No More Feedback for Delhi Seniors : Center’s Closure to End Lunch Ritual

Each day, Cruz Solis and more than a dozen longtime neighbors gather at a church parish hall to eat a hot lunch and talk. However, their friendly ritual will end on Thanksgiving because of funding cuts.

“We don’t want this place closed,” said Solis, 79. “This is the only place we have to come and chat with our friends.”

The lunch center at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church on Central Avenue is one of six in Santa Ana run by Feedback Foundation Inc., which provides free or low-cost meals for people 60 and older. Faced with reduced funding, organizers decided to close the Delhi neighborhood location because it serves the smallest number of senior citizens among the sites here.

Shirley A. Cohen, executive director of the foundation, said she does not want to close the Delhi site but has few alternatives to cut costs since the foundation has already reduced staff.

The Anaheim-based Feedback Foundation Inc. provides more than 368,000 meals a year at 20 sites and more than 313,000 meals to homebound residents in a dozen Orange County cities, as well as unincorporated county areas. The Delhi church site is the only one slated to close.

The foundation currently feeds 260 people daily at the sites in Santa Ana and also delivers lunch and dinner each day to 175 homebound people in the city.

Organizers ask senior citizens to contribute what they can afford for their meals, but some can only give 25 cents or less, said Delhi lunch center director Anna Nunez.

The lunch center will be shut down because donations and federal, state and city funding for the programs declined this year. Federal money given to the program by the city of Santa Ana, for one, was cut by more than half.

Although the 10-year-old Delhi location has the smallest turnout among the centers--from 12 to 18 people each day--the people who use it “are the people that really need the program,” Nunez said.

“They don’t have transportation to go somewhere else,” she said. “They’re frail and they don’t have the money to afford other services.”

The foundation received about $15,000 less than it had budgeted to run the six Santa Ana sites, Cohen said. The foundation also faces a shortfall of about $15,000 for its home meals program, but directors say they will keep that program intact.

Senior citizens who depend on the meal service at the Delhi lunch center aren’t concerned about budgets or number-crunching. They worry about where to go next for food--and company.

They say the nearest lunch center is almost four miles away and too far for them to walk. Also, they say they are not eligible for delivered meals because they are not confined to their homes.

“Besides, it’s like therapy coming here,” Solis said. “I wouldn’t feel right eating alone.”

Her friends agree. They will miss the companionship, and most of all, the stories they hear at lunch.

Solis, for one, remembers when Bristol Street was nothing but orange groves and eucalyptus trees. “There were no sidewalks, either,” Solis said.

It was a time when the Dodgers were still in Brooklyn and when heavy traffic meant two cars on a street.

“I used to go to Los Angeles and watch the Hollywood stars and go to see the fights,” Joe Aguilar said, munching on a lunch of turkey and mashed potatoes beside his wife, Eula.

“I remember when there was no Disneyland,” Eula says. Her husband was part of its creation: Joe helped bulldoze the land to make way for the theme park in the 1950s.

The pair, part of the neighborhood since 1949, have eaten hot lunches at the Delhi site for nine years, they say. That is where they have met people like Antonia Escobedo.

Escobedo says she first came to Santa Ana in 1955 for work.

“We had oranges, asparagus, lots of tomato fields,” the 70-year-old Escobedo said, scraping her Styrofoam plate clean of gravy. “You didn’t hear about gangs of kids then. . . . When boys were given vacations, they went to work in the fields.”

Escobedo, the Aguilars and Solis are people with whom Nunez grew up. She has been in the neighborhood for 46 years, she said, since the day she was born in a small house on Adams Street.

Delhi was one of the first areas where many U.S.-born Latinos lived in Santa Ana, said City Councilman Ted R. Moreno, who represents the neighborhood. “There are a lot of older families there,” he said.

To help her older neighbors, Nunez gets cans of vegetables with money donated by students who use the parish hall for English classes. A market in Irvine also donates bread and pies.

Chances are slim that the city can help solve the funding problem for the Delhi meal site because federal block grant funds, part of which had been earmarked for Feedback, have already been allocated this year, Moreno said.

The City Council gave an additional $6,700 to the program last week by shifting money allocated to a now-defunct social center--adding to the $22,000 in block grant funds the city gave the program. That is still about $30,000 less than Feedback got in federal funds last year. The decrease is because of stiff competition among social service groups vying for money.

One of two Feedback meal sites in Anaheim was closed in 1992 because of cuts, Cohen said, although staff reduction at sites in most cities have kept other meal locations open.