Faith & Love Finds Enemies in Bid to Open Vista Shelter

As a young child in the rolling farmlands of southeastern Pennsylvania, Janet Sucro would hop off the school bus and trudge the last few steps home, only to be met by a strange man sitting on the front porch.

“He’d be a hobo, a tramp--we call them transients now--sitting out there, eating a sandwich or bowl of soup that mom had put out for him,” Sucro recalled.

“Mom was a loving, caring person who would give everything she had to someone who needed it more. I used to kid her that the hobos must have put a mark on our house, because they’d always seem to find her when they’d jump off the train and look for a place to get something to eat.”

As Sucro got older and learned her mother’s cooking skills, she’d take the apples and peaches and cherries grown in the family orchard and bake fresh pies, four or five at a time. “And it always made me feel special,” Sucro said, “to see mom offer pieces of pie for the hobos.”

More than just memories, Sucro’s early-life experiences equipped her for her own life’s journey, a kind of testimony to her mother’s legacy.

Today, the 45-year-old Vista woman isn’t cooking an occasional pie for the occasional hobo. Inspired by her mother’s charity and directed by her spiritual convictions as a Christian evangelist, Sucro has marshaled more than 100 active volunteers and won the support of more than 30 Vista-area churches to provide hot meals for more than 100 homeless and street people in Vista seven days a week.

Her vocation has won her both praise and--of late--scorn as different segments of the community measure her role as chief cook and bottle washer of Vista’s only soup kitchen.

There was something benign about allowing Sucro & Friends to operate soup kitchens out of six different Vista churches that offer their kitchens and dining halls. For four years her program grew, nourished by food and monetary donations and accolades from civic leaders. There was nary a critical word.

But now, Sucro and her private, nonprofit organization, Faith & Love Ministries, have sparked an outcry from some corners of Vista’s community because of their next goal: To buy a surplus Vista fire station, so it can be converted into an outreach center and small residential hall for the area’s needy.

Residents and business owners near the fire station, in the 2200 block of South Santa Fe Avenue, say they want the Vista Fire Protection District to renege on the sale of the 45-year-old firehouse to Sucro’s ministry, and have threatened legal action to block the sale.

The fire district--and, by extension, the taxpayers--could have gotten more than $245,000 for the place, critics say, if the sale had been better promoted. But clearly, many of the opponents simply don’t want a homeless shelter in their neighborhood, which features a mix of commercial and industrial buildings, apartments and upscale homes on hillsides within eyeshot. They shouted their not-in-my-back yard sentiments from the back of the room at a meeting last Wednesday night, called to air the matter and see what, if anything, could--or should--be done to reverse the sale.

The debate over where to set up shop to help the hungry and homeless is not new in North County. From Escondido to Oceanside, civic leaders have been troubled in trying to find appropriate locations for such outreach services.

But this is a new problem for Janet Sucro, and she says it has taken its toll.

“That opposition really has gotten me down. I just don’t understand it,” she said the other day from her ministry office, located in a small, no-frills industrial building.

“They’re entitled to their opinion, but there’s a homeless problem in Vista. If we can’t get them off the street, rehabilitate them off drugs or alcohol if necessary, and get them jobs, then there will continue to be the problem,” Sucro said.

Faith & Love’s plan is to win county approval to convert the fire station into a day-care center of sorts for the homeless--where drug- and liquor-free men and women can try to find a new way. Those afflicted with drug and alcohol problems would receive initial counseling by Faith & Love, and be referred to one of a variety of rehabilitation programs in San Diego County.

Those who are “clean” and are intent on finding work will be offered a light breakfast, a shower, and be dispatched to work--in clean clothes and with a sack lunch--before returning for the night supper. Those who don’t have jobs will be put to work around the old firehouse.

Depending on need, as many as 24 men and women will be able to live at the site until they save enough money to get a place of their own, she said. And ideally, a playground could be established for young children and a few small, aging homes behind the fire station might be purchased as well, for emergency housing of needy families.

At the same time, she said, she would continue the soup kitchen ministry from the various churches in town.

Aspiring plans, these are, for a quiet woman who, even friends say, is more noteworthy for her tenacity and vision than a charismatic personality.

“She has a tremendous sense of vision, and compassion for the poor,” said the Rev. Doug Regin, pastor of St. Francis Catholic Church in Vista and chairman of Faith & Love’s board of directors.

“Her vision is that they (homeless people) are all brothers and sisters in the Lord, and that each of us can do something to assist them. And she has the ability to convey that sense to others.

“By her tenacity and her own willingness to step out and do this work, and to sometimes place herself at risk, she’s been a catalyst for other people to say, ‘Look at this lady. She can do this, and I can do it too.’ ”

Even those who have opposed Faith & Love’s purchase of the fire station concede they are smitten by the woman behind the purchase. Karen Kunze, a realtor who has emerged as spokesperson for neighbors and business owners objecting to the fire station’s sale to Sucro’s ministry, said she is planning her own fund-raisers on behalf of Sucro’s soup kitchen work.

Sucro has even enlisted the assistance of former county supervisor Paul Eckert, a Vista resident and businessman, to help raise the $400,000 needed for the purchase and renovation of the firehouse.

“I heard her speaking at a Rotary Club meeting,” Eckert said. “I asked her some tough questions and she had good answers, and now she’s got me working to help her.

“She’s got more in-depth in her little finger than most people have in their entire body,” said Eckert. “She’s got empathy, sympathy and understanding--and she can be tough. You don’t ever want to underestimate her.

“I’ve met some real powerful people in my life, and she’s one of them. Yet she works like a slave, to her commitment to serve.”

For Sucro, it’s simply an extension of her mother’s work in Flourtown, Pa., not far from the Pocono Mountains. “Early in life,” she said, “I developed a big heart for people who were hungry.”

Sucro, who never married, left her parents as a 22-year-old, moving across the state and taking a job as a bookkeeper. She returned home for a time, visited California in the late 1960s, returned home again, and eventually decided to move to San Diego with her sister in 1978.

The two lived in La Mesa and Lakeside, tried Escondido and finally settled on Vista, despite warnings from some people that “only old people lived there.”

Sucro joined a young adult’s group at the First Lutheran Church of Vista and remembered the time the group sponsored a Thanksgiving dinner for homeless people.

“My job was to keep the bowls of food full,” she said. “I returned to a table with a bowl of dressing when an old woman put her hands around me, started crying, and said this was the first time in months her stomach felt warm from food. She really affected me.”

That was in 1982. Three years later, at a fellowship meeting of charismatic Christians, “a prophet told three of us that the spirit of God was all over us to feed the poor, and that we should step out in faith and the Lord would take care of us.”

At the time, Sucro was affiliated with the Vineyard Christian Fellowship in Vista, a small, store-front church on the second floor of a shopping center, above a public health clinic. “People would come into the church and ask us for food. The church kept sandwich meat around for them.”

Sucro asked the pastor if she could prepare a hot meal for the hungry and won his permission to use the church facility.

“To get ready for it, we sponsored a pot luck where people paid 10 cents for each dip of food they took. We raised $46, which paid for the spaghetti sauce and salad makings. Some other women donated the spaghetti noodles.”

On a Thursday night in June, 1986, she offered her first hot meal to Vista’s homeless. Twenty-seven people showed up for spaghetti, garlic bread, salad and desert.

“That first night, a lot of the people we were feeding were very hostile. They wouldn’t look up from their plates,” Sucro said. “They were suspicious of us. They wondered what we were going to do to them.”

Sucrow offered dinner the next Thursday night, and the next and the next. Each week, the numbers slowly grew, and suspicions generally evaporated.

Two months later, the Assembly of God church in Vista offered to host the dinners Tuesday nights. A dozen other churches started offering Sucro food donations and cash as word of her work spread. Today, a meal is offered daily as other churches joined the ranks of rotating kitchens.

“Some of the volunteers working with us were apprehensive at first,” she said. “They weren’t sure what to expect from these (homeless) people. And I remember one pastor telling me he didn’t know there were any homeless people in Vista.”

But, to help break down any stereotypes and to foster a feeling of family among them all, Sucro encouraged her volunteers, after they had served the dinners, to take a plate themselves, and to sit down at the tables alongside those who had just been served.

In addition to feeding the hungry, Sucro and her volunteers helped find jobs for those who wanted them, and found families in the community that would host individuals in their own homes for periods of time.

Not everyone wanted a place to live, or a job, but just the free handout, Sucro said.

“I knew there were feelings in the community that we shouldn’t feed people who weren’t trying to help themselves,” she said, “but the Lord said we’re to feed people, not just those who are trying to help themselves.”

Most, though, were genuinely trying to better their lives, she said.

“So many people have nothing in savings and are just one paycheck away from being on the street, either because they lose their job or are in an accident or whatever,” Sucro said.

Such was the case with 38-year-old Susan Vitrovick, a one-time receptionist at a dental office who lost her job, fell on bad times and now lives in her van on Vista streets--and who shows up for her nightly dinner at the Faith & Love traveling soup kitchen.

“I don’t think we’re the kind of people they think we are,” she said of those who display cynical attitudes toward the homeless. “We’re just like they are, except that we have fallen on unfortunate times, and they haven’t.”

The ministry received about $40,000 last year in donations, mostly from individuals and area churches; Sucro draws a salary of $1,000 a month.

And for the most part, getting food donations hasn’t been a problem, she said, as farmers, backyard gardeners, restaurants, grocery stores, catering truck operators, bakeries and others provide Faith & Love with a steady diet of leftover breadstuffs, vegetables, fruit, sandwiches and dairy products that are on the brink of spoiling or are cosmetically flawed.

Meat is usually purchased outright--although one benefactor routinely buys a lamb at auction at the Del Mar Fair and donates the meet to the ministry.

The greatest need, Sucro said, is for more refrigerators and upright freezers to store the perishables, and for cash for the firehouse fund.

But Sucro is confident that the needs will be met, and has set her sights on serving still more hungry people.

“I can look back over my life,” she says, “and see how everything I’ve done in life has prepared me for this work. My bookkeeping experience, having served as a women’s club president, my cooking, and my mom.”