ORANGE : Food Center Hungry for Volunteers

At the warehouses of the Food Distribution Center, a nonprofit food bank that helps feed more than 180,000 Orange County residents a month, the cauliflower is piling up.

So are the boxes of cereal, canned goods and thousands of other food and personal care items that the center regularly distributes to 256 charitable organizations in the county.

“If we don’t get the cauliflower out, we are going to have to dump it,” said Fred Pratt, the food center’s director. “We don’t want to do that.”

The problem isn’t that the private organization has a glut of donations. Rather the food center, like many county volunteer-dependent agencies, is experiencing backups and delays because they have lost a substantial chunk of their free work force to the new school year.

“When you lose a significant amount of volunteers like we just have, the food just isn’t available (to distribute),” said Pratt, who estimates that the center lost a quarter of its volunteer force earlier this month. “It sits and waits until we get the volunteers here to do it.”

Irvine Temporary Housing, a transitional housing and counseling service for homeless families, also took a heavy hit--losing about 20 volunteers or about two-thirds of its volunteer staff. The agency feeds about 1,100 families a year and helps clothe needy schoolchildren.

“That’s why I’m answering the phone,” said Stephanie Kight, the organization’s resource director. “The kids are all gone.”

With more than half of its staff made up of volunteers, the Food Distribution Center has handed out more than 66 million pounds of food since it opened nearly ten years ago, center officials said. In the past year alone, 2,000 different volunteers have donated some 55,000 hours to help the private organization distribute 9.5 million pounds of food.

The organizations report an acute need for volunteers to inspect, sort and package foods, handle administrative tasks and help hand out food.

“During the summer we had 20 kids working on this stuff,” said Charlene Sydow, the center’s resource coordinator, pointing to huge crates and boxes of unsorted canned goods and personal care items. “Now, we have three guys working in here.”

Relief may possibly come in October after students have established their school routine, officials say.

“We are in that in-between period where the kids are back to school and the parents haven’t settled down yet,” Kight said. “We will begin to recruit the stay-at-home mom and dads in the next few weeks.”

But until then, it will have to rely upon its existing pool of mostly corporate, church and retired volunteers, like Paul Dick, a former senior executive at an Irvine engineering firm.

“I just like the way they operate around at (the food center), they get things done,” said Dick, 66, of Newport Beach. “The food we are processing here today will be eaten by someone the day after tomorrow.”

“We just can’t do this without volunteers,” Sydow said. “We just couldn’t.”

For volunteer information, call the Food Distribution Center, (714) 771-1343, or Irvine Temporary Housing, (714) 250-7177.