Agency Director Has Help in High Places

Connie Jones, 38.

Occupation: Executive Director of the Southwest Community Center

Address: 1601 W. 2nd St., Santa Ana, Calif. 92703. (714) 547-4073.

With the holiday season in full swing, the pace is frenetic at the nonprofit Southwest Community Center in Santa Ana.

In broken Spanish, Connie Jones directs a frail senior citizen to the kitchen to get a free hot lunch, then answers a question from a telephone caller. The next moment, the executive director is running to the refrigerator in the back room to retrieve milk and other food for a needy woman and three children.

The recession has brought more people through the doors of the center, at a time when public and private donations are diminishing.

But through prayer and determination, Jones said, the workers inside the old, rust-colored building on 2nd Street hope to keep their seven-day-a-week program running--offering food, meals, housing and job assistance, clothing and other services to the needy.

The “adopt-a-family” Christmas program that provides about 500 poor families with toys, food and gifts has been booked up for weeks, and clients are being referred to other agencies. Also, because of dwindling donations to the food bank, the three-day-a-week free lunch program is now available only to first-time visitors, Jones said.

Even in tough times, the agency head said, she is motivated by the sense of accomplishment she feels when she knows that she has helped people through an emergency, or assisted them in finding food or shelter.

“I have faith in God that he’s going to bring us through this,” Jones said. “If (help) does not come one way, it will come another because there’s more than just me praying for it to come.”

Jones’ knack for social work, she said, is a talent inherited from the woman who founded the center, her grandmother, Annie Mae Tripp.

It was her grandmother who took used clothing donations from people whose houses she cleaned, and spent her meager income to feed and clothe the poor. The volunteer program, which included cooking the meals in Tripp’s own kitchen, eventually moved into a former pet shop that became the Southwest Community Center.

As a child growing up in her grandmother’s house, just around the corner, Jones remembers marching in the Santa Ana parade with her Girl Scout troop. In high school, she continued working with the Girl Scouts, collecting money for UNICEF on Halloween night and doing other volunteer activities. And at the age of 17, when her grandmother’s center officially opened, she went to work as a volunteer.

Except for a few years when she was away from Santa Ana, Jones has worked as a volunteer, a paid cook and administrator at the agency. After her grandmother’s death in 1986, Jones succeeded Tripp as executive director.

When she is not at the center, Jones is also active with other groups, including the Orange County Hunger Coalition, the Community Development Council, band boosters, Little League and her church choir.

It is not difficult for her to feel compassion for the poor, she said, because she was once poor herself.

She is happiest, she said, when she can help those who “need somebody to lend a hand rather than be stomped on.”