Giving When It Hurts : Failed Thrift’s Workers, Facing Layoffs, Pitch In to Help Needy Families

Like most employees at the headquarters of failed FarWest Savings, Henry Ricci knows he won’t have a job much longer. But he and his co-workers figured that others in the community were having a much tougher time.

So the headquarters employees got together about 10 days ago and decided to buy food to provide seven needy families with Easter dinners. Their simple idea, though, quickly mushroomed into a full-fledged charity effort as they filled dozens of boxes and baskets with food, clothing, household products and toys.

After the goods were unloaded Wednesday from a parade of cars and vans that wound up at the Outreach office of Catholic Charities of Orange County, Ricci surveyed the scene and pronounced: “I think this is better than Christmas.”

For the seven families, with a total of 32 children, the goods were much more than expected.

There were hams and potatoes and fresh vegetables and fruit for Easter meals, and cookies and pies for dessert. There were Easter baskets and candy, and new and used clothes to wear this Sunday and many days thereafter. There were stuffed animals, games and toys, and two tricycles for several lucky children. Blankets, towels, radios, detergent, napkins and an assortment of other household staples rounded out the gifts.

The families’ needs are great. They were facing evictions from their homes but have hung on with Catholic Charities subsidies, according to Dee Warbington, director of the organization’s Outreach program.

For beleaguered FarWest employees, the effort was a welcome respite from the travails of working at the once-booming thrift, which collapsed in January after bleeding for more than a year with losses from junk-bond holdings and major real estate loans.

“I thought it was a good idea,” said John Troutman, a senior coordinator for construction lending who expects to lose his job sometime this year. “We’ve been under a lot of tension and stress, and this has brought us some relief.”

Such gift-giving from corporations or individuals is a regular event for social-services organizations that coordinate the donations, but what makes this event more unusual is that the gift-givers themselves may soon be in need of some charity.

Typically, when regulators sell failed institutions, the buyers are interested only in the branch systems. Administrators and headquarters employees are usually the first to be axed.

“We’ve been told that we have six months to 18 months, and then we all could be out of a job,” Ricci said.

He should know. As an asset manager, he was laid off before the takeover and couldn’t find a job. But he was hired back after three weeks.

Ricci and his colleagues said that they felt good about providing some help for those less fortunate than themselves.

The more than 200 employees at FarWest headquarters seemed like the family they were before the troubles hit, said Kathy D. Mula, senior vice president for corporate administration. It was Mula who came up with the idea of organizing the headquarters employees for the charity drive.

With approval from the Resolution Trust Corp., the federal agency managing the thrift, the employees organized seven teams, one for each corporate department. Each team adopted a family selected by Catholic Charities and began collecting food and other goods.

“I was trying to pull employees together once again,” Mula said. “In some ways, this was done more for the employees than for the families.”

Downtrodden from 18 months of bad news, the federal takeover of FarWest and uncertainty about their jobs, the employees “really got excited about this,” said Claudia Bondorff, an executive secretary in the thrift’s data-processing center.

Melanie O’Donnell, a paralegal for FarWest, said the employees “just opened their hearts.”

“For what little we spent,” said telecommunications employee Kelly Sugihara, “it sure amounted to quite a bit.” Mula estimated the total value of the gifts at up to $5,000.

Many employees felt a special empathy for the families they were helping. Losing a job, missing rent or mortgage payments and relying on social services “could happen to any of us,” Bondorff said.