Recession Proving a Grinch for Charities : Volunteerism: So while contributions are down, and some former donors are seeking aid, more and more people are donating time to service groups.

Jean Heinzman slipped behind a desk at the Laguna Hills Mall one day last week and launched the peak season for charities.

Heinzman is a volunteer for the Salvation Army. She donates her time because “I enjoy making sure that children have a good Christmas.” Her task is to entice shoppers running from card shop to clothing store to stop for a minute, buy a toy and donate it to a child.

“I get a great deal of satisfaction out of helping children that would not have things,” she said.

Heinzman isn’t alone, especially at this time of year. Thanksgiving Day to New Year’s Day is prime giving season for most charities in terms of money received and volunteer time donated.

And this year, the volunteers are especially welcome. Many charities have reported that the recession is cutting into overall giving:

* The county chapter of the American Red Cross ended its fiscal year in June with a $282,000 operating deficit. It has shut a facility in Huntington Beach to save money and laid off 15 staff members.

“The downturn in the Orange County economy has made it hard for us, like everyone else, to come by the donations that makes it possible to run our programs,” said Judy Iannaccone, a Red Cross spokeswoman. “People think we’re always there and will always be there and think we get support from the government. We don’t.”

* The Shelter for the Homeless in Westminster has seen cash donations plunge about 30% this year, according to executive director Jim Miller, but there has been plenty of food and volunteers to feed Thanksgiving dinner to an expected 400.

* United Way officials expect donations to be down this year.

* That decline is being felt at the YWCA in Santa Ana, which gets some United Way support, executive director Mary Douglas said.

Further, donations directly to the YWCA “are definitely down,” she said. When the YWCA opened its hotel for homeless women five years ago, a dozen women a night requested shelter, Douglas said, while now “two to three times that number” come daily.

In general, charities are reporting that the recession has cut into the amount of money donors can give. In some cases, these groups say, those who formerly gave money find themselves asking for food for their own families.

All of this places a focus on volunteers. Although charities stress that they need volunteers year round, not just during the holidays, they find that “at the Christmas season people just want to help in some way,” said Lt. Lee Lescano, county coordinator for the Salvation Army.

The one silver lining in the recession gloom is that hard times this year may be spurring the volunteer effort, according to some officials. “Maybe people can’t give a lot” of money, Lescano said, “so they put the time in” as volunteers, instead.

“We use literally more than a thousand volunteers over the Christmas season,” Lescano said. “We’ve hired a volunteer coordinator just for our Christmas programs.”

On Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, the group’s red kettle drive will begin, with bell-ringers, most of whom are paid, standing outside stores and seeking donations.

The Salvation Army’s Angel Tree project started last week, with Heinzman and her cohorts putting in two-hour shifts at the malls in Laguna Hills and Westminster. A donor plucks a cardboard angel from a tree, reads the name of a child written on the angel, buys a suitable toy and puts it under the tree. Heinzman records the information.

“Once the word gets out” that the Salvation Army needs volunteers, Lescano said, “we get inundated. . . . At the Christmas season, people just want to help in some way. Maybe they can’t give a lot, so they put the time in.”

Fire and police departments, the Marine Corps, churches and service groups make all-out efforts at this time of year, officials of the Volunteer Center of Greater Orange County said. People collect food, cook meals for the homeless, sing carols at senior citizen centers.

The Volunteer Center’s Charla McNeff said there are more than 1,200 nonprofit organizations across the county. She said a new movement seen by many of the groups is involvement of entire families as volunteers, which expands recruitment outside the traditional mainstays: retired seniors and homemakers with spare time.

The Pacific Mutual Foundation, a part of the Newport Beach-based Pacific Mutual insurance company, this year gave the Volunteer Center a $9,000 grant to see how to get families involved.

The center ran a “gleaning” in which 250 people--from toddlers to grandparents--picked green beans left in an Irvine field after the commercial harvesters finished. The volunteers scooped up more than 2 tons of beans and turned them over to food distribution centers.

“It was a wonderful day,” said Linda Lyon of the Volunteer Center. “The feeling was just marvelous, with families coming out on a Sunday afternoon, knowing each bag they filled up was going to help the hungry.”

Lyon said Pacific Mutual Foundation wanted Irvine as the site for whatever family volunteer program developed “because they see it as a family-oriented community.”

She said dozens of other nonprofit groups are studying how her group gets families involved in programs to satisfy people wanting to help out but concerned that charitable duties cut into their time with the family.

For years Peggy Swanson of Orange has involved her five daughters and a son by bringing them along whenever she could on her Monday Meals on Wheels route. The program delivers food to homebound elderly.

Swanson came to California from Connecticut 25 years ago. As her children got older, “the holidays were getting lonesome,” she said. So she decided that delivering meals to senior citizens would be a solution.

“I wanted to get involved with senior citizens so my kids would have sort of adopted grandparents,” Swanson said, “so they could meet more people and help more people. And it only takes an hour a week.”

Swanson is a full-time bookkeeper for doctors and also volunteers with the Girl Scouts, a church senior citizen center and elsewhere.

“People don’t realize you can do a lot of things on your lunch hour at work,” she said. After delivering the meals, she goes back and eats a sandwich in her car.

“A lot of people laugh at me. They think I’m nuts,” she said. “But they’ll sit there and eat at a table at work, just waste the time. The seniors love to see you, you’re probably the only one they see all day long.”

Swanson brought her daughters--Tammy, 21, and Lynette, 9--along on Monday this week to help carry meals to the seniors: a hot entree on a tray, and sandwiches, milk and dessert in two brown paper bags to each home. As she pulled up at houses along the streets of Orange, the seniors were indeed glad to see her.

“It’s a great program,” said Jean Bowman, one of those receiving the meals. “Give it an A.”

No food deliveries were scheduled from Thanksgiving Day through Sunday--meals are not delivered on weekends--but Swanson lined up friends to feed 15 seniors who would not otherwise have received a Thanksgiving Day dinner.

“I just feel good doing it,” she said. “I like helping people. It makes me feel good.”

Barbara Mora, director of Orange Elderly Services, which includes the Meals on Wheels program, said volunteers from Kiwanis, the Junior Women’s League and Sunwest Bank also have routes. All drivers are volunteers, serving about 10 people per route, 67 people throughout the city.

Santa Ana lawyer Gerard J. Fane said he does not recall a specific incident that led him to start volunteering six years ago through the St. Vincent de Paul Society of his local Roman Catholic church.

Fane, a 57-year-old native of the Bronx, said it “took a while, months, maybe a year” for him to get from thinking about helping out to actually volunteering.

“I was very bothered by the fact that there were people hungry in Orange County, that there were people who, in the midst of all this affluence, couldn’t get the bare necessities,” he said.

The St. Vincent de Paul Society uses laymen to help those suffering “some sort of calamity in their lives,” Fane said. They may need shelter or food or money for a gas or electric bill.

Not all parishes have a branch of the society, and the individual chapters vary in their workings. Fane said he is “on call” for two or three days every few weeks.

He and a partner travel to the rectory at Holy Family Cathedral in Orange, get the names and addresses of those needing help and go to see them.

Food, sometimes government surplus, is donated or occasionally bought. Those with special problems can be referred to other agencies.

“The Lutherans have some very good programs, the Episcopalians have a very good program,” he said.

“There’s no religious test” for people needing help from his society, he said.

“If someone’s hungry, they’re hungry. That’s all,” he said.