The new year is here, and everyone seems to be in the spirit of newness: new resolutions, new goals, new beginnings. The idea of a fresh start is a welcome one for those struggling through hard times in a hard land. The need for food, clothing, and shelter seems to be ever increasing.
Sitting at the corner of McClelland and Sunset in Santa Maria, the Central Coast Rescue Mission has been helping locals since 1999. The facility has been a center of hope for all who walk through its doors.
According to an October 2010 survey conducted by the Association of Gospel Rescue Missions (AGRM), homelessness is increasing throughout the United States. Of the people surveyed, about half were homeless for the first time and have been homeless for less than a year.
And the problems go deeper.
“We are serving more than the homeless population,” said Central Coast Rescue Mission Director Larry Cooney. “The meals, clothing, and hygiene that we give away is not the end game for us.”
Much of the Rescue Mission’s clientele are known as “working poor,” whose paychecks aren’t enough to pay the bills or buy groceries. They rely on the mission’s resources to make ends meet. With the foundering economy, Cooney said, expect those numbers to rise for the foreseeable future. This past year, the Central Coast Rescue Mission offered more than 12,600 meals and 2,700 food boxes to those in need. And mission leaders plan to offer more in 2011.
The rescue mission has three goals for the new year. To expand its outreach services, to start a women’s recovery program, and to engage more volunteers.
“If there’s anybody I want to reach, it’s that potential volunteer who doesn’t know what to do to make a difference,” Cooney said. “There is a powerful bond that develops between volunteers and clientele.”
Volunteers do much more than serve food and set up tables, they interact with the clientele on a personal level. The Rescue Mission hopes to see an increase in volunteers to go along with recent grants to fund general operating costs. The group received two grants for a total of $35,000 from the Woods Family Foundation and the Wood Claeyssen’s Foundation. These grants are what fund the Rescue Mission along with local partnerships, such as with the county FoodBank which allows the Rescue Mission to buy groceries for pennies on the dollar. These grants also fund special projects. This year Cooney plans to acquire a catering truck and a central kitchen to improve the group’s food outreach programs.
The data from the AGRM survey also found that most of its Mission’s clientel prefer to receive assistance from agencies with a spiritual emphasis. The Central Coast Rescue Mission has a strong Christian foundation essential to its work, from its association with local churches to its Residential Drug and Alcohol Recovery Program.
The recovery program may be the Recovery Mission’s most important work, which runs six to nine months for 12 men at a time. The rescue mission provides lodging for the men, along with about 25 hours of work within the mission per week. It’s available to men struggling with addiction and seeking a relationship with God.
“The biblical concepts of forgiveness, loving oneself, accepting oneself really gets to the root of addiction. Addiction is a very self-centered behavior,” Cooney said. “When it comes to the deep-seeded stuff of life, such as anxiety, nervousness, fear, insecurity, the faith component brings more of a hope.”
The men involved in the recovery program are primarily trying to kick methamphetamine, an especially nasty substance that can erode everything in a man’s life, from his job to his family to his mind. Rescue Mission helps with all those areas. The men are eased back into society via transitional jobs and housing. Most of the graduates become churchgoers, helping them stay clean and restructure their lives.
“The more they love God, the more they can love themselves, and the more they can love their neighbor as themselves,” Cooney said.
The biggest challenge the Rescue Mission faces isn’t on an economic level or a population level, it’s on a personal level. It is one thing to provide a meal and a jacket to someone; it’s another thing entirely to personally help a fellow man or woman overcome a major obstacle in his or her life. That is true community service.
“We’re always looking for a way to get somebody to the next level. Whether that’s a homeless person thats needs to get off the street into a shelter or a broken life that needs recovery or services (ESL) to the Hispanic population,” Cooney told the Sun.
Contact intern Jacob Lopez through the executive editor at rmiller@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jan 20-27, 2011.