Olive Crest breaks ground on O.C. apartments for transitional youth in need
Olive Crest, a West Coast-based nonprofit that works to prevent child abuse and family neglect, celebrated its 50th anniversary last year.
It wasn’t just cake and ice cream. It was also about doing some forward thinking.
The first 50 years in existence, Olive Crest served about 250,000 children and families. The goal now is to get to 1.2 million by 2030.
“The board and us got together to celebrate the 50th anniversary, and we said, where are we going to go from here?” Olive Crest chief executive officer Donald Verleur said. “We took this audacious goal and said, what are the gaps? One of the gaps was youth housing.”
Olive Crest is working to fill that need with a new project in Santa Ana.
It held a groundbreaking ceremony Tuesday for 16 apartment units adjacent to its Orange County headquarters on 4th Street. The goal is to prevent homelessness among transitional-aged youths in the foster care system.
“The first thing we have to do is provide stability,” Verleur said. “That’s food, clothing, a house. And then, from the trauma and the crisis that we’ve gone through, we can serve their emotional need through counseling and education. But stability is the first thing.”
Each of the 16 apartments will have two bedrooms and shared bath, kitchen and living spaces.
The Orange County project also includes a renovation and expansion of Olive Crest’s adjacent Children and Family Resource Center, Verleur said, including a new youth drop-in center.
The privately-funded $18-million project is scheduled to open in winter 2025, officials said, with additional Olive Crest apartment communities planned in Riverside, southeast Los Angeles, Palm Desert and Las Vegas. They’re all part of a $100-million capital campaign to expand essential services to children, families and young adults in California, Nevada and Washington.
Kerri Dunkelberger, executive director of Olive Crest for Orange County and San Diego, cited national statistics that show that 60% of kids leaving the foster care system will be homeless within the first year, and 20% of those will be homeless immediately.
“This avoids that, allowing them supportive housing,” she said.
Project donors include RSI Dream Communities, the Crean Foundation, the Larry and Helen Hoag Foundation and the Oltmans Foundation.
RSI Dream Communities was founded by Ron Simon, who started the Simon Scholars Program in 2003.
“Our kids didn’t qualify [for the scholarships] because they didn’t have a home,” Verleur said. “He goes, ‘They don’t have a home? Let me build you one.’”
Jim Palmer is the president and chief executive of RSI Dream Communities, which has committed to funding construction of the apartments.
As someone who has fostered nine kids through Olive Crest and adopted three, he is also very familiar with both the nonprofit and the need for housing.
“The issue of housing is amplified in Orange County, because of the simple cost of it,” Palmer said. “Even those that are stable and employed have a really difficult time finding a place to live. So imagine a young person that’s coming out of foster care or a group home with really no connections and no stable income. Where do they go? This is preventing them from going onto the street, and sort of bridging that gap. Since Olive Crest has been around for 50 years, they’ve become good at finding the gaps that need to be bridged.”
He added that the location is ideal because there are plenty of job opportunities in walking distance.
Santa Ana City Council member Jessie Lopez, who also attended Tuesday’s ribbon-cutting, said that Olive Crest occupies a special place for her.
Born and raised in Santa Ana, Lopez said she worked two jobs to put herself through college at Cal State Long Beach. She was still housing insecure, sleeping on her college campus.
According to this year’s Orange County Point in Time count, there were 308 transitional-aged youth ages 18 to 24 among the 7,322 homeless people countywide.
“It’s really important that we support these partnerships,” Lopez said. “I understand how incredibly difficult these challenges are, especially when you hear a lot of negative rhetoric about the people on the streets that are just being swept altogether. When you hear that, it’s very demoralizing. As we heard from some of the people that have benefited from these projects, if they didn’t have this resource, they would the ones sleeping next to a dumpster or on the street.”
Seth Putnam, 25, counts himself as lucky that he avoided that circumstance.
Putnam, who spoke at Tuesday’s ceremony, is an Olive Crest alumnus who now works as a phlebotomist at Providence St. Jude Medical Center and is also in nursing school. He spent about six years in Olive Crest’s housing program before aging out.
“I didn’t have anywhere to go when I turned 18,” Putnam said. “Without this program, I pretty much would have been homeless. I feel like this is going to help a lot of people that are in that situation as well. You hit a certain age, and everybody kind of just thinks that you’re not trying hard enough, or it’s all your fault that you’re homeless. A lot of people just don’t have anybody and they need something just to get somewhere.”
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