Hope Builders

It was the winter of 1996 when Farrah Sargenti, 6 1/2 months pregnant and addicted to speed, turned up at the door of the Precious Life Shelter in Los Alamitos.

Sargenti, 19, had lost her apartment. Scared and alone, she was staring at life on the streets when a soup kitchen worker told her about the shelter.

That was the bleak then. This is the bright now:

Sargenti is a clean and sober mother of daughter McKenna, born in June, and a student in adult education classes.

“I have a lot of aspirations for the future,” she said, “a degree in cosmetology and being a really good parent to my baby. Someday I hope to be in a stable place with a good job.

“I had nothing when I came here and now I have everything,” she said. “Precious Life is a godsend.”

Sargenti, although she may not even be aware of it, is one of the estimated 10,000 temporarily homeless in Orange County who have been helped by an innovative 8-year-old program called HomeAid, created by the Building Industry Assn. of Orange County.

It was the HomeAid team, led by Warmington Homes, that rebuilt and expanded the Precious Life Shelter, making room for six more women, all pregnant or new mothers, seeking to get their lives back on track.

Since 1989, HomeAid--with the support of some 1,500 building-related companies representing 30,000 volunteers--has built or refurbished 36 shelters for the temporarily homeless, adding more than 600 beds in 25 cities, mainly in Orange County but also elsewhere in California as well as Arizona and Illinois.

HomeAid’s efforts are directed toward families or individuals who because of job layoffs, health problems or simply a string of bad luck find themselves without a roof over their heads.

And most often these days, it is women and their children whom HomeAid finds itself trying to help, said the organization’s director of development, Julie Brinkerhoff-Jacobs: “[They] are the largest group of homeless out there now.”

The success of HomeAid’s approach in Orange County has spawned chapters across the state and the country. In 1995, HomeAid America was created to link groups in California, Illinois and Arizona.

There are now five chapters in California--Sacramento, Greater Los Angeles/Ventura, San Bernardino, Riverside counties and the flagship chapter in Orange County--one in Chicago and one in Phoenix, and projected chapters in cities as widespread as Seattle, Dallas and Fort Lauderdale.

HomeAid expansion plans are not stopping at the U.S. border, either, according to Brinkerhoff-Jacobs. In July, she met with the London-based managing director of an international building company who hopes to start a program similar to HomeAid in Britain.

“My goal is to take HomeAid worldwide,” she said, “I don’t see any limitations of where we can take this program.”

HomeAid, to put its building know-how and resources to work, forms partnerships with local nonprofit care providers, said Home-Aid Executive Director Michael Lennon.

And, he added, it picks its partners and projects carefully:

“First, the project must add beds to the community; we don’t do cosmetic work,” Lennon said. “Then we look at how many people who come to [the organization] end up in long-term housing and finding a job. What we don’t want to support is a revolving door.

“We look at their political and community support base: Are they supported by the city council, the county supervisor, community leaders? Obviously the [organizations] that are effective have a lot of support.

“Finally, we look at their funding to see if they will have the money to run an increased operation. We don’t want to build a shelter and have it just standing there.”

After a project is selected, HomeAid appoints a “building captain,” a company that agrees to supervise the project. Captains have included Lewis Homes, Warmington Homes and the National Assn. of Women in Construction.

“The key to making this all work is emotional ownership,” Lennon said. “Once we’re committed to the project, we have a company like Warmington Homes come out and they catch the vision. Then they go back to their subcontractors and suppliers and get them to come out and donate all or a portion (of the needed work).

“Our average on 36 completed projects is about four-to-one in in-kind donations to cash contributions,” Lennon said. “That means on a $250,000 project, we can get it built for $60,000.”

One such project is Precious Life, the facility for pregnant women and new mothers where Farrah Sargenti began to turn her life around.

Under building captain Warmington Homes, HomeAid rebuilt Precious Life’s original shelter by literally picking up the little one-story house and moving it back from the street, adding two wings and a second story.

Finally, builders added the finishing touches: fixtures, counters, trim, all designed to contribute to the shelter’s cheerful, homey atmosphere.

“These women come from really tough situations, so the first thing we want is for them to feel like they’re cared for,” Lennon said. “Maybe that’s why the contractors tend to donate not just what’s good enough, but what’s better.”

The refurbished shelter now houses six women and two babies; an adjacent building provides additional housing. A large building under construction behind the original shelter will eventually provide apartments for long-term residents.

HomeAid Orange County also built Precious Life’s adjacent thrift store, which has become a major fund-raiser for the charity.

Another beneficiary of HomeAid’s building muscle has been the Orange County Rescue Mission.

Before HomeAid, “we had one small home with three families and a 20% success rate,” said Jim Palmer, the charity’s executive director.

“Today, we have the House of Hope, where we are able to house 45 women and children and which has a 90% success rate” (which means that 90% of graduates are self-supporting two years after leaving the shelter).

The idea for HomeAid grew out of the home-building industry’s reaction to the campaign for Measure A, a 1988 Orange County no-growth measure. Proponents painted developers in a distinctly negative light, the building industry felt.

“We at the BIA had a thousand members supporting everything from the Arthritis Foundation to the performing arts, but no one knew about it,” Lennon said.

“So we thought, what if we had a charity that emanated from the industry? And since shelter is how we make a living, it only made sense to build shelters for the homeless.”

HomeAid’s first group of projects--one shelter for each of the five supervisorial districts in the county--met with such approval that Orange County now allows HomeAid to administer $100,000 of the county’s annual budget for the building of homeless shelters.

Now, eight years and 600 beds later, HomeAid is drawing increased financial support from government and the private sector, most notably matching funds of $30,000 from the National Housing Endowment, along with sizable grants from Norwest Mortgage and First American Title Insurance Co.

The donations, of money and labor, also reflect the building industry’s broad-based support of HomeAid, from the smallest local plumbing companies to Lifescapes International Inc., Brinkerhoff-Jacobs’ landscaping firm, which counts the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas among its clients.

“The real beauty is that many people cannot give cash, but they certainly can give of their talents and skills to help organizations like HomeAid,” she said.

“We’ve probably helped thousands of people who will never know who we are.”

For More Details

For more information, contact HomeAid America at (888) 346-6324 or check out its Web site at:

https:/www.homeaid.org.

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Wendy Madnick is a Los Angeles freelance writer.