A FORUM FOR COMMUNITY ISSUES : Testimony / ONE PERSON’S STORY: HELPING KIDS ON SKID ROW : Nancy Berlin

Nancy Berlin, 38, works at Las Familias del Pueblo, a privately funded community center on 7th Street and Maple Avenue in the Skid Row section of downtown Los Angeles. Raised in a middle-class suburb in Pennsylvania, the granddaughter of Ukrainian immigrants, she came to Los Angeles after graduating from Beloit College in Wisconsin in 1979. She was looking for a job as a research biologist but spent the last decade working with the poor instead. She lives with her husband, a public-interest attorney, and their child in Echo Park.

Thirty kids have just come through our storefront door on a bus from the 9th Street Elementary School. Over the next few hours that number will grow to 80. We turn away as many more. Their parents are mostly working in the garment district and when they come at night to pick up the kids they sometimes have to take them back to the factories while they finish their work.

I had to see these factories to believe them. Eight blocks from City Hall there is this whole underground system of garment workers in sweatshops making 6 cents on every label they sew on the clothes that we buy for $50 in the store.

I had one mother call a few weeks ago, saying that she couldn’t pick up her kid because the owner had locked the factory doors till the job was done. They mostly work at minimum-wage jobs or below. When they are doing piecework, 12 cents to sew on a collar, they are lucky to make $100 a week. Try supporting a family on that. They sometimes work 11-hour days and end up living eight people--three adults and five children--to a single room with a hot plate and a common bathroom down the rooming-house hall.

Government agencies aren’t doing anything to help these families. And yet they keep blaming everything on poor people who are already trying really hard and can’t get anywhere. But what we’re hearing are proposals for cutting back money for after-school programs and all the other things that these people need in order to be able to work. Or cutting back welfare benefits to people who can’t find work.

I’ll tell you why this matters to me. I have all these kids in the room with me now, they’re just kids--they’re 5-year-olds, for God’s sake. They deserve a chance. They didn’t do anything wrong and they deserve a chance at a good life. And they’re going to be the next generation--if we care about our own lives we have to care about the kids who are here now.

I have a daughter who’s 5 whom I love very much. But what I see is that these kids are just like my daughter. They’re just as bright as she is. And they’re just as eager to learn and they’re just as loving. But they don’t have nearly the opportunity and it really pains me to think of what might happen to them in 10 years. Sometimes I can barely think about it because I know that most of them don’t have a pretty future ahead of them.

I think for most of them they’re going to live in poverty their whole lives, because they’re never going to be able to get the kinds of educational opportunities to pull themselves out of it.

Last week, we had an art class here for some of the older kids, like 8 to 12 years old. And one of the kids drawing a picture of his life drew a picture of drug dealers on the corner near his house. That’s what life is to him. That’s all his world contains.

All of the money to run our center is from private sources. It comes from foundations, corporations, individuals. We don’t get any government funds. We are a frugal operation and our top salary is $28,000 a year. We are one of President George Bush’s “thousand points of light.” Well the problem is, it’s not anywhere near enough. I mean there are all these little programs that are scattered out there and all of us are overworked.

We turn away people all the time. It’s very hard to do. But we don’t have a choice. The money that comes from private sources is minuscule compared to what government has in its hands. I think that it’s a non sequitur to say that government can’t do everything. Government is hardly doing anything at the moment. The fact that we have 80 kids here in the afternoon says that there are no recreational and after-school programs for kids. And since parents need to work, children need to be somewhere and they need to be cared for. And those programs do not exist for poor children.

I see kids who are hungry every day and we try to feed them here. We don’t have a lot of food here. But when I come in the morning, it’s clear that some kids have not eaten breakfast and maybe not dinner, either. We often send food home with families because we know that the family doesn’t have enough.

We’re eight blocks away from the L.A. Times and City Hall. But this is the other side of life.

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