HomeAid Wins $75,000 Grant for Homeless Shelters

The HomeAid homeless shelter program of the Building Industry of Southern California has been awarded a $75,000 grant by the James Irvine Foundation.

The grant, announced Tuesday, will be used to help finance expansion of HomeAid’s program of building and renovating shelters for the temporarily homeless, according to Michael Lennon, HomeAid’s Southern California executive director.

He said that each of the Building Industry Assn.’s regional units--in Orange, Los Angeles, Ventura, Riverside and San Bernardino counties--either already has an active HomeAid program or plans to establish one.

The Orange County HomeAid program is the first and largest in the nation. In its first two years of operation, it has contributed more than $2 million in cash, supplies and labor--donated by the building industry--to 11 homeless shelter programs.

The program’s largest effort to date has been construction of the Don R. Roth Family Center in Orange. Volunteers from more than 100 companies provided the material and labor to build three duplexes to serve as temporary shelters for homeless families. The project, completed in late 1990, cost $400,000.

Money from the Irvine Foundation grant, Lennon said, will be used to help expand shelter programs in each region, using the Orange County HomeAid program as a model.

Mariano Diaz, a program officer with the Los Angeles office of the James Irvine Foundation, said the grant was “a very significant one for us (because) the HomeAid program is a nonprofit organization designed to link private developers and their subcontractors to the mission of providing shelter to the homeless.”