ATTORNEYS FOR THE POOR Catholic Charities is Taking a Stand Against East County Poverty
	DECEMBER 2005

by Solomon Belette
Photos by Russell Byrne

The original charter for CCEB (Catholic Charities of the East Bay) contained the words, “attorney for the poor.” The phrase is a good term to describe the nature of our work. We are engaged in providing a voice for the area poor. We embrace the law of love by taking the victim’s side. Reaching out to the poor with the help they need is a moral burden that our faith lays upon us all.

I’ve dedicated my professional life to reaching out to people in need. We achieve our highest state as human beings, I think, when we are helping to shoulder the burden of any fellow human being who is being bowed down by the circumstances of life.

“A servant who is ill demands more attention than a son who is not,” said Thomas Aquinas. And he said it correctly.

I was born and raised in Ethiopia. My parents taught me both by word and example to care for those in need, and I have been part of the church’s outreach to the poor for more than two decades.

My Road into Service
I came to America to study sociology at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota in 1972 and then pursued graduate studies at Michigan State University. I came to California for what I intended to be a short visit, but ended up getting a job with CCSD (Catholic Charities in San Diego). My initial task was to provide management oversight of the refugee resettlement program that was going on in the early 1980s. Thousands of people were flooding into the United States fleeing the indescribable conditions going on at that time in some African and Asian countries.

I got hooked on the services that the Catholic Charities organization was providing, and felt that my actions were having a genuine effect in reducing the anguish that these impoverished people were experiencing. I ran the Refugee Resettlement Program of CCSD for seven years, and subsequently worked for five years with the National Office of Refugee and Migration Services in Washington, DC.

My experience in Washington served to broaden my focus beyond the refugee and migration issues that I had previously worked on. I was responsible for putting together a major publication called Update and served as its editor.

Update was the visible, public manifestation of our work. Our services were as big as a continent, since we offered support functions to the network of Catholic charities that spread across the United States. It was good work! The affiliated agencies appreciated the technical assistance we gave them, as well as the information we could provide to help them get their job done.

I found the work to be personally rewarding, but I really longed to get more personally involved with the services being provided. So in 1997 I returned to the Bay Area, where I began to serve with CCEB (Catholic Charities of the East Bay).

Providing Services for
the East Bay Poor
My attention became deeper and more focused as I became involved in Catholic Charities’ broad spectrum of services for the poor, including such things as employment, training, family literacy, and mental health services.

When I took it over, the CCEB penetration to the entire area was somewhat undeveloped. We were supposedly ministering to all of East County, but the program was Oakland-centric and we had not expanded our services into the other parts of the area. We began cultivating relationships with other non-profit organizations working throughout the county. We wanted to work with people on the ground, do some needs-assessment tasks, and increase our visibility.

We were seeking to become part of the wider East County community, and to establish relationships that would open up doors to projects that we could manage and fund. We knew we needed to expand beyond Alameda and to move into East County.

Brentwood became an important place on the CCEB map a few years ago following extensive research in which we were trying to identify an ideal location for our services. We eventually located a place on First Street, in a building housing several other agencies.

As our program expanded beyond emergency food distribution, we required more space and finally secured our current Brentwood location at 654 Third Street. Our services have expanded; more clients are coming to us seeking food assistance, immigration services, and family counseling. Those programs have become a magnet for other new clients.

Opening the Hidden Door to East County’s Poor
You can see homeless people in San Francisco lying on street corners, but East County poverty has a particularly incognito character. The poor are among us without making their presence felt by people in the mainstream culture. They are an invisible host whose numbers include off-season migrant workers, seniors, women, and children.

All the area’s new homes and businesses serve to hide local poverty from our view. People aren’t sleeping on the street, but neither are they sleeping on a bed or even on a mattress. Many of them are sleeping on the floor — for example, 20 people are living in a small house that would seem to us crowded with five occupants. And the neighbors often don’t even know!

The situation is becoming worse. Our national poverty rate rose to 17 percent, and infant mortality in America now ranks 43rd among the nations of the world.

We are increasing our visibility; East County residents are becoming aware of us through a number of communication channels. Some of our clients are parishioners, others are finding there way to us through a combination of referrals and outreach activities, including a seasonal newsletter with the catchy title Catholic Charities of the East Bay. We attempt to identify the needs of our new clients on a case-by-case basis and to provide the assistance that they really require.

The generous response of Americans to catastrophes tends to be our most natural way of showing charity. We often give because the giving feels good. The mayor of New Orleans said that all the donated clothing following Katrina could raise the level of New Orleans so high they wouldn’t even need levees. A lot of those clothes were new; they had been given at some sacrifice by people who were doing what they could to help.

However, it is not enough to be charitable. We have to provide response to disasters, but we must go beyond the short-term emergency mode to provide the poor with the self-sufficiency skills required for the long term. We have to help people navigate their environment and move towards taking control of their own lives.

Providing both Fishing
Rods and Fish
If a family is hungry, we give them a bag of groceries, of course. However, our most important goal is to help the people to help themselves. The Bishop of Oakland, Reverend Allen Vigneron, put it best when he said that we always need to work on behalf of the poor — but also think how to encourage the poor to work on their own behalf.

Providing for this kind of social lift means that we must concentrate on such things as training people with concrete skills, helping them develop resumés, coaching them in effective interview techniques, and teaching people to dress appropriately for the kind of job they would like to have. All these skills, and many more, go a long way to promoting self-sufficiency.

CCEB is currently providing solutions on a limited scale. We lack resources to be able to face the challenge on our own, so we’re finding ways of partnering with agencies like the One/Stop Career Center in Brentwood. We’re seeking to establish synchronistic relationships with other community resources, so that together we end up doing more than we could accomplish working independently.

We’re not doing everything we should be doing, nor are we doing everything we will be doing, but I’m, nevertheless, proud of the work we are already getting done. Not many area outreach programs are providing the range of services we are offering to the poor in our community — from emergency food supplies to translation services.

Our work would be greatly limited if not for the support of the area parishes. CCEB is working closely with local Catholic churches including Immaculate Heart in Brentwood, St. Anne in Byron, and Saint Anthony in Oakley. These partnerships are an integral part of our work; developing and strengthening these parish relationships remain my top priority.

The Lenses Necessary for Seeing Our Duty
We believe that we create social injustice when we deny to the poor among us the opportunity for them to lift themselves financially and socially. By our neglect we effectively deny to them the dignity that our shared humanity demands.

Charity provides one lens through which we view intervention for poor people; justice is the other. The justice I’m talking about has nothing to do with the cold processes of law, but bears the marks of tender and earnest love. It is only with both lenses that the picture comes into focus.

William O’Neill, S.J. Professor of Social Ethics at the Jesuit School of Theology recently said, “Teaching on dignity and human rights is our moral squint.”

Professor O’Neill was right! Our “moral squint” is our intense concern for dignity and human rights as the intrinsic worth of any person created in the image of God comes into clear view.

Professor O’Neill made a comment that seems obvious to me, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Father Jesus Nieto, Pastor, St. Anthony Parish, Oakland expressed a similar idea on a more personal level when he said, “If you are not OK; I can’t be OK.”

An ever-increasing number of needy people are showing up at the doors of our Catholic Charities’ centers. Every year the question, “Who cares for the poor?” comes to us with a more strident plea for an answer than it did the previous year.

I want us to be able to answer with a direct gaze and a firm voice, “WE do!”

Last April I was promoted to CCEB Executive Director. This has allowed me to further focus my passions upon directing Catholic Charities of the East Bay in providing the care that my faith directs me to, and that, after all, the poor people of this area really deserve.

Come join me in this noble effort! Opportunities are available for people who want to support CCEB by volunteering or donations. Contact the Brentwood Manager, Deacon Gustavo Arteaga, at 925-308-7775. Or contact me directly at 510-867-1216 (solomon@cceb.org. See also, www.cceb.org).