Teenager’s Bead Art Benefits Abuse Victims

Nearly six months after the Northridge earthquake, the Nusbaum family had to evacuate its contaminated Encino home.

Melinda Nusbaum remembers dragging garbage bags with all the possessions they could salvage into a hotel. Melinda, now 14, recalls someone bumping into her in the hotel hallway who knew of the family’s plight and saying, “Oh, you’re the ones with asbestos in your house.”

From the tone of voice, Melinda said, “I felt like I had a disease.”

The move because of quake damage began a quasi-nomadic life for the Nusbaums. They have been living in rental homes--the most recent in Tarzana--while the family, which comprises Melinda, an other brother and their parents, has been waiting for the architect’s plans to rebuild the home.

At a meeting of the nonprofit Community Assisting Recovery group for residents affected by the earthquake, Melinda met Jae Weiss, a domestic abuse counselor at Haven Hills shelter in Canoga Park.

Weiss and her husband also were wrestling with earthquake damage, but she remembers how quickly Melinda, then 12, impressed her.

“She’s very outspoken for a young girl,” Weiss said, adding that she had “a maturity of thought that was really impressive for a young girl.”

Weiss had been the survivor of an abusive husband in a previous marriage, and, as she later told Melinda of her experiences and the services offered by Haven Hills for victims of domestic violence, the two connected.

Because of the earthquake, “in a way, I think Melinda really felt abused herself,” said her mother, Susie Nusbaum. “And there was this instant soft spot created of identifying with people who have to keep running.”

Melinda, who will be a sophomore this fall at Sherman Oaks Center for Enriched Studies in Reseda, wanted to do something to help the abuse victims, but was too young to volunteer for the Haven Hills Teen Dating Violence Prevention Team, which has a minimum-age requirement of 16.

So she came up with Shelter Beads.

A year ago, using dark string, beads and strips of magazine images, Melinda began making and selling Shelter Beads for $2 each at youth activities, block parties and Rotary Club functions.

She cuts magazine pictures into elongated triangles, then rolls and glues them to form tiny colorful tubes. Melinda attaches each tube to a string, adding beads to either side. The creations have raised $1,100 for the shelter in the past year.

“What’s been so wonderful about the bead project--apart from the fact that she has been able to go out there and earn money--is that she’s disseminating information about domestic violence to people who we might not have been able to reach otherwise,” Weiss said.

Melinda is also involved in tree-planting projects, volunteers at a food bank on weekends and, whenever she eats at a restaurant, tries to talk the manager into donating excess food to homeless agencies like the Valley Shelter.

She is an aggressive salesgirl when it comes to the beads, her parents say.

“She’s caught some of them [customers] walking away from her display table, and she turned them around and made a sale,” said her father, Bob Nusbaum, a systems engineer for Paradyne Corp., a data communications company.

“Ever since I was little, I wanted to do things for others,” she said.

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