Agency to Acquaint More of County With Its Humane Concerns

As director of the Ventura County Commission on Human Concerns, Lee Riggan finds that her job never ends.

After hours, the Thousand Oaks great-grandmother may be on highway cleanup detail with a homeless client, selling donated goods at a Ventura swap meet to raise money or taking a night class to learn how to set up a commission Web page.

“You wish instead of 24 hours a day, you had 48 hours a day so you could do all these things,” said Riggan, 60.

Promoting dignity and self-sufficiency is central to the services that the Oxnard-based commission has provided since President Lyndon Johnson created its prototype in 1965 as part of his War on Poverty.

Still, after three decades, the commission operates in relative obscurity, one of the problems the commission is trying to address, Riggan said. As part of this effort, the group is planning regular presentations to local chambers of commerce starting in January, she said.

“Even though we’ve been around since 1965, people say, ‘I’ve never heard of you before,’ ” said Riggan, who started volunteering for the organization in 1973.

The commission’s low profile belies its impact.

The nonprofit commission serves about 59,000 people throughout the county each year, Riggan said. It will spend $1.9 million, mostly from grants, to provide legal services, medical attention and food, weatherize homes and help people pay their energy bills and rent and file tax returns. The commission also will continue to operate a drop-in center in Oxnard where the homeless can get hot meals, flu shots or job-hunting advice.

Guy Walker, a volunteer for the commission, said the agency helped get him off the streets.

“It helps a lot of poor people who are just scraping by,” Walker said. “All around, it’s helped many, many people.”

Local elected officials, representatives from the private sector, low-income residents and people who work with the poor make up the commission’s 15-member board. Current members include city council members Laura Flores Espinosa of Santa Paula, Murray Rosenbluth of Port Hueneme and Dean Maulhardt of Oxnard.

Sal Gonzalez, housing director for the city of Oxnard, gives the commission high marks. Three years ago, the Oxnard City Council decided to give another social services agency $25,000 to provide job training to homeless people. The agency declined the offer, Gonzalez said.

“They wouldn’t take the money,” he said. “This was a very high-risk group and they would have difficulty demonstrating the success rate that was being demanded of them.”

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City staff next asked the Commission on Human Concerns. Riggan didn’t hesitate to take on the project.

The commission set its sights on helping 10 people the first year, but it worked with 52 people. All the clients found housing and 71% got jobs. Gonzalez nominated the commission’s program for an Award of Merit from the National Assn. of Housing and Redevelopment Officials, and it won.

“They have been remarkable,” Gonzalez said.

Gonzalez also applauds the commission’s work in the area of housing, a particularly difficult problem today. With the economy booming, more people can afford housing, and Ventura County’s apartment vacancy rate hit its lowest level in history this year. The high demand has pushed up rental rates so high that it has become harder for those who still have low incomes to afford a place to live.

This means that it’s critical to keep families from losing their homes since it can be nearly impossible to find a new place to live and come up with a first and last month’s rent, Riggan said.

“One of the difficult things in the county is keeping people in housing, preventing them from being homeless,” Riggan said.

Walker didn’t want to talk about what led to his 16 years of homelessness, but he happily recalled what happened when the commission reached out to him. He joined and became president of the Breakfast Club, a group of mostly homeless men who donate their time to pick vegetables for Food Share, clean people’s yards and move furniture for seniors who are going into board-and-care homes.

Walker spent a year helping Les Goldberg, who founded the Breakfast Club when he was the commission board’s chairman, and other homeless volunteers renovate a fixer-upper in Ventura that Goldberg had donated. The volunteers turned it into the Goldberg House, where formerly homeless men stay in exchange for turning over part of their state aid checks to help pay bills.

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A man who once insisted he had no desire to leave the streets, Walker lived at the Goldberg House for a while and, on the day after Christmas last year, moved into his own place. The grandfather, who wouldn’t reveal his age, now earns money doing odd jobs.

Walker said the commission boosted his self-esteem by showing him how much he could help others. He now volunteers for Jewish Family Services, Food Share and for the commission. He works Sundays at the swap meet with Riggan and serves as an alternate board member for Goldberg.

There are many success stories like Walker’s. Then there are the stories that, so far, lack the happy endings. Riggan and the drop-in center staff recently sought out a client who has been struggling to get his GED after they heard he had started drinking again.

“He said it’s so hard, but he’s trying,” Riggan said. “It can be frustrating. Then I think to myself I’ve been trying to lose 50 pounds for so long. I just realize it’s as hard for them [to change] as it is for me to change that one behavior I don’t like about myself.”