Giving Goes With Center’s Spring Cleaning

About 75 people joined in a cleanup of the Southwest Community Center and the surrounding west Santa Ana neighborhood Saturday, sweeping sidewalks, sorting donations and throwing out piles of accumulated trash.

Schoolchildren and church members, homeless people and neighborhood volunteers pitched in to spruce up the center, a 26-year-old Santa Ana fixture that serves 500 hot meals a week and gives bags of food to anyone who asks.

The day began with a pancake breakfast for homeless people, prepared by parishioners from St. Mary’s Church in Fullerton.

By meal’s end, the cleanup was underway with help from the Santa Ana Neighborhood Housing Services and the Artesia-Pilar Neighborhood Assn.

Children from Spurgeon Intermediate School were assigned to sort the center’s massive toy collection. They piled dolls and balls, rubber snakes and guns into bins for Christmas and Easter. Adults took on the larger, heavier tasks, such as disposing of old mattresses.

Spurgeon English teacher Erika Franceshini and guidance counselor Chiyoko Niimi, brought a group of honors students with them to help with the cleanup.

“It’s fun because you do stuff with a lot of toys--almost like Christmas,” said Sodajohn Lam, 12, a seventh-grader at Spurgeon.

“It’s all about helping others,” said Lorena Cabrera, 13, also in seventh grade. “It would be very sad to be homeless.”

“We really want our kids to get involved in volunteerism,” Franceshini said. “We try to teach them that there are many different ways to learn and that learning is a lifelong process--not just something that happens while they’re in school.”

“The food bags and tangible items we give out really help people living paycheck to paycheck make their rent,” said John J. Collins, 54, chairman of the Southwest center’s board and a Fountain Valley city councilman.

“Whoever says they’re truly hungry we give food to,” Collins said.

About 30% of the center’s clients are homeless, and the rest come from the surrounding area, said executive director Connie Jones, who is the granddaughter of the center’s founder, Annie Mae Tripp.

Tripp was a stern but devoutly Christian woman who had an unerring sense for who truly needed her help and always offered a meal to the hungry, Jones said.

“She used to take up homeless people and bring them home with her,” Jones said. “People would tell her she was crazy for taking risks, but she developed a relationship with people and never had a problem.”

First a worker in the now-defunct Dyer Street Sugar Factory and then a maid, Tripp asked women’s groups at churches throughout the county to help her feed the homeless. Today the center provides a variety of services, including job networking, immunizations and HIV screening.

Letty Plasencia, 22, a member of Santa Ana Neighborhood Housing Services, joined activities at the center while growing up. She volunteered there as a child and on Saturday brought her 4-year-old daughter, Vivian, to help out.

“There are several centers like this around here, but this is the one that helps out most with food,” Plasencia said.

“This is a good neighborhood, even though the people don’t have a lot always to give their kids,” she said. “This center makes a big difference because they can always come here for the stuff they wouldn’t be able to get.”