<i> Lending a Helping Hand to Charities

Sister Anne, a slight woman, goes out in a van three days a week to bring food, toiletries, blankets and first aid to homeless women in MacArthur Park, Pico-Union, Echo Park and other areas near downtown Los Angeles.

If they want help, she brings them to the emergency center of the Good Shepherd Center for Homeless Women in Echo Park. Thirty women are cared for there. If they choose to get off the streets, they may move to the nearby Good Shepherd residence where 30 women live for three to six months and get training and help in looking for work and a new life.

Sister Anne, who came to the United States in 1975 from Vietnam along with a company of Catholic nuns, estimates that over 14 years she has brought more than 5,000 women through the Good Shepherd center. The center also serves 23 once-homeless mothers and 50 children at two other facilities in Hollywood and Echo Park. It is building an additional Women’s Village for an education and day-care center and long-term housing for disabled homeless women.

The needs for care in Los Angeles are mind-boggling. There are 84,000 homeless people living on the streets of Los Angeles every night, say charitable foundations that contribute to the upkeep of the Good Shepherd center.

Meeting such needs demands money. Good Shepherd has an annual operating budget of $1.5million, 30% of it financed by grants from federal, state and local government. For the rest, the center depends on help from the businesspeople who make up its 31-member advisory board--including Phyllis Currie, president of Pasadena Water & Power Co., attorney Maureen Binder of the Beverly Hills law firm Larwill & Wolfe and Susan Campoy, owner of the Julienne restaurant in San Marino.

The board lends budgeting and management skills to the center and opens doors for foundations and businesses to help. “Ralphs grocery company has been very generous, and so has [furniture store chain] IKEA, whose employees built us a kitchen,” says Sister Julia Mary, who founded the center in 1984 after years of working with homeless people in downtown Los Angeles.

There is a vibrant network of business and professional people in Southern California serving on many informal advisory boards for institutions and schools serving poor communities. Their efforts point to needs that could be addressed by the Times Holiday Campaign, which is raising funds for the needy with the McCormick Tribune Foundation, which will put up 50 cents for each dollar raised in local contributions.

A main focus of business aid is education. “This is the true war on poverty,” says Rev. Tracy O’Sullivan, pastor of St. Rafael’s Church in South-Central Los Angeles, which educates 292 students at St. Rafael’s school.

O’Sullivan relies on an advisory board that includes attorneys Winston McKesson and Dwight Bolden--prominent graduates of the school--as well as Anthony Chidoni of Credit Suisse First Boston in Century City and Robert Ibsen, a dentist and inventor of Rembrandt Toothpaste who grew up near the school.

The board is responsible for bringing in $100,000 of the school’s $800,000 annual budget, or almost as much as what the church’s owner, the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, contributes.

Nativity School, like many South Los Angeles schools, has a sponsor-a-student program through which businesspeople defray the $1,400 annual tuition for poor parents.

Charitable help from businesspeople is not only the province of religious institutions. The Los Angeles Unified School District has more than 500 businesses helping schools with contributions of employees’ time and skills as well as money. Similar efforts by firms in Orange County help schools there by funding music, art and science programs.

The aim is to give poor kids a good education and opportunity for the future. In East Los Angeles, Dolores Mission School was in disrepair physically and financially five years ago. So Patrick Nally, a senior vice president of Cushman & Wakefield, a Los Angeles real estate management firm, led a group of business volunteers in fixing its windows and roofs, installing computers and working on its budgets and accounting. It’s thriving today with 250 students, compared with 160 then.

“Anything that acquaints students with the world of work and the broader environment beyond their town or neighborhood is helpful,” says Theodore R. Mitchell, president of Occidental College and a nationally recognized expert on education.

Help also extends to higher education. Mt. Saint Mary’s College, which educates 2,000 young women from this region’s ethnically varied communities, is aided by nondenominational foundations. Donors include the Ahmanson, Carrie Estelle Doheny, James Irvine, Thomas & Dorothy Leavey, W.M. Keck and Ralph M. Parsons foundations.

But a worry shared by all care-giving institutions in Southern California is the departure of corporate headquarters and their philanthropic clout.

But Stephen McDonald, managing director of Trust Co. of the West, the L.A.-based investment firm acquired by France’s Societe Generale, advises worriers to recognize reality.

“This area has the economy of the 21st century, entrepreneurial and adaptive,” says McDonald, who is active in helping organizations for the homeless and for education.

“We have entrepreneurs working in foundations and in business,” he says. “They always find ways to get involved.”

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James Flanigan can be reached at jim.flanigan@latimes.com.