By CLAUDIA KOERNER
THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
LAGUNA BEACH – Like so many who run fast-growing enterprises, Sita Helms can rarely finish a sentence before her phone rings. She excuses herself, even though she’s just arrived for a meeting. She apologizes as she steps away, but the call can’t wait.
Sita Helms loads a delivery truck with donations with volunteer Luther Castro.
CLAUDIA KOERNER, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
To get involved, visit thehelpinghandworldwide.org or call 949-499-4476
As businesslike as she sounds, Helms, 50, isn’t leading a small business or a big business or any business at all. Her work is charity, the Helping Hand Worldwide, which works to feed the hungry in a stretch of Orange County where, on the surface, it might seem that hunger isn’t a big problem.
Sadly, Helms’ business is booming.
MANY ROLES
It’s a sunny, spring Friday. By 8 a.m. Helms has ushered her two daughters to middle school and high school and hustled herself to a parking lot in South Laguna, where one of the three Helping Hand delivery trucks is parked.
But before she can climb out of her own car, the Blackberry is buzzing.
A grant application is due later today and the volunteer helping her write that application is calling from out of town. They discuss what’s left to be done before submitting the request for funding.
Finally, when she clicks off that call, Helms switches away from her role as chief executive. Running a charity means wearing many hats and, as she turns the truck’s ignition and hears a diesel engine growl to life, Helms takes on a new role – delivery driver.
In part, Helping Hand fills a wholesaler’s role among local charities. Helms and her crew get excess food from grocery stores and other corporate sponsors, and deliver it to 14 food banks. Those food banks, in turn, get food to people who might otherwise go hungry. Helping Hand also plays a more direct role, getting food to people with living in low-income apartments, to military families, and to schools.
When the group began in 2004, Helms and other volunteers paid for most of the organization’s needs out of pocket. Helms, whose background is in real estate, says she was happy to help because she sensed a need and because, well, she could.
But in the six years since, Helms has seen the operation expand. Even in upscale south Orange County – as she drives her truck past houses valued at multiple millions of dollars – hunger has grown. So have her expenses. This year, the charity is delivering some eight tons of food a day. Just the insurance and maintenance for the three trucks runs about $45,000 a year.
To stay in a business that brings in zero revenue, Helms finds it necessary to use public grants and community gifts and, yes, her own money.
And there’s more growth in the works.
Helms says Helping Hand needs a warehouse, a place with space for walk-in refrigerators. Also, she says, a forklift would be nice, taking on the work of loading and unloading pallets of food, something now done by hand. And, ideally, Helms says, the upgraded version of Helping Hand would have room for a thrift store, an outlet that would help provide a steady income to help pay for overhead.
Though the workload has increased dramatically over the years, Helms sticks to her original goal of never turning food away while someone is in need.
“It’s easy to place food.”
LUXURIOUS HUNGER
The first stop of the day is Trader Joe’s, where Helms and a volunteer fill the back of the truck with bags of bread, vegetables, fruit and flowers. In between lifting crates Helms gets another call, this time from another volunteer who had received some good news from his doctor.
After talking animatedly for a few minutes, Helms returns to the truck.
“What a relief he’s not sick,” she says.
Illness is what pushed Helms into charity work.
In 1984, she was working selling homes and a retired neighbor, a military man, asked her to look at his house. When she returned to his house a few days later, she found the man sitting the same chair where she’d last seen him. He was dehydrated and confused. He’d had a stroke. And, it turned out, Helms was the only person checking on him.
She made some phone calls and connected the man with medical help and, later, Meals on Wheels.
That year, Helms started volunteering to work at Meals on Wheels.
“He kind of threw me in a whole different realm,” Helms says of the man she first helped.
The lesson Helms took away was simple – need and isolation can go unrecognized, even in seemingly comfortable communities. She calls it “secrets behind closed doors,” explaining that pride and hunger sometimes coexist.
“People are embarrassed to say they’re in need.”
NO ONE EATS ALONE
Back in the truck and, yes, Helms’ phone is ringing.
She balances the Blackberry carefully on the steering wheel and talks through the phone’s speaker.
The conversation is about how to pick up a pallet of 700 cartons of eggs from a Mission Viejo grocery store. Over several more calls, Helms carefully navigates the Pacific Coast Highway traffic, finally driving to the Top of the World neighborhood. There, she drops off the donated flowers and bread to teachers at Thurston Middle School.
Later today, she says, she’ll be delivering food to seniors at a low-income apartment complex. But they tend not to eat much artisan bread. The teachers at Thurston welcome the high-end breads that often are out of their budget. The flowers, Helms adds, are just to make the teachers smile.
“A happy teacher is a happy 30 kids,” Helms says.
She leaves the donations on the curb as thankful staff members tote them inside.
Skillfully maneuvering the truck down curvy, hillside roads, Helms drives back toward Coast Highway. She honks and waves at two ladies out for a morning walk. By the time she backs the truck into the loading area at South Laguna Albertsons, she’s found a volunteer willing to load eggs between regularly scheduled deliveries.
With the truck reloaded with donations from Albertsons, the last stop of the day is a low-income senior housing complex.
As food is set out on tables for residents to “shop” from, Helms jokes with volunteers and compliments an elderly woman’s hat. She makes sure each of the residents waiting in line gets a little extra food. That way, Helms says, they can have a neighbor over for dinner. No one, she says, should have to eat alone.
“Then you get the sort of community where people start to look after each other.”
Contact the writer: ckoerner@ocregister.com or 949-454-7309
Her Helping Hands Deliver Aid at Home and Abroad
The Laguna Beach Independent
December 12, 2008
by William Hagel
|
Sita Helms, founder of the non-profit Helping Hand Worldwide, collects food at the Laguna Niguel Trader Joe’s for distribution to the Laguna Beach Resource Center, one of 43 organizations she assists with Helping Hand. Staff photo by Courtenay Nearburg |
 |
Watching Sita Helms roll up her sleeves and load the meat and produce at the local Trader Joes is not the same as watching someone shop. For one thing, she’s at the loading dock making sure a pickup truck fills up with enough to feed a small army.
And that was just the beginning of her day. In 1984 Helms gave up her appraising property and real estate sales to take care of the poor and needy. As a kid from a single mom, who worked in a grocery store, Helms saw thousands of pounds of food being wasted. From her on the job experience, she knew how to tap a resource at the stores.
A stint in Chile as a foreign exchange student developed another skill, useful in cajoling the Spanish-speaking grocery truck drivers. She said small kindnesses to everyone connected with her efforts pay off in big ways. As a gesture, she passed out boxes of caffeinated candy bars to the young men wrapping the goods she was picking up in plastic.
Laguna Beach, an affluent city by most measures, is the most surprising recipient for her services. The 72 residents of the low-income Vista Aliso apartments have much better nutrition now, according to Helms. “Before we started serving them,” she said, “some of them were kind of gray. Now they’re nice and pink.” She describes kids she’s run into that never owned their own ball or doll and a girl wearing shoes that should have been thrown out years ago. “I found a pair sitting out in an alley for free and got them to her,” Helms said.
Helms’ 95-strong, all volunteer Helping Hand Worldwide organization collected an estimated $1.5 million in donations during 2008 from Trader Joes, Albertsons, Big Lots, and Pavilions to benefit 43 organizations. Recipients include Camp Pendleton’s 5th Marine Regiment, local food banks, senior centers, HUD housing in Laguna Beach, and schools serving low-income families.
Worldwide aid goes to Iraq where U.S. soldiers distribute Helping Hand goods to children; clothes and books go to orphanages in Ensenada, Mexico; a variety of items ends up in a small village in Guatemala; and donated medical supplies find their way to the Equity House Clinic in Hopkins Village in Belize.
Helms pointed out that the persons working in the back end of the store need training to keep the food safe for consumption, and that requires special handling. “The biggest thing is training staff,” Helms said.
A pet project involving Marines called Operation Baby Shower supports military wives who need a start for their families. Yvette Heinze of Camp Pendleton said, “It was a fantastic event, and it meant so much to all of us whose husbands are so far away.”
Don Campbell, who has volunteered in Helm’s crew for three years, is a retired firefighter. Now, he works four days a week picking up goods in his pickup, filled recently at Trader Joes. He admires the store’s management for making the effort to donate unsold goods. “It’s easier for the store to throw it away,” he said. “They invest in people to scan and process and wrap it in plastic.”
Donations can be arranged by calling Sita at 949 499- 4476, or eMailing her at Sita@theHHWW.org .
