County Builders’ Aid to Homeless Draws National Notice : Charity: The BIA’s HomeAid program, in which shelter facilities have been enhanced, is explained to a federal task force meeting in Texas.

When the Orange County Building Industry Assn. sought donations to assist a struggling shelter for homeless women in Irvine two years ago, it was just part of the trade group’s annual charity drive.

But response to the appeal was so swift and substantial that it changed the entire focus of the BIA’s community involvement and gave birth to a major shelter program called HomeAid.

Since that time, the county BIA chapter has raised nearly $1 million in cash, labor and materials from 300 of its 1,200 members. The money and effort has gone into rehabilitating and enlarging homeless shelter facilities operated by 10 different county programs.

And now HomeAid has caught the eye of national homeless advocates.

Earlier this week, Newport Beach builder Art Hansen took the HomeAid story to Texas, where he discussed the program at a meeting of a federal task force on homeless issues.

In a telephone interview from Dallas on Thursday, Hansen said his presentation was “well received” by the nearly 500 federal, state and local program directors and business representatives who are meeting there this week to discuss how to get corporate America more involved in helping the nation’s homeless.

The Interagency Council on the Homeless is a federal group chaired by the secretary of housing and urban development.

Hansen, a partner in Shawntana Development Corp., which specializes in entry-level housing in Orange County, is vice chairman of the HomeAid program.

He said he was dispatched to the regional meeting in Texas at the invitation of the Dallas area HUD office, which heard about HomeAid from its agency counterpart in Santa Ana.

His message to the group, he said Thursday, was fairly simple: The best way to get help from businesses is to get them involved in areas they already are comfortable with.

Until it offered to assist the Irvine homeless shelter in 1989, the Orange County BIA’s community charity program was mostly limited to drumming up member donations for specific groups like the Arthritis Foundation or American Lung Assn., Hansen said.

“When you asked a roofing contractor to contribute money to a charitable cause he really wasn’t connected with, it had pretty limited results,” he said.

“But when we approached that same contractor and asked him to provide a roof for a homeless shelter, the same guy who was reluctant to donate cash happily came up with about $7,000 worth of roofing material and labor.”

Hansen said he came away from the Texas session “with the feeling these people are really scratching their heads over what to do . . . and are interested in what we have done in Orange County.”