Making the Case for Help : Charities: SPIN’s tenacious executive director puts aid applicants through paces.

When people who need a place to live or who are trying to kick addictions go to Serving People In Need for help, they have to talk to the agency’s executive director, Jean Wegener.

It is not a pleasant experience.

In the agency’s small office on Birch Street, a staff of four, including Wegener, runs a program that helps 60,000 people a year. The deal is this: If needy people bare their souls and their sins, Wegener’s organization may lend them the move-in costs for an apartment, or provide the money for at least part of a long-term drug rehabilitation program.

But first, unsmiling and unsympathetic, Wegener, with spiky russet hair and an attitude to match, puts people through a series of hoops. For example, if applicants are late with references or other information SPIN requires, it is a bad sign. If they agree to go to parenting classes but turn up late or not at all, it’s another bad sign. And Wegener keeps count.

“It’s not my job to feel sorry for them,” Wegener said. “I care passionately about them, and I want them to succeed. But if they don’t, there is no forgiveness.

“This is money that is worked for very hard. It is given by people through their taxes or their private donations, and I have a strong sense of responsibility about that.”

Applicants for help arrive for their interviews scrubbed and washed, hoping to make a good impression. Most have been in shelters or other social service programs before seeking help at SPIN, and have references from Wegener’s colleagues at other agencies.

In spite of their efforts, the signs of their poverty are impossible to eradicate. Poorly nourished children accompany some. Others show the weariness of living in shelters or cars.

Wegener, 49, who saw hard times herself after she and her husband divorced 12 years ago, believes that if people who already have some grit and character are offered help, they will clear the obstacles that life puts in their path.

She is vigilant about who gets help because she sees her role as that of “the bad cop,” heading one of Orange County’s most respected charities, and the guardian of its hard-won resources.

The agency consumes most of Wegener’s life, and the long hours and the work itself take their toll. Day after day, people tell her their most personal stories of desperation, and she either helps them or does not.

“Even though it’s not my role to feel sorry for them, I do worry. I go home and worry about how somebody’s doing, get some dinner, then go back to work.”

In part because of Wegener’s rigorous scrutiny of applicants, SPIN has a high rate of success with the people it helps. The agency boasts that 70% of the people in its Guaranteed Apartment Placement program become self-sufficient after two years of help from SPIN that includes move-in costs, furnishings and counseling. It also claims that 65% of the people who complete its two-year drug and alcohol treatment program stay off those substances when they leave.

But another reason for SPIN’s apparent success is that most applicants already are on the road to recovery and have been referred by other nonprofit agencies after completing some programs. Also, SPIN’s programs are 18 months to two years long--enough time for real progress.

As with most charities, money is a constant concern at SPIN, which has a budget of about $250,000. Services provided by the agency include free sandwiches and hygiene kits to homeless people on the streets and loans to clients accepted into the Guaranteed Apartment Placement Program or the drug rehabilitation program. The budget also pays Wegener’s salary of about $30,000, one full-time staff member and two part-time workers.

The success rate preserves SPIN’s broad base of support. SPIN’S advocates include not only church groups and other charities, but politically conservative donors and officials who understand that the agency helps people return to productive lives.

“When I first met Jean, I thought she was so mean,” said Jennifer Strayli, 36, a licensed vocational nursing student who turned to SPIN two years ago after a divorce left her on the edge of homelessness. “But underneath it, she’s got a really big heart.

“She wanted to first see if I was motivated to help myself or if I was just there for a handout,” Strayli said.

Ultimately, SPIN provided a no-interest loan to Strayli and a roommate, which they used to move into an apartment in Garden Grove. As required, the two established a payment plan with the agency. They paid off the loan last year.

But just weeks ago, Wegener turned away a couple with three children because Wegener suspected the husband of domestic violence.

“Just the interaction between them was all wrong,” Wegener said. “Every time he talked to her, the wife would flinch away from the husband. She looked terrified and he looked meaner than anyone I’ve seen in a long time.

“I certainly wasn’t going to pay for someone to go into their own place and commit some more atrocities, so I just flat out said I’m sorry, I suspect there are issues of domestic violence that you two have not addressed.”

She told them first to go to Human Options, a shelter for battered women, to have their relationship assessed, but they refused. Days later, she learned, the couple were kicked out of another shelter after a violent incident.

Wegener has been with SPIN five years, and like many directors of nonprofit agencies, it seems like she does the work of four people. She administers the program, solves crises and keeps track of 200 volunteers. Wegener arrives at work by 9 a.m., goes home to have dinner with her two sons, ages 16 and 21, then often returns to SPIN to work until 11 p.m.

The life she leads now is dramatically different from the one she had years ago.

Raised in a small town in New Jersey, Wegener went to Colby College in Maine in 1965. There, her social life revolved around parties at nearby Dartmouth College. She attended winter carnivals with the student who would become her husband and went to picnics on the ski slopes.

They both transferred to colleges in her husband’s home state of California, and moved to Orange County after they married. Wegener devoted her time to renovating their home and volunteering for various charities and community efforts.

Her reputation in Orange County for tenacity and fund-raising ability lingers from her volunteer days. Even today, there are people who would rather just give Wegener what she needs--furniture for a family, food, money, whatever--just to get her off the telephone, Wegener acknowledges.

“Our first meeting was her screaming at me and the city staff that we were not doing enough to look out for the interest of the taxpayers of Newport Beach, because at that time she and many other people were concerned about the expansion of John Wayne Airport,” said Bob Winn, former Newport Beach city manager and now a SPIN board member.

“But if there’s a job that needs to be done, then she’s the first to step up and do it no matter what it is,” Winn said. “And if there were unlimited funds, Jeanie would be taking care of everybody in the state of California.”

Twelve years ago, Wegener’s whole life changed. She and her husband divorced; Wegener became a single parent with two boys to raise, and she learned how thin is the line separating those who have from those who need. The only difference between her and the people she helps, Wegener said, is that she had a strong support system of family and friends to rely on.

“I know that there but for the grace of God go I,” she said. But “I did it and they can too. We’re there to help, but they have to have something inside.”

So day after day, Wegener talks to people who desperately need her help, listening to their problems but always searching for something inside them that wants to succeed.

“The difference between the ones who make it and the ones who don’t is that there’s a determination there,” she said.

“You can almost picture them scraping themselves up the side of a building and every time they get that hand up to a window sill, somebody opens the window and says, ‘I thought I heard a noise!’ and smacks the window down and whop, there goes the hand.

“And they’re about ready to plummet down but instead they say OK, ‘This hand is bruised but I’m still gonna reach up with my other one.’

“That’s what I look for.”