A Moving Day for Homeless Center

The move Saturday of Ventura County’s new homeless center to the outskirts of Camarillo only spanned four miles. But for families and individuals who call the shelter home, it covered a lot more ground than that.

Aided by dozens of volunteers, nearly 50 men, women and children relocated from cramped quarters at Camarillo Airport to a fully renovated, two-story building near Cal State Channel Islands.

The move, held up for more than a year by red tape and construction delays, will provide immediate benefits. The refurbished, 20,000-square-foot building has an expansive commercial kitchen and dining hall, putting an end to preparing meals on outdoor barbecues and requiring residents to eat in shifts for lack of room.

It has two playrooms for children, two rooms for respite health care and two laundry rooms that will end the shelter’s once-a-week trips to the Laundromat. The Lewis Road facility also will expand from 65 to 95 the number of people who can live at the shelter, the county’s only transitional living facility for the homeless.

Program officials expect to reach capacity within a week of opening at the new site, which will continue to offer services ranging from parenting classes and job training to adult literacy classes and after-school tutoring for kids.

“I think it’s going to be great,” said 48-year-old shelter resident Susan Roberts, who landed at the center three weeks ago after a five-month hospital stay.

Volunteers helped Roberts and other shelter residents pack and transport their belongings Saturday morning, easing the transition to the new facility.

“I’d be on the streets if it wasn’t for this place,” Roberts said. “A lot of us need something like this.”

The RAIN shelter program -- officially known as the River-dwellers Aid Intercity Network -- was created in late 1997 to assist people who lived in the shantytowns that once dotted the Ventura and Santa Clara river bottoms.

It was patterned after a successful assistance program launched in 1995 after storm waters ripped out homeless encampments along the Ventura River, displacing more than 100 people.

One man was killed during the flooding and a dozen other river dwellers had to be plucked by rescuers from the rising waters.

To prevent a similar occurrence, officials started the shelter project in 1997 in an unused wing of Camarillo State Hospital -- now Cal State Channel Islands -- before moving it months later to the airport.

Almost immediately, officials began to look for ways to expand the program and turn it into a permanent social service network.

Scraping together grants and other funding, officials raised about $1.4 million to renovate the new facility. But it took at least another half-million dollars to refurbish the 1930s-era building, a sum attained through gifts, in-kind donations and hours of sweat by a small army of volunteers.

“Everyone stepped up to do their part, it was so wonderful to see,” said program manager Diana Vogelbaum. “There are so many people out there who are homeless for any number of reasons, and this program can make the most enormous difference. It can totally change people’s lives.”

Program officials had initially targeted fall 2002 for the move, but were forced to change the date several times even as volunteers worked feverishly to get the job done.

CM Concrete in Camarillo laid concrete for free while Ventura-based J & S Excavating provided free landscaping. HomeAid, a nonprofit initiative of the Greater Los Angeles/Ventura Building Industry Assn., renovated the second floor of the building at no cost.

The Camarillo Rotary Club donated $15,000 to purchase new playground equipment while members of the Camarillo United Methodist Church brought their sewing machines to stitch blankets. Youngsters from the Boy Scouts, California Youth Authority and the Oxnard Job Corps also pitched in.

“It took longer than we thought it was going to take, but we found our way through it,” said Jerry DeVillers, who serves on the board of directors for RAIN’s fund-raising arm and volunteered many hours himself. “It’s a great cause and people have risen to the occasion. If you can’t sell RAIN, you can’t sell anything.”

Westlake resident Merrie Powell was among those who contributed money to furnish one of the shelter’s 22 rooms. Sponsors paid between $2,500 and $12,000 to outfit the rooms. And like Powell, many did so in memory of loved ones.

Powell got involved with RAIN through her work with the Camarillo Quilters Assn., which provides quilts to the shelter and other charitable organizations. She used money she inherited from her parents, Clay and Carolyn Campbell, to sponsor a room in their memory. Then she took it a step further, asking to supply quilts to the first family to move into the room and then every family to come after.

“I think they are a really good group,” Powell said. “It just seemed like a good thing to do.”