Orange County Register

The mood inside the Portola Pavilion inside Cal State Fullerton’s student union was already glum when Susan Caumiant, an executive at Orange County United Way, played a couple of videos on the large screens.

Her goal was to put human faces on an otherwise wonky morning-long presentation of data points, bar graphs and speeches about the well-being of Orange County’s children. Caumiant played a homemade video of the long, long lines of people waiting for food at an outreach center in Orange. Another video followed, this one professionally done — a fundraising video up on the chapter’s homepage that showed a local woman, identified only as Rebecca. Her husband was laid off last year, plunging them into the growing ranks of middle-class families forced to swallow their pride and seek assistance.

“I never thought — ever thought — that I would be sitting there asking someone to help me with rent, to help me put food on my table, to help me not be homeless,” she said. “I felt like a failure, an absolute failure. I have this child who depends on me for everything, and I couldn’t provide the simplest things for him. It hurt me to the bone … it just hurt.”

Her message set the tone for the eighth annual Community Forum, a gathering of representatives from county government relief agencies and nonprofits to discuss the Conditions of Children in Orange County 2009 report. Turns out, kids here are generally better off than their counterparts elsewhere in California. But in the last few years there has been an erosion of progress in several areas, such as:

• Reports of child abuse rose 12 percent over the last year, to 41,119.
• The high school dropout rate among Hispanics was a staggering 62.4 percent in 2007-08.
• The number of known gang members is on the rise, from 1,766 in 2007 to 1,896 in 2008. And their ethnic makeup is changing: There are fewer Asians and whites and more Hispanics, says Dr. Eric Walsh, the county’s Director for Family Health Services.

Caumiant said her agency’s operating budget has been cut “really beyond the bone” because of falling donations. But it will be able to allocate the same funds to its various projects in 2010 as 2009.

“We fund over 80 agencies, and every single one of them says the need has doubled,” she said later.

Bill Steiner, a former county supervisor who founded the Orangewood Children’s Home and now is chairman of the Juvenile Justice Commission, said this economic climate is worse than anything he’s seen in his 40 years in the county. This recession makes the county’s 1994 bankruptcy debacle look like a “picnic,” he said.

“It’s almost like the perfect storm has hit all at once: unemployment, funding problems, social problems getting more exacerbated,” he said. “There were people today in this audience that were reeling from the realities they deal with every day, that are heartbroken to see programs reduced.”

Steiner was quick to add, however, that the culture of helping the needy has growing in the county over the decades, and, armed with the data in the report, philanthropists will work together to get help to the needy.

“I’m very optimistic, because I’m 73 years old, and I’ve been around and seen these phases where the sun always comes up every day,” he said.

(Photo courtesy of Cal State Fullerton)

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