Kathy Jenks

It might seem odd that the guiding spirit behind Ventura County’s most successful effort to help homeless people would be the director of the county’s Animal Regulation Department.

But it makes sense to Kathy Jenks. In 25 years with the county, she has made a career out of getting things done. And when El Nino storms pushed the persistent countywide problem of homelessness to the crisis level, she had the right combination of skills, connections and compassion to take charge.

As she stood before the Board of Supervisors last week to ask its support in moving her shelter program to larger, permanent quarters and starting it toward a self-sustaining financial footing, Supervisor John Flynn declared Jenks “the Mother Teresa of Ventura County”--jeans, sneakers and all.

Jenks got what she came for. The board allotted $96,900 to keep the shelter open until June and gave her permission to seek funding for a permanent facility for homeless people in transition at the Lewis Road complex formerly occupied by the Association for Retarded Citizens.

The program Jenks directs is called RAIN--River-dwellers Aid Intercity Network. In a hand-me-down county building near Camarillo Airport, RAIN operates a transitional living facility dedicated to getting the homeless, most of them families with kids, off the street and back on track toward a happier life. At present 56 people--including 30 children--get a warm, secure place to sleep along with help to combat substance abuse, find jobs and housing, and overcome other problems that stand in the way of self-sufficiency.

Since RAIN was created in late 1997 to assist people who lived in the Ventura and Santa Clara river bottoms, it has served 438 men, women and children from throughout the county.

At the shelter last week, Jenks discussed the program’s past, present and future with Doug Adrianson and Sarah Holeman, editors of the Ventura County Perspective pages of The Times Ventura County Edition.

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Question: How does this operation fit into the big picture of trying to help the homeless in Ventura County?

Answer: Back in 1995, the HERO [Homeless Employment Resource Operation] program in Ventura was the first time anybody really took a look at transitional living. There had always been cold-weather shelters, but they were short-term, never with any services provided, just a warm bed for the night. When the first flooding happened in ‘95, the city of Ventura and the county kind of got together to deal with the immediate problem. They plucked all the people out of the river bottom and all of a sudden the cold-weather shelter was bursting at the seams. Randy Feltman, who was then at the mental health agency, pulled together this whole concept of a one-stop shop--let’s bring all the services to them and see if we can’t resolve some of the issues.

We ended up out at Camarillo State Hospital, got some FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] funds to see us through, and we saw that it could work. We also found out very quickly that it wasn’t going to work for everybody. There are a number of people on the streets, living in the riverbeds, who choose to be there. Anything we offer them, they’re not going to accept. It’s just not what they want. But it will work for the ones who just need help.

When HERO was going, we tried to get it extended but there wasn’t much interest. It had been truly thrown together with all of us agreeing on the short term to manage it and the city of Ventura pretty much paying the freight. So it was dismantled and went by the wayside.

When this came up this last time, in the back of my mind I was thinking, “OK, they’re going to ask us to do this again for these people in the river,” but what they did was ask us to also include last year’s Oxnard-Ventura warming shelter.

We knew we were going to take in some families so we set aside a wing for them. I remember walking through there about a week before that part was due to open, on Dec. 1, and saying to [Project Manager Diana May-Vogelbaum], “If we could just get one or two families with some cute kids, the press will love us and we’ll be there.” Well, the first family through the door had eight children, eight little blond stairsteps, and we joked, ‘OK, that’s enough!’ but they never stopped coming. Everyone was stunned, they’d never seen the families at any of the cold-weather shelters.

It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out: In a cold-weather shelter, a warehouse situation, you don’t want to put your kids next to some who-knows-what. But here, they had heard, we had individual rooms and families weren’t separated, there was school and other services. They were coming out of vans and out from under trees and they just keep coming. We have a waiting list of more than 30.

So in the big picture we see ourselves as one of, hopefully, a number of transitional living facilities. They keep talking about a “continuum of care” that runs from emergency sheltering to transitional living and then to low-cost, affordable housing. We’re trying to get that middle part nailed down but someone has to deal with the emergency sheltering end, and then we really have to take a look at the other.

Many Mansions has transitional living; they’re full and have a waiting list. Salvation Army’s got a waiting list. Project Understanding’s got a waiting list--you can’t build rooms fast enough. But with a little luck we can get this up and running and get a steady funding stream coming in, get the building secured, and then hopefully turn it over to a nonprofit to operate so the county isn’t in the business forever. That is our ultimate goal.

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Q: How is Supervisor Kathy Long’s countywide task force on homelessness doing?

A: They’re still in the educational phase. There were so many misconceptions out there--Ventura was thinking this, Simi was thinking that, the county was doing something else. I think it’s been good, just so everybody hears all of the different programs. I think now they’re really going to knuckle down and start to come up with some answers.

There’s no one easy answer. We could go back to what we were doing at Cam State and take in hundreds, and we’re still not going to solve the problem. We’ve got to have residential drug and alcohol treatment programs available on demand, not just detox beds but full treatment programs. Until that component is there, that whole segment of the population is not going to be able to move forward. We do need some kind of sheltering or something to do with these people after the winter shelters close or they’re all going to go back to the rivers or the trees or wherever they were living, and then you lose them for the season. Once we have options in place, then we’ll look for police agencies to get a little tougher. Right now, it’s real difficult to get tough when you’ve got no alternative.

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Q: Where would the steady revenue stream for this come from?

A: Probably a combination of state and federal grants, hopefully some private grants. With the change of leadership in Sacramento, we’re seeing some money freed up. Congress has put a little more money into Housing and Urban Development at the federal level. But I think you’re going to have to look at some creative things like redevelopment set-asides from various cities, used in a cooperative effort. All cities have money set aside for transitional living--and for low-cost housing, let’s not forget that. It’s definitely a regional problem. We’ve had clients from every city in the county.

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Q: The city of Ventura took a lot of heat for the way it forced this countywide look at the problem, but it seems to have accomplished a worthy thing.

A: Yes, otherwise I think the board might have allowed us to shut down. The tactics may have been a little rough but it did accomplish something. It got everybody to the table talking about it and that has not happened before.

Look at Simi. They set up their own committee, they are where Ventura was 10 years ago, as far as really looking at it, but they aren’t going to have to reinvent the wheel. All of this has been done, so they can learn from it.

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Q: What will it take to actually forge a coordinated regional approach to this?

A: There’s going to have to be some local stuff because you’ve got local issues with emergency sheltering. But the cities don’t have the resources to bring all the services in. To expect the cities to do it all alone is ludicrous. It’s got to be a joint effort.

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Q: How did you, director of the county’s Animal Regulation Department, wind up overseeing a transitional living shelter for homeless people and families?

A: Well, when this whole thing came about in 1997, it all started with Flood Control calling the city of Oxnard and the Sheriff’s Department, saying, “We’re going to do some clearance work in the Santa Clara River before the El Nino storms come, and there’s a bunch of homeless people there so we need to get them out.” The Sheriff’s Department called me and said, “We’re going to roust out a bunch of homeless guys, and they all have dogs. Will you help?” And I said, “Well . . . yeah . . . but why don’t we get everybody together like we did with HERO and see if we can come up with something better than just rousting them. Where are they gonna go?” That’s how it all got started.

Well, we went to the meeting and we had again Randy Feltman and Steve Kaplan--all the usual cast of characters--but Randy had moved on to CalWORKS, Steve was in the middle of [reorganizing the county’s mental health care structure] . . . so they sort of looked around the room to see who else was left who had done this before. I was sitting in the back and they were all staring at me, so I said, “OK, I’ll do it. It’s my turn.” The county does things that way. And I was thinking it was going to be short-term--through March [1998] and then out of there. But I wouldn’t change any of it.

They had talked about moving it over to the Human Services Agency but, let’s face it, right now is not a good time to be doing any kind of merging . . . so right now it works better just sort of sitting out there. It’s just weird enough that, even if they don’t remember all the details, they do remember, “It’s that homeless program at the dog pound.”

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Q: Are there people who don’t like the idea?

A: Yes, a few of the service providers took offense at first. They felt it was demeaning to our clients here.

But our clients didn’t feel that, because we’re taking care of their dogs too. They saw the connection right away. We’ve been dealing with a lot of these people for many years, through providing veterinary care to their pets. So they trusted my people more than they trusted the social workers.

We keep it as separated as we can. Most people don’t realize that this is one of two shelters that I operate--an animal shelter and a transitional living shelter. When you look at it, who else in the county has the experience of operating a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week program? The sheriff, the hospital and me.

Both shelters provide food and medical care--the basic needs are the same, though the delivery is different. And at the time we get them, the people are as dependent on us as the animals are.