Orangewood Children’s Foundation got its start three decades ago as a passion of Gen. William Lyon. Today it’s one of Orange County’s most widely supported charities.
The Santa Ana-based foundation, which built the Orangewood Chil-dren’s Home, prepares foster teens to live on their own. The county of Orange runs the group home in Orange.
Gen. Lyon, chief executive of homebuilder William Lyon Homes Inc. in Newport Beach, is credited as the driving force behind Orangewood’s creation more than two decades ago.
“He is really the father of Orangewood,” said Cal Winslow, chief executive of Orangewood Children’s Foundation.
In the 1980s, shortly after Lyon retired as chief of the Air Force Reserve, he rallied a group of developers to design and build a children’s home to replace the rundown, overcrowded Albert Sitton Home for abused children in Orange.
“As we got into this, none of us ever realized the enormity of this problem in Orange County,” Lyon said.
Lyon’s early involvement gave a real estate feel to the nonprofit.
These days, Orangewood’s board members are a cross section of the local economy: David Ritchie, executive vice president of commercial banking for Wells Fargo & Co.; Richard Dutch, president of Irvine-based Sterling Medical Products; Vikki Vargas, Orange County bureau chief for KNBC News; and Bruce Fetter, chief operating officer of St. John Knits International Inc. in Irvine.
Selling the Vision
Lyon said he wanted to build a pleasant home for foster kids. But first he had to raise money for the cause.
It wasn’t easy, he said. People didn’t understand the purpose of the home, according to Lyon.
Some thought the kids were going to be delinquents, he said. They didn’t understand that the kids were taken out of their homes because they were being abused or neglected.
Lyon heard firsthand stories of abuse from his daughter, who was an Anaheim police officer.
“That’s how we became interested in the first place,” he said.
Others, Lyon said, thought their taxes already paid for a children’s home.
“We changed a lot of that thinking,” Lyon said.
The foundation set a two-year fundraising goal. People asked Lyon: “What happens if you don’t raise the money?”
“Then we’re going to go for another two years,” he told them. “We’re going to finish this building.”
The foundation today has a broad fundraising operation that includes support groups 44 Women for Children and Orangewood Pals.
Many groups in the county hold fundraisers for Orangewood.
Markus Hempell, president of home automation company Total Automation Inc. in Rancho Santa Margarita, recently held a fundraiser at his home for Orangewood. He and his wife are in the process of learning about being foster parents, with the hopes of adopting a foster child.
“There are so many kids out there who are getting bounced around,” he said. “We feel like there’s such a huge need.”
Last year, there were about 41,000 cases of reported child abuse in the county. About 2,700 children a year spend time at Orangewood for emergency shelter. The kids spend an average of 17 days at the home.
When Orangewood opened in 1985 and the county took over operations, the foundation shifted its focus to programs and services to help prepare foster youth to be responsible for themselves at age 18.
Former county supervisor William Steiner, then a county employee, was tapped to run the home early on.
Steiner, a child abuse expert, “has more experience and more empathy for this than anybody I’ve ever met,” Lyon said.
It was Steiner who called attention to the need for a home in the first place.
“He flung the doors open and said this is what our children are experiencing,” said Shelley Hoss, president of the Orange County Community Foundation, an Irvine-based nonprofit. “Bill Steiner was the heart of Orangewood. The general was the grand ambassador, the one who provided the gravitas to the effort.”
Lyon helped lure others to help, according to Hoss.
“If the general was involved, they knew it was going to be successful,” she said.
After serving on the Board of Supervisors, Steiner became national program director for Childhelp USA, where he oversaw the conversion of Merv Griffin’s donated ranch in Arizona into a treatment center for abused children. Steiner also founded the Good Samaritan Boy’s Home in Corona.
Today, he serves on Hoss’ Orange County Community Foundation board and still is active as a child advocate.
Hoss, one of the early staffers at Orangewood, got her start in nonprofits from Steiner.
Steiner hired Hoss as an intern in 1986, after she did a graduate school research project on the formation of Orangewood as a public-private venture. She was Orangewood’s third employee and worked there for 10 years.
Prior to Orangewood, kids were sleeping in the hallways at Albert Sitton Home.
It was overcrowded and dilapidated, Hoss said. It wasn’t even a separate building. It was a wing of juvenile hall, which gave it a punitive and institutional feel, she said.
Orangewood was built with warmth. That was important to Lyon.
“We wanted them to remember this as a pleasant experience,” Lyon said.
The Home
The home is a group of cottages with special touches such as fireplaces, a swimming pool and Spanish tile roofing.
Children’s homes across the country, including Polinski Children’s Center in San Diego and the Valley of the Moon Children’s Home in Santa Rosa, have emulated Orangewood’s model of private support for a public service.
The Orangewood foundation now is looking at developing another building, a residential high school. Gene Howard, Orange-wood’s former longtime chief executive, is heading that effort.
As Orangewood evolved, supporters and administrators saw that many of the kids were bogged down with other troubles and dropped out of high school, foundation Chief Executive Winslow said.
If they’re not graduating high school, then they’re not prepared to go to college, he said.
“That’s what the academy is about,” Winslow said.
Susan Samueli, a philanthropist and wife of Broadcom Corp. cofounder Henry Samueli, is a big backer of the academy.
She has been active in Orangewood since the 1990s and started 44 Women for Children, now made up of 80-some women.
“She is an amazing lady,” Winslow said. “She works with the kids and is so committed that these kids have an equal playing field.”
Many of these kids just came from bad families, he said.
“They’re very capable if you can level the playing field and if you can get them to look forward instead of over their shoulder,” Winslow said.
Samueli said the academy is in the early planning stages.
“We’re looking at land,” she said.
And for a partner.
The University of California, Irvine, is a possibility, Samueli said. Many of the University of California campuses have high schools associated with them.
The school fits with the foundation’s focus on helping teens prepare to go to college or live independently.
In OC, about 250 teens a year turn 18 and move out of the foster care system. Often, they don’t have the family support or the resources to transition into independent adulthood. Many end up homeless.
“An astounding number of former foster youth that emancipate end up in jail the first year that they turn 18,” Winslow said.
Nationally, two-thirds of inmates have spent time in foster care.
“My kids were coming home when they were 30, in between jobs, and they needed a bed for a month or two while they were making transitions,” Winslow said.
But these kids don’t have families, so the Orangewood foundation tries to fill in the gaps, he said.
It runs a drop-in resource center, where kids can fix something to eat or do their laundry. Orangewood accepts mail for 60 kids. Before the doors open at Orangewood in the morning, kids are waiting outside, Winslow said.
The resource center is a place where they can find a place to live and get help writing a resume or finding a job.
Additionally, Orangewood has two apartment buildings called Rising Tide. A group of businessmen bought the buildings and donate yearly rental income, about $517,000, back to Orangewood. Fifteen of the 80 apartments are used to house former foster youth.
They live there for 18 months at $250 a month.
The sole purpose of the apartment buildings is to benefit Orangewood, Winslow said.
A case manager helps residents manage a budget and find work so that they can become independent.
Orangewood matches every dollar they save.
College Help
For kids who are ready for college, Orangewood’s Guardian Scholars program sends them to school.
The program, which started in the 1990s, pays $6,000 of the costs, which triggers other federal funds. Partner schools cover the rest.
About a dozen universities and trade schools participate in the program, including California State University, Fullerton, and UC Irvine.
The schools keep dorms open during holidays so the students, who might not have family to visit, have a place to stay.
About 260 kids have received scholarships, Winslow said. So far, Orangewood counts 42 college graduates.
The bulk of Orangewood’s $9 million yearly budget,about 65%,comes from donations. The rest comes from government sources.
The county pays Orangewood Children’s Foundation $2.8 million yearly to provide services, such as the peer mentor program and the independent living program, which teaches kids how to budget and grocery shop, among other things.
Winslow has been trying to increase private donations and reduce government funding since he took over.
But these days, both sources are tough to get money from, he said.
Winslow spends time fundraising every day, he said.
He’s no stranger to fundraising. He has been involved with nonprofits for 40 years and even dabbled in politics in Montana.
He spent four terms as a state representative and unsuccessfully ran for governor of Montana. Winslow, a native Montanan, used to set up Jerry Lewis telethons in the 1970s.
Slowing Donations
Winslow noticed that donations started to slow about this time last year. By summer, it was worse, he said.
“Even the wealthiest people are being impacted,” he said.
Many of Orangewood’s donors still are associated with the building industry, hit hard by the recession.
Winslow expects Orangewood’s corporate donations to shrink by about $1 million this year.
“We are doing some special appeals to individuals,” he said.
Its fundraising budget is about $5 million.
“The need is up. The dollars are down. Everywhere,” Winslow said. “We just don’t know how long it will last.”
