DOING GOOD FOR GOODNESS SAKE Providing Help and Creating Hope
	DECEMBER 2003

by Solomon Belette and Deacon Gustavo Arteaga
Photos by Brad Shifflett

The young couple had several years earlier become participants in a long and noble American tradition; they had come to the East County seeking a better way of life for themselves and their small children. They were working hard to make this most typical American dream come true.

During the past year the husband had been laid off from his job, and the couple’s struggle had vacillated between difficult and desperate. Our Catholic Charities organization had leaped to their rescue, in providing them with employment services, counseling, and even, on several occasions, with some food that kept them from the horrible experience of sending their little children to bed hungry.

Now the young parents had been facing the dreary prospect of celebrating Christmas without Santa Claus. Fortunately, they had heard about our Project Joybell, which provides Christmas gifts for children. Now they were receiving from us the toys and books that on Christmas morning would fill their children’s hearts with joy and their mouths with laughter. As they took the shining gifts we saw the young couple’s own eyes, which had too often lately been dimmed by the weary effort of surviving in a declining economy, fill with shining tears of happiness.

There is a lot of payoff for us in our Catholic Charities work, but best of all, perhaps, is the expression that we often see on parent’s faces when they suddenly realize that their children will not be disappointed on Christmas morning. Sometimes they are speechless; they don’t know what to say in the light of the realization that someone cared enough for them to do this.

Source of Aid for Troubled Times
The Catholic Charities of the East Bay Family Service Center is a central facility serving Brentwood, Knightson, Bethel Island, Oakley, Byron, and Discovery Bay.

We’ve been in Brentwood for a little over a year. Before making the move we had considered opening an East County facility for almost a decade. We wanted to be here because of the tremendous growth in East County. Such growth, of course, is always accompanied by increased demand for the services that we provide.

The other part of the decision to open the Brentwood center is our desire to be of service to our community. Several East County parishes had been requesting us to come and help them meet the growing needs in their communities. We are glad to be able to respond to those requests, and to begin establishing services in this area.

The Contra Costa Food Bank provided another impetus for creating our center when it specifically requested Catholic Charities to assume emergency food distribution for East County. We had been doing this in Alameda and were well positioned to replicate in East County the services we had been performing in Alameda County.

At the service center we serve more than 200 people during the course of a single week. We provide emergency food assistance to needy individuals and families three days a week. We augment the food we receive from the Contra Costa Food Bank with food donations from local parishes including, St. Anne’s, Immaculate Heart of Mary, and St. Anthony’s in Oakley. The donations from the churches help us to provide more variety to the food from the Food Bank. The parishes provide clothing, as well.

During the times when we provide direct assistance we conduct a careful assessment of the needs of each recipient. When we discover families who require other things than food, we are able to link them to other services that can meet their needs. A migrant worker family might come for a meal, for example, and if we note that the wife is pregnant, we will refer her to an agency that can assist her during her pregnancy.

Touched by the Problems that Touch our People
We don’t just walk through the tasks of providing help for people who are in need. Reaching out with assistance to needy people is a central-life issue for all of us. It is beautiful to be among the people, to help them, and to reach out and touch them. We get emotional about this. We have genuine heartfelt concern for people who have been laid off, who are hungry, and who are losing resources they need to be able to survive, let alone thrive, in this wealthy area.

People come to us who are starving, or at least malnourished. They need clothing. They need things for their kids. We can’t just conduct this ministry “by the numbers.” People’s lives are complicated and their situation varies greatly from one family to another. Our ministry includes services to at least 15 people who are living on the street. Every hungry person who walks through our doors gets something to eat.

When people come into our facility and say, “Hey, brother, can you give me a hand!” Catholic Charities usually can make the beautiful response, “Yes, my brother, we can give you a hand.” Our services extend far beyond helping people merely to survive.

The decline of farming has taken jobs away that these people depend upon. Our mission as an agency is not only to provide direct services, which we have been doing for more than 50 years, but we are hoping to begin employment services, including such things as training on computers, literacy, life skills.

Our hope and intention is to accompany people in accessing those services essential to getting themselves out of poverty and onto the road to self-sufficiency. We do this through proactive case management, employment and training, housing assistance, immigration, and counseling.

We also provide technical assistance to other emerging nonprofit agencies to help bring them up to the capacity-building level that will help them do, in some places, the things that we can’t do there ourselves.

Providing Christmas Joys through Christmas Toys
We conduct Project Joybell during the Holiday season. Some dedicated volunteers working with Catholic Schools collect toys for children. As in past years, we will be administering the program, identifying needy families that we have located through our Case Management program, and then matching the toys to the families, as appropriate.

We are often dealing with parents who have a sense of shame because they lack the financial resources to purchase Christmas gifts for their children. We don’t have words to tell what it means to us to help these people meet this particular need. We give the toys to the adults rather than to the children, so the parents can do the Santa Claus thing and get the praise from their children.

We seek to remain anonymous. We don’t want to get credit. We don’t want the children to be thankful to Catholic Charities; we want them to be thankful to Santa, or even better to their parents. That way we don’t just make the children happy, but we make the whole family happy.

Last year we served about 2,000 families with Project Joybell toys. Project Joybell is community driven. The ideal is to not depend upon people in Oakland, for example, to meet the needs of residents here in East County. If you want to participate in helping make some families happy this Holiday Season, feel free to contact us. You can give donations, you can come and help personally. If you want, you can also get the name of a family from us, buy them toys, and go play Santa Claus. Watch the kids’ eyes light up for yourself.

One of the fundamentals we live by is the principle of universal human dignity. Every human being counts. We’re living out our faith completely and effectively when we are able to provide help and create hope in restoring a person’s dignity and saving his or her pride. We lift ourselves as we give a hand to others.

For further information or to make a donation, contact Deacon Gustavo Arteaga. (gustavo@cceb.org. 925-516-3880 X211)