February 6, 2010
Charities rely on Annual Catholic Appeal
By Denise MacLachlan
Herald staff
Retired teacher Sue Shimamoto, left, signs for groceries on Feb. 2 at the St. Vincent de Paul Society food bank at Our Lady of the Assumption Parish in Carmichael. Food bank recipients must show proof of residency in the area and most show utility bills. Luis Gris/Herald photo
Sue Shimamoto and her husband raised 102 foster children over 32 years together, she declares proudly. She taught foster parent education classes while her husband worked for the city of Los Angeles.
Now a widow living on a fixed income, she’s in line at her parish food locker on a damp February morning.
She is not ashamed to have her name in The Herald. “Times have changed,” she says. “My retirement income isn’t enough.”
With her in line is 17-year-old Leyth Ames, who is staying at Shimamoto’s daughter’s house. He’s a friend of Shimamoto’s granddaughter. Ames is on his own, he said, and can’t find a job.
They’re at the food locker run by the St Vincent de Paul Society’s conference at Our Lady of the Assumption Parish in Carmichael. Open Tuesday and Thursday mornings, the locker has been serving about 1,100 people each month, says Vincentian Celeste Depner, who runs the program.
“We have several families living in their cars, and a lot of people who are couch-surfing,” Depner said, describing the food locker’s clients. “We have two single mothers, with four children between them, who live in a garage. The kids go to school each day.
“You think, ‘This is Carmichael. That can’t happen here.’ But it does,” she said.
The St. Vincent de Paul Society is just one of more than 100 social service programs that will be supported by the 2010 Annual Catholic Appeal, the Diocese of Sacramento’s stewardship effort that provides crucial funding to charities throughout Northern California.
With cutbacks at every level of state and county social services, the work of Vincentians in parish conferences has become even more essential, according to John Hallissy, president of the Sacramento District Council of the St. Vincent de Paul Society.
When someone calls the St. Vincent de Paul Society, he said, two Vincentians go to the caller’s house. It’s not unusual to find children living in apartments without a stick of furniture, he noted, or with no food in the cupboards. When that happens, Vincentians bring in beds and a table and chairs from the Society’s thrift store in Sacramento, along with boxes of groceries.
“We go into people’s homes,” Hallissy said. “We see the poor first.”
Vincentians help people who have “hit a bump in their lives,” he added. They give people emergency assistance — help with rent, utilities, groceries or clothes — to get through the present crisis; then Vincentians connect people with the appropriate county agencies to help them get back on their feet.
The funds received from the Annual Catholic Appeal are the lifeblood of individual St. Vincent de Paul conferences at each parish, Hallissy said.
Calls for help have increased at St. Vincent de Paul conferences, he noted, and the kinds of callers have changed.
“Two or three years ago, you’d never have thought these people would need money. They had good jobs. They thought they were OK,” he said. “Then they lose their jobs, they’re out of work for months, and they’re out of resources.”
California’s unemployment rate stands at 12.4 percent. Taking into account the underemployed — those working part time who need full-time work — brings the number of Californians who need a full-time job to 20 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Statistics.
In the Diocese of Sacramento, which covers 20 counties and 42,000 square miles, county unemployment rates range from 11 to 25 percent, with underemployment reaching up to 30 percent of the population in some regions. Two metropolitan areas in the diocese — the Vallejo/Fairfield area in Solano County and the Sacramento/Arden/Roseville area — are listed among the 20 cities with the highest home foreclosure rates in the nation.
“There are people in need all around us,” Hallissy said. “Even in wealthy areas of town, they’re in apartments or rental houses. They get the kids off to school and so forth, but they are out of resources.”
In Fairfield and Vallejo, a similar story unfolds.
Kurt Chismark, executive director of Catholic Social Service in Solano County, explains that his agency helps put people back on their feet. Catholic Social Service operates a food locker to feed the poor, he said, but because they have social workers and counselors at the agency, they can also help a family navigate through county agencies to find shelter or food stamps, and can help adults look for work.
Catholic Social Service receives about 20 percent of its funding from the Annual Catholic Appeal, Chismark noted, adding that the agency receives state and federal grants, but that in hard economic times. this need increases just as the funding gets cut back. The Solano agency served 1,000 more people this year than last year, he said. More of the working poor are losing jobs.
“Maybe five percent of the homeless are the chronic homeless, who sleep under bridges because they want to,” Chismark said. The rest are sleeping on their friends’ living room floors, hauling the kids from place to place, trying not to overstay their welcome, looking for a job.
“We provide bus passes to look for work and counseling, help with resumes, and fresh clothes for an interview,” he said.
His agency also provides hope.
“We treat people with dignity, with respect, according to our Gospel values, and it helps,” he said. “We are all here to help one another. That becomes more apparent the older we get.”
At Sacred Heart Parish in Anderson in Shasta County, the community is living those values.
In a county with a 16 percent unemployment rate, Sacred Heart parishioners almost doubled their donation to the Annual Catholic Appeal last year. Then they took their portion of the stewardship fund — the 25 percent of their donations that goes back to the parishes for local social service ministries — and gave all of it to Anderson-Cottonwood Christian Assistance, a food bank that fed 350 families a month last year and feeds 600 to 650 families each month now. Many Sacred Heart parishioners volunteer there.
Deacon Mike Evans of Sacred Heart Parish told The Herald that 14 local churches together create and run the food bank, applying for foundation and government grants, and appealing to their congregations. The families helped each month are out of a total area population of 10,000 people, he said.
The food bank may be feeding almost a quarter of the population, Deacon Evans said.
“These are mostly resident families,” he said. “Work has dried up around here. In most cases, you don’t work full time even when you have work. The need is huge. We’re trying to sustain people who have no other income.”
“We put every penny we get from the Annual Catholic Appeal straight into Christian Assistance,” he said.
How you can donate
Approximately 100,000 Catholic households in the 20-county Diocese of Sacramento recently received advance notice of the 2010 Annual Catholic Appeal through an eight-page mailer and gift envelope sent to them by the diocese’s Office of Stewardship and Development.
At Masses throughout the diocese on the appeal commitment weekend on Feb. 27-28, parishioners will view a DVD (in English and Spanish) featuring Bishop Jaime Soto and other parish and charities’ leaders, as well as some of the people who are helped by programs that the Annual Catholic Appeal supports.
The Annual Catholic Appeal will help fund more than 20 different charitable organizations, which operate more than 100 different social service programs.
Fifty percent of the total money raised will go to social service programs. Twenty-five percent of donors’ gifts will be returned to the 104 parishes in the diocese for their local social service ministries. The remaining 25 percent will support the education of diocesan seminarians and create a diocesan needs-based tuition assistance fund for families who desire a Catholic school education for their children but cannot afford it.
Despite the economic recession, the number of donors to the Annual Catholic Appeal and the total amount raised both have risen steadily over the past three years. Contributions increased from more than $1.1 million in 2007 to more than $1.9 million in 2008. In 2009, the appeal raised $2.5 million from 21,000 donors.
“We have a very proud legacy of good works in the area of social services and Catholic education and health care,” Bishop Soto said in the DVD. “When we celebrate the Gospel and are nourished by the Lord Jesus, we have to carry that nourishment out, through our charitable works, in the way that we care for our brothers and sisters.”
For more information about the Annual Catholic Appeal, call the Office of Stewardship and Development at (916) 733-0266 or visit the diocese’s Web site at www.diocese-sacramento.org.
