Like Its Clients, Refugee Center Faces a Need to Adapt and Grow
GARDEN GROVE — After helping refugees and immigrants resettle in Southern California for 21 years, St. Anselm’s Cross Cultural Community Center now finds itself at a crossroads.
The number of refugees, most of them brought here by the Vietnam War, has steadily declined in past years. At the same time, the needs of St. Anselm’s longtime clients have changed, from the basic necessities of finding places to live, learning English and finding jobs to adjusting to the new social climate, overcoming emotional upheavals and becoming American citizens.
In all this change lies a question of survival for the center: How does it keep helping people when government funding, which directly correlates to the number of refugees entering the country, is certain to decrease?
With that in mind, the center is expanding its programs and taking on the world of fund-raising, as it prepares to move from government financing to the chancier and more competitive world of private donations.
Its first grand-scale effort was a $35-a-plate dinner Saturday at the Hyatt Regency Alicante in Garden Grove. Billed as “A Celebration of Achievement and Contribution by Immigrants and Refugees,†the event drawing 400 supporters was an opportunity for the agency’s leaders both to bring in money and to raise the center’s profile among Orange County leaders, educators, law enforcement officials and business people.
“For a long time, our work was so specific, we didn’t have to be out there,†said Marianne Blank, executive director of the center. “We just needed to carry out the government’s mission and that was to resettle refugees. Well, for St. Anselm’s Cross Cultural Center, the time has changed.â€
The center began in 1976 as St. Anselm’s Immigrant and Refugee Community Center, a grand name for what really was a ragtag team of volunteer workers who provided day care and English classes for the South Vietnamese war refugees who first landed in Camp Pendleton.
As the number of refugees grew, so did the center’s services, and to finance them, St. Anselm’s incorporated as a nonprofit agency in 1980 to qualify for government funding. Programs were increased to accommodate new waves of refugees: boat people, Amerasians, political prisoners from Vietnam.
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St. Anselm’s Amerasian Program, which had a staff of seven to serve about 2,000 children of Vietnamese women and American servicemen, was the largest of 60 such programs in the nation. In 1995, government funding for those programs stopped.
Aside from the termination of its nationally recognized Amerasian Program, the center underwent another dramatic change in 1993, when officials changed its name to the current St. Anselm’s Cross Cultural Community Center to reflect the diversity of the state’s demographics.
“For our future, ‘immigrants and refugees’ was too limiting a label,†Blank said. “Even then, we knew that we had to prepare ourselves to take the next step, [which] is to get out into the neighborhood, the community, and help people who are no longer refugees.â€
Most of St. Anselm’s 1997 budget of $900,000 comes from the government and foundations. Federal funding has been based on the number of refugees who come to the center, whose resettlement program in its heyday served about 1,000 families a year. In 1996, the center resettled 400 refugee families in Southern California.
Looking at that number, Blank and board members project that next year’s public funding will significantly be cut.
“With the number of refugees declining, [St. Anselm’s] needs to become more of a community-based type of service--more a broad-based service--instead of strictly refugee- [and] immigrant-based,†said Andrew Do, a member of the nonprofit center’s board of directors since 1992.
The center, with a staff of 25, already is reshaping and expanding its programs to include family counseling, classes on how to adapt to Western customs and values, and prevention and intervention for victims of domestic violence and drug addiction. But the agency will continue to maintain, on smaller scales, programs that once made up its backbone, such as job placement and English as a second language classes.
“The heart and soul of the agency has always been the resettlement of the refugees,†Blank said. “But we’re in the post-resettlement era now . . . and for us to continue our work, we need to shift gears.â€
She added: “We can’t rest on our history.â€
* A TEACHER HONORED
Son Kim Vo is feted for her work in the Vietnamese refugee community. B3
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