By Eliza Ridgeway

JOE HU/TOWN CRIER Career Closet client Francis Felldman, left, and volunteer Patti Harrignton browse at the Career Closet’s new San Jose location.

The Town Crier Holiday Fund raises donations each year for a group of local non-profits with small budgets that make a little go a long way to aid the area’s neediest residents. This week, we profile the Community Homeless Alliance Ministry, Career Closet and Truck of Love Ministries in the first in a series of profiles of the fund’s recipients.

Community Homeless

Alliance Ministry

“Sometimes people just have prejudices about homeless people and don’t want them around, sometimes not,” said Sandy Perry, outreach director of the Community Homeless Alliance Ministry (CHAM) of San Jose. “In our area, the homeless tend to be invisible. Silicon Valley is famed as place of technological innovation, but we feel there’s a need for some moral and spiritual work. The disparity between great wealth and poverty is striking.”

In addition to running a family homeless shelter, the ministry advocates politically for affordable housing and health care.

The emergency shelter, housed at First Christian Church in San Jose, opens each evening with food provided by the Second Harvest Food Bank, and clients are able to cook for themselves. There are evening counseling and Bible study programs.

It has been a tough year for CHAM financially, and the non-profit is restructuring its program to take fewer clients. The shelter, which plans to reduce its number of clients from 40-50 to 24, runs year-round on an annual budget of $40,000.

Sunday church services at CHAM are lively. The nondenominational group, headed by Pastor Scott Wagers, brings together a rainbow of San Jose residents, including the homeless, students, ex-gang members, the formerly incarcerated and mainstream area residents.

“It’s a very unusual combination of people,” Perry said. “We don’t believe in judging people - we think that’s God’s job.

For more information, visit www.cham-ministry.org.

Career Closet

Career Closet outfits disadvantaged women entering the work force with a wardrobe and a sense of confidence. Volunteer dressers work with each client to pick out a complete interview outfit, shoes and accessories to start a new job feeling prepared.

Jean Cecil, executive director, said the change in clients’ attitudes was as important as their change of clothes.

Partner agencies such as the Welfare-to-Work program, Calworks, domestic violence shelters and churches refer needy clients to the Closet. The 15-year-old program advertises through word of mouth and accumulates clothing through donations from women in the area. The Closet receives more than 500,000 pieces of clothing a year. The program’s two “closets,” in San Jose and Foster City, served more than 1,500 women last year.

The San Jose Career Closet moved to a new, bigger facility, easily accessible by local public transportation. Commercial Real Estate Women (CREW), a local professional association, connected the Career Closet with realtor Nancy Morse of Grubb and Ellis, who, after a two-year search, found the right space for the group.

“Next thing I know, 24 companies, all members of CREW, came in here, gutted the place, redid everything - all free of charge to the Career Closet,” Cecil said.

Career Closet has a budget of $370,000 this year.

For more information, visit www.careercloset.org.

Truck of Love

Ministries

On a typical day, Pete Fullerton wakes up, sometimes goes to church “to get my spirit together,” then saddles up for another day in his “Truck of Love,” motoring around the San Jose area with snacks, diapers, spare clothes and anything else he can collect. Dropping off water and fruit for day workers, picking up food donations and visiting homeless encampments around urban San Jose, Fullerton is a fixture for the area’s disenfranchised.

Truck of Love Ministries has an annual budget of nearly $150,000, with which Fullerton supplies necessities that provide dignity as well as nourishment. He hands out quarters, for example, for laundry. Families and individuals living on the streets and in unsanctioned, informal communities are particularly vulnerable. One of the homeless encampments Fullerton regularly visits was recently raided by the police.

“Carts, tents, sleeping bags and clothing were thrown away. They’re (the homeless) all back now, just without belongings,” he said. “All I can do is all I can do.”

Each Christmas Fullerton matches donor families with families in need.

“I’m literally up to my eyebrows this year,” he said. “It’s almost overwhelming. There’s something in the economy that is making things run downhill. Things are going too fast.”

Fullerton has 150 families in the 2006 program and describes them as “fall-through-the-cracks people.”

For more information, visit www.truckoflove.org.

The Community Foundation Silicon Valley serves as the fiscal agent for the Town Crier Holiday Fund. It provides the tax-deductible status for the fund, and every contribution to the Holiday Fund qualifies as a 501(c)(3) gift.

A group of donors has pledged challenge grants to match community donations. Matching donors as of press time include the Steven and Michele Kirsch Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Charles and Nan Geschke Foundation, the William and Gay Krause Foundation and Los Altos resident Ed Dowd.

Watch the Town Crier for more details about groups that benefit from the Holiday Fund.

Donate now to the Holiday Fund. Make checks payable to: Town Crier Holiday Fund, 138 Main St., Los Altos 94022.