Youth Shelter Dedicating New Facility Built With Donations

Troubled teens looking for guidance in Los Alamitos used to meet with counselors in the dining room, on the back patio, and even on the front porch of the large, renovated house on Reagan Street that is the Casa Youth Shelter.

Shelter officials and volunteers will hold a dedication ceremony Tuesday to celebrate the completion of a new addition to the center for runaways and abused children.

The recently completed, 2,000-square-foot addition will provide the shelter’s kids with meeting rooms, a large community hall and offices for the center’s small staff.

The $360,000 addition took nearly six months to complete. Shelter officials said the debt-free center has been built, furnished and landscaped without public assistance.

“We had just outgrown our britches,” said Gena Evans, executive assistant at the shelter. “That’s because the program is so popular and is doing so well. So now we have this brand spankin’ new facility, funded from the private sector--no tax dollars!”

The shelter currently has 12 beds to provide temporary shelter for teens. It has never been closed in its 22 years, said Evans. It has provided 72,000 bed-nights for more than 8,500 youths.

“That’s 72,000 success stories,” Evans said. “The streets really are mean streets and we don’t want anything to happen to them.”

Over half of the children who find their way to the shelter are victims of physical or sexual abuse, and almost 80% have parents who are alcoholics.

The shelter has always provided individual, group and family counseling for its temporary wards, but has had to do so in a makeshift fashion, having people gather wherever there was space available at the house. The addition should ease the problem.

The shelter’s old, one-room office is now being used to staff the 24-hour, crisis hotline.

The new building was funded by private sources, with significant donations from the Boeing Co., and the Carrie Estelle Doheny, Weingart and William Gillespie foundations. In addition, the center was built for cost by the Telep Construction Co. of Cypress.

But the new center would not exist if not for a donation by Ruby Hartoebben. The Seal Beach Leisure World resident who died in 1996 willed her entire $140,000 estate to the shelter.

“Ruby first visited us years ago,” Evans said. “She was impressed by what was being done here for the throw-away kids. She had no parents and was raised in an orphanage. It meant a lot to her to see what was going on here.”

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Chris Ceballos can be reached at (714) 966-7440.