Four nonprofits break bread with community at shared campus in Santa Ana
Santa Ana has its first female mayor in the city’s 153-year history.
In a way, Valerie Amezcua was the perfect person to welcome people to a nonprofit community open house Wednesday — featuring four female CEOs — in the city she serves.
“I go to a lot of things, but it’s very personal to me because you’re touching the lives of children,” Amezcua said. “Children are a priority to me. They always have been, they always will be.”
Four nonprofits that serve Orange County — Big Brothers Big Sisters of Orange County and the Inland Empire, Families Forward, Girls Inc. of Orange County and the Orange County Human Relations Council — now operate from the same hub in Santa Ana.
They held the open house at their office, located at 1801 E. Edinger Ave., not far off the 55 Freeway, to showcase the services they provide the community.
“One of the coolest things that has happened over the last decade is the purchasing of this building,” Big Brothers Big Sisters chief executive Sloane Keane said. “I was not CEO yet, I was running development, and I went out to look for an 18,000-square-foot building. We said, ‘We found the perfect home, and it is 50,000 square feet.’”
The other nonprofits have gradually filled the space. OC Human Relations moved there in 2017, followed by Girls Inc., then Families Forward last year.
All of them do in fact have female leaders, which is a point of pride.
“For us, it’s standing together as women, as leaders in our community,” Girls Inc. chief executive Lucy Santana said. “I hope we’re kind of starting that. We want to continue to break down those barriers.”
Santana said Girls Inc. recently celebrated 170 girls who are going to college.
OC Human Relations CEO Alison Edwards joked that the hub was just 2 miles from her house, so she was sold on moving there. In seriousness, Edwards knows that having all of these services down the hall from each other makes a lot of sense.
“If someone needs to report a hate crime, these folks know that they can refer to us,” Edwards said. “If we have a young person in one of our schools that’s struggling, we know that we can connect them with a mentor. If we find out they’re at risk of losing housing, we can connect them with Families Forward. We’re really running in the same spaces of supporting youth and families, so it’s just a natural alignment to all be together and support one another the same way we want to support our clients.”
OC Human Relations does important work in schools, especially coming out of the coronavirus pandemic. She said they are receiving more calls around the use of racial and ethnic slurs on campus than they have in some time, which has been a challenge.
Wednesday’s event featured tours available of each suite, with Big Brothers Big Sisters and OC Human Relations on the first floor and Girls, Inc. and Families Forward on the second floor. The event was catered by Bracken’s Kitchen, another nonprofit based in Garden Grove.
Amezcua presented certificates of recognition to each corporation, and a representative from state Sen. Tom Umberg’s office was there to do the same.
Families Forward chief executive Madelynn Hirneise said her organization, which was founded in 1984 and works to end family homelessness around the county, had started to outgrow its space in Irvine. Moving into the hub in Santa Ana seemed like a natural fit, and Hirneise knew that from her personal experience in Big Brothers Big Sisters, the largest youth mentoring organization in the country.
She said she was a “Big” in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program when she was in college. Her “Little” was part of a family of seven, which lived together in a one-bedroom apartment.
“She would tell me about housing insecurity and her mom and some of the struggles,” Hirneise said. “I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know who to connect to. If I connected with my program manager, did they have a resource? Now there is a resource, and it’s on site. I think that makes a big difference.”
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