Nuby Sears, a real estate appraiser from Newport Beach. “We’re trying to be 100 points of the ‘1,000 points of light,’ ” said Sears.

The Cause

The YWCA South Orange County Hotel for Homeless Women provides short-term shelter and a variety of programs for disadvantaged women of all ages. The goal of the programs--which include financial and legal aid, medical referrals, job training and individual and group counseling--is to help the homeless women return to mainstream society as self-sufficient and productive individuals. The majority of the women who come to the hotel are high school graduates between the ages of 24 and 44.

The 38-bed facility is always full. “And there is never a night we don’t have to turn some women away,” said Dianne Russell, director of the shelter. “Since Christmas it’s just gone crazy--we had 15 (turned away) one day, 25 the next day. That’s a big frustration for the staff. We can say ‘Oh, you can call so-and-so,’ but chances are, if we’re full, the other places are, too. There’s nowhere to shuffle them off to. There’s just a crying need for more housing for people with no money, for the elderly, mentally and physically disabled and for the working poor.”