By Jacqueline Gilvard Landry
Voice correspondent

Rosa was in her 20s with a three-year-old daughter, no insurance and a husband hospitalized for weeks with a threatening heart disease when she came to Catholic Charities of the East Bay for help coping with her stress.

Three years later, with the help of CCEB’s Family to Family partnership program, Rosa has a thriving housecleaning business, and her family has bought a home.

Solomon Belette, CEO Catholic Charities of the East Bay

The Family to Family program started more than three years ago as a cooperative effort between CCEB and several parishes in the Oakland Diocese. Currently eight parishes participate. CCEB screens and matches eligible needy families with parish teams, who collaborate with the family on creating and implementing a tangible plan for moving out of poverty.

Although it does address immediate needs for things like food and clothing, this isn’t a check-writing program. “The principal criteria is that the family is interested and eager to meet a level of self-sufficiency,” said Solomon Belette, chief executive officer of CCEB.

Buying into that mission requires a willingness to hold employment and a willingness to identify aspirations and real ways to reach them, said Carol Leahy, CCEB’s director of Family Support Services.

Rosa was not expecting to discuss aspirations when her Catholic Charities counselor referred her to the Family to Family partnership program. She was trying to stay afloat with only a handful of houses to clean, a husband too sick to work, and a young child in need of attention, she said.

“I didn’t know what to expect,” Rosa said of meeting Family to Family volunteers Stan Bochenek and Dick Sanders of Danville’s St. Isidore Parish.

They asked if she needed money; they also asked about her future goals and how they could help her achieve them.

Rosa said she was shy about asking for money. “I told them all I want is to be working. I’ll get money from that. Get me cleaning jobs,” she said.

And they did. Within weeks, a new client called Rosa after seeing an ad that Bochenek had posted at the church, she said.

The referrals continue to come in, and Rosa’s business has grown to nearly 30 clients — including Bochenek, she said.

This type of networking has proven to be the teams’ greatest resource, Leahy indicated, and a great equalizer. Team members — usually 10 per team — may differ in age, financial status or profession, but they all know someone who knows someone.

By tapping into their networks of friends and colleagues, Belette said, Family to Family parish team members have drummed up donations of money and cars, secured employment and job training and provided mentoring.

Networking has helped support other small businesses like Rosa’s. Leahy said one team helped a client establish her car-detailing business by pledging to refer 10 customers per month.

Although friendships continue, the formal relationship between team and family lasts until the plan is bearing fruit, generally measured by an increase in financial stability. That typically takes about a year, Leahy said.

“Helping a family increase their income is a very satisfying way to help overcome poverty, which is one of the major initiatives sponsored by CCUSA,” Leahy said, referring to Catholic Charities USA’s Campaign to Reduce Poverty. The campaign gives high priority to programs addressing poverty, like Family to Family.

CCEB has created a task force to guide the Family to Family partnership as it plans to roll out the program to the rest of the diocese.

First, said task force chairman John Kiefer, the group must complete items that are in the development stage, such as training for team leaders, team requirements, a checklist of potential family needs and a resource guide.

Kiefer, who also is a Family to Family team coordinator at St. Stephen Parish in Walnut Creek, said he is not sure when the program will be ripe for a rollout to take place.

In the meantime, the existing eight participating parishes are helping about 10 families. In addition to St. Isidore and St. Stephen, the partnership includes St. Ignatius in Antioch; St. Bonaventure in Concord; St. Perpetua in Lafayette; Santa Maria in Orinda; Christ the King in Pleasant Hill; and St. Joan of Arc in San Ramon, Belette said.

The Family to Family program is open to CCEB client families with children under 18, Leahy said. Participating family members must not be active substance abusers or have a serious, untreated mental illness, she said. At least one of the family members must speak English and be able to communicate with the parish team about their goals and the creation of the plan, she added.

And of course, like Rosa, they must be willing to work.

“The most important thing for me — it’s working,” she said. “They gave me work . . . that support is huge.”

CCEB’s Belette said that 30 to 40 families have been helped since Family to Family’s inception. The program, he said, grew out of St. Isidore’s Adopt a Family program, which Sanders founded.

Family to Family planners look forward to adding to that number. “[There is] no problem that can’t be solved with a big enough network filled with people with open hearts,” Kiefer said.

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