Shelter Renovation to Open More Doors

Moving into a new home is always an exciting prospect, but it holds a special meaning for Diana Vogelbaum.

As the driving force behind the RAIN homeless shelter in Camarillo, Vogelbaum faces the daily task of telling families that she doesn’t have room for them.

But that will all change come September, when RAIN’s newly renovated shelter is complete.

“The best thing will be there’s fewer people I will have to turn away,” said Vogelbaum, the RAIN project manager. “It’s no fun to do that because there’s nowhere to turn them.”

Located on Lewis Road near the Cal State Channel Islands campus, the new shelter sits on 21/2 acres and features a 20,000-square-foot, U-shaped building that was once part of Camarillo State Hospital.

Standing two stories high with a red-tiled roof, the shelter will accommodate 90 residents, as opposed to the 60 who can be squeezed into the current facility at Camarillo Airport.

Vogelbaum said the majority of residents are families with children. The new shelter, similar to the current one, will feature a variety of different-sized rooms to sleep all sizes of families.

“We don’t take people on a first-come, first-served basis, it’s more of a first-come, right-size family,” Vogelbaum said. “We generally have 30 to 50 people on the waiting list at a time.”

RAIN--short for River-dwellers Aid Innercity Network--dates to November 1997, when it was formed in advance of the upcoming El Nino storms.

“The whole point was to get the homeless out of the river bottom before the storms hit and washed them away like in 1995,” Vogelbaum said. “There’s not many homeless left in the river bottom, so now it just means providing shelter from the rain. Luckily, the new shelter will do that and more.”

Features of the new facility include an oversized dining room that will allow everyone to eat together instead of in shifts; a commercial kitchen so meals can be cooked inside rather than on an outdoor barbecue; additional bathrooms; and most importantly, heat.

“It’s just going to be a much more comfortable situation,” Vogelbaum said.

With the majority of the project’s estimated $1.4-million cost coming from grants, the budget is still about $200,000 short. To make up the difference, RAIN has been relying on the help of volunteers.

“We’ve done several Saturday sessions of prep work using volunteers from the existing shelter and various community groups,” said Mike Lewicki, project manager for Gafcon, the Los Angeles-based firm hired by the county to oversee the renovations. “It’s been very cool to see college students working side by side with 85-year-olds.”

Members of the multicultural sociology club at CSUN at Channel Islands--on the future campus of Cal State Channel Islands--are among those pitching in. Their duties have ranged from cleaning out a flooded storage shed to pulling up old tile flooring.

“Self-satisfaction is what we get out of it and why we started the club,” said 30-year-old Wendy Henke of Oxnard.

Lewicki said the gutting of the new facility has been done in advance of the construction contract, which will be put out for bids at the end of this month. That process generally takes 30 days, so the renovation work is expected to begin in early May.

“Our target [opening] date is early September, because we want to be in there and established when the kids go back to school,” Lewicki said.

One of RAIN’s requirements is that all children be enrolled in school. Additionally, the RAIN staff helps residents find a job, with 80% of residents’ paychecks placed into a savings account, with the money eventually going toward moving expenses when residents find a more permanent home.

Residents’ length of stay at the RAIN shelter varies. “We shoot for six months, but each case is very individual,” Vogelbaum said.

The residents also attend parenting and life skills classes, are assigned chores and have the option of attending one-on-one counseling sessions.

“The five major reasons for homelessness are mental illness, drug and alcohol abuse, domestic violence, loss of a job, and death of the family’s bread winner,” Vogelbaum said. “We are more than just a shelter for these people. This is a home.”