For Charities, Aid Comes As Feast, Famine

Just before serving Thanksgiving dinner on skid row, the volunteers gathered for their orientation.

“I’m Dick Riordan,” the gubernatorial hopeful and former Los Angeles mayor said with a grin and a wave.

“I’m Bonnie Hunt,” the actress said as she prepared to put on an apron.

“I’m John Tesh,” the musician and former “Entertainment Tonight” host said, wearing jeans for the dirty work.

Thanksgiving and Christmas are the most popular days to help the homeless, say shelter staffers--so popular that the centers typically issue invitations to celebrities to take part.

This season, the Los Angeles Mission said it employed 350 volunteers for its Thanksgiving meal, but turned down 200 volunteers a day in the two weeks prior to Thanksgiving. The sign-up list for Christmas help was full at least two weeks in advance.

But although the holidays bring crowds of volunteers descending on the mission district and the shelters that house and feed the homeless, during the rest of the year they largely disappear.

The reason, according to staff at the shelters, is partly that the public shies away when confronted with the everyday realities of skid row. But another part of the problem is that the centers have few resources to recruit or process the volunteer effort.

“It might sound strange, but we don’t have the help to get help,” said Ray Alvarez, director of the Lamp Day Center.

Keisha Chinn, Los Angeles Mission volunteer director, said there’s no way to answer all 200 calls a day herself, so this year they turned to a recorded message that said: “We have filled all volunteer positions for Thanksgiving dinner--including [shifts for] expected cancellations.” Callers interested in helping on other days were directed to another extension to leave a message.

“No one wants to be mean or turn [volunteers] away, but this is what happens,” said Jorja Prover, a UCLA professor who brings students each quarter to skid row. “We are now in an era when resources for the homeless are shrinking and the homeless population is not shrinking.”

Prover said that bringing in more volunteers would require resources that the shelters lack. Some of the centers said they simply didn’t have the staff to galvanize a volunteer effort.

Alvarez said his staff isn’t organized to integrate volunteers. “We collaborate with UCLA, but everything else seems impossible.”

No one questions that the organizations desperately need the services volunteers would provide.

Carmen Berrera, a 25-year-old who has worked free for the past two years at the Volunteers of America center on San Julian Street, said, “It seems like there are never enough volunteers” to do cleanup, laundry and food preparation or pour coffee.

Three months ago, the paid staff there was cut from 31 members to 21, program manager Connie Tyson said. The center serves 300 to 400 homeless people a day with food, shelter and counseling.

When a reporter went to ask what volunteer opportunities were available, he was initially told they didn’t have any.

Volunteers of America officials, like those at other centers, say many people only want to help on Thanksgiving and Christmas, when shelters don’t need all the help that is offered.

The rest of the year, “This is a population that a lot of people don’t want to deal with,” said Alvarez, whose center has 18 beds, food service and showers serving about 300 homeless monthly. However, Alvarez said, the agency has never actively sought volunteers.

At most missions, paid staff members try to do everything with limited resources. But UCLA’s Prover said it is a loss to the homeless as well to as the communities that want to help them if volunteers don’t reach the needy.

For people who donate their time, Prover said, the rewards are that the work “demystifies the homeless. They are no longer some abstract social program.”

She said her students form lasting relationships with homeless people once they’ve crossed the crucial threshold of becoming part of an organization that serves them. Without telephone, postal or e-mail service, the volunteers learn to maintain their relationships with the homeless in some of the ways that the homeless do themselves: by learning faces and the schedules people keep.

Yetta Young’s job at the Weingart Center is to bring in volunteers who would come away with that sort of lasting commitment. She registered her center on Web sites that match volunteers with organizations and began getting responses from volunteers whom she funneled into jobs at the center.

The center provides food, education programs and short-term housing for 642 clients at a time. Since January, Young has built a staff of 30 volunteers.

“There is a great need,” Young said. “All of the departments need help and they ask me for it.”

When made aware of the Weingart Center’s approach to recruiting volunteers, Alvarez said, “We’d like to move in that direction.”

Still, the work of signing up volunteers is often frustrating. Young said volunteers sometimes make an appointment to see her and then don’t show up. When she checks her phone, “There will be a message from the person that they came by and saw how bad it is down here and didn’t realize what they were getting themselves into.”

Both Young and Prover said prospective volunteers need to do their homework on what homeless culture is like before offering their help.

Prover suggested that reading information on a few Web sites or in books can get someone started. Renting videos such as “The Fisher King” and “The Caveman’s Valentine” can also help prospective volunteers, she said.

For the volunteers who donated their time this Thanksgiving, some said they were only getting started.

Securities trader Bob Sievers was among the volunteers who joined celebrities for at the Los Angeles Mission’s Thanksgiving meal, where 4,000 homeless people were served. The mission invited his family because he is a steady donor.

He pointed to the downtown skyscrapers, several blocks away. “I used to work there, but I never came this far away from the freeway. I never realized there were so many homeless here,” he said.

Some of the homeless said volunteers bring a connection to the rest of the world that paid staff members can’t always provide.

Ezell Williams handles publicity for the Los Angeles Mission. He was once homeless and remembers the Christmas meal in 1995.

Williams said his birthday that year passed unnoticed. That is, until someone mentioned it to radio DJ Shadoe Stevens, who was volunteering on one of the celebrity days, and Stevens crafted Williams’ only birthday card that year.

“I have it today. . . . I don’t think I’ve ever held onto something for so long,” Williams said.