Aid Brigade Gets Rolling

There was the man with agoraphobia who could leave the house only if his 4-year-old daughter accompanied him. There was the unemployed mother of two with a sick daughter, no insurance, a husband who had been deported and no place to turn. And there was the young single mother trying to forge a brighter future for herself and her son.

For the past year, Aileen Ramirez has witnessed all types of life’s challenges and has dispensed some helpful advice. From the back of a trailer.

Ramirez is a resource specialist with Fullerton’s Mobile Family Resource Center, a portable treasure trove of social and health services for those in need.

Concerned that families in poor neighborhoods are skipping on important counseling and health services for lack of transportation, a collaboration by Orange County public and private agencies is bringing such services to their doorstep, or at least to the nearest corner.

“We are their link to services,” said Ramirez, herself a former welfare mother. “I wish there [had been] something like this when I needed it.”

The year-old program has been serving households in Fullerton’s “poverty belt,” an area between the Riverside Freeway and a downtown dotted with low-income apartment complexes and modest single-family homes. Most of the residents are Latin American immigrants, isolated by economics, language and lack of transportation, program organizers said.

The project, a partnership of 15 Orange County public and private agencies, is among a fast-growing number of mobile programs locally and nationwide designed to get social services to those who need them.

St. Joseph Hospital in Orange has a mobile X-ray service it uses to serve the county’s poor and uninsured. St. Jude Hospital in Fullerton sponsors two medical vans, one for pediatric care and one for adult and prenatal care, that travel around four north county cities during the week. The free program immunizes 6,000 children a year. An additional 5,000 receive basic medical services.

“We had considered fixed sites, but in many areas we felt mobile units would provide better access,” said Barry Ross, vice president of St. Jude’s Healthy Community Programs. “We are the safety net for people without insurance.”

The hospital is a partner in the Fullerton project and receives many of its referrals from the Mobile Family Resource Center, a 20-foot-by-10-foot white trailer partitioned in half for office and interviewing spaces.

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The center, itself, is spartan but stocked with information on everything from parenting classes and employment resources to domestic-violence counseling. All services are free for those who can’t afford to pay.

It is a first stop for families with limited English and in need of help navigating the wide web of nonprofit and public agencies. The program is funded by government grants and money from Proposition 10, the state tobacco tax fund.

Ramirez, who is bilingual, assesses the families’ needs and can arrange for on-site counseling or home sessions or can refer families to other agencies. If the families can’t afford transportation, they are provided bus passes or Ramirez often drives them.

“The need is tremendous,” said Terry Cummings, assistant director of community services for Children’s Bureau of Southern California, another partner agency. “We would like to have family-resource centers within walking distance in every community. But in the meantime, this is another method of distributing services.”

Last year, a man and his 4-year-old daughter approached the trailer when it was parked near Orangethorpe Elementary School, Cummings said. The man explained his daughter was his security blanket of sorts. He could not venture outside without her.

After receiving weeks of counseling in the trailer, he was able to attend sessions by himself and eventually go to a therapy center.

“We lifted such a burden off that little girl,” Cummings said.

Nearly 1,500 people have gone through the mobile center since it opened last January, Cummings said. The Children’s Bureau, a private nonprofit agency that specializes in parenting education and child-abuse prevention, has served 66 families with at-home counseling.

“This is so helpful,” said Elizabeth Aguilar, 23, a Fullerton single mother. “I am unemployed and I get very depressed and desperate sometimes.”

Aguilar visited the trailer when it was stopped near Valencia Park Elementary School last week, her 3-year-old son, Michael, in tow. The center connected her with a family counselor, who visits periodically and helps her cope with her anxieties so she won’t take them out on her son, she said.

Organizers said they picked the central Fullerton area because of its high density and poverty level. The seven elementary schools in the target area account for nearly half of the enrollment for the Fullerton Elementary School District. An average of 72.8% of the students in those schools live in poverty, according to district’s office of child welfare and attendance.

Many of the residents are working-class poor with no health insurance and limited knowledge about the resources available to them. Some are fearful too.

“A lot of the moms are undocumented and afraid,” Ramirez said. “They don’t believe that we can help them.”

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Late last year, a woman approached Ramirez in the trailer. Her 4-year-old daughter was sick, and she had nowhere to turn. The family had been in the U.S. illegally and the husband had recently been deported to Mexico, Ramirez said.

Without money to treat her daughter, the mother was desperate. But when Ramirez offered to take them just five blocks down to St. Jude’s mobile medical van, the woman hesitated.

“She was thinking, ‘What’s behind this?’ ” Ramirez said. But eventually, the woman relented.

The little girl was treated for a minor fever, and given a hepatitis shot as a precaution. Ramirez also got the woman and her daughters something extra--Christmas presents from local charities. The woman and her two daughters are now reunited with her husband in Guadalajara.

“She sent me her address,” a smiling Ramirez said. “She says she wants me to visit and that I will always be part of her family.”