Annie Mae Tripp Southwest Community Center burns the same week they were to hold their annual Christmas Party for the needy of Orange County. It's one of those stories that makes your heart ache a little. And this soup kitchen has been around for years in one of the most depressed areas of Orange County. "The OC" is not all Housewives and Ocean Front Property, it's like any County in the US, it has it's share of poverty and many more are hurting this year because of the failing economy.
A Facebook group has been started to rally the community around this cause, to gather people to help in any way they can. This is how I help, I write.
Donations are being accepted at Orange County The United way. Follow the link, and enter "SMEDA Fire" into the PROMO box.
Corporate Sponsors are already volunteering time and resources as are community members like myself. My family and I are going to spend some time on Saturday helping to make that Christmas Party happen come hell or high water. It's going to be made right with or without the help of the Daily Kos community. But I still wanted to write about it here.
The health care debate rages on but people are still hurting, mandate or no mandate and there are still things we can do to help people right now. And I know that you know that.
There's been coverage in the local papers...
Fire destroys center's holiday gifts, food
It destroyed hundreds of crates of food the center had set aside for meals for the needy and for a holiday party this weekend. It also burned about 100 stockings filled with small gifts, such as socks and toiletries, for poor seniors and children.
But the center had most of the donated toys and stockings for its Adopt-A-Family event in storage, off site. And, as word of the fire spread on Tuesday, other charities and food banks stepped in to help.
"We're going to have Christmas," center director Connie Jones said. "We're going to have it. It just might be on a smaller level."
The community center serves more than 100 hot meals every day to the homeless and needy. It hands out bags of groceries to poor families, helps them pay their rent and, every year, adopts more than 200 families for the holidays.
The center was also planning a holiday party for children in the neighborhood this weekend. It was expecting around 800 to attend.
I was hoping for a blogathon of some kind, maybe three or four diaries. I wanted this center to be overwhelmed with donations, to show that what they do on an everyday basis is important, not just one Holiday party.
That places like this matter because so many people who are struggling to get by right now depend upon them and any one of us could be there next year.
I could be, who knows? We never know how near we may be from losing our home, our hope and our very means of keeping ourselves from depending on a soup kitchen such as this.
As things break down we learn that we are all vulnerable, that the safety net is being torn apart before our very eyes and that we are more and more dependent upon the communities that we weave ourselves, those communities like Daily Kos. I'm proud to be a part of this community and I wanted to share this with you.
Here are some more photos of the fire, some taken by Laura "Agitator" Kanter via Facebook and some from the local papers.
But this really isn't meant to be a "downer", it's meant to be about how were all lucky to have what we have and to share that with a five dollar donation or more and to let Annie Mae Tripp Southwest Community Center have a Holiday Party but to continue to do its good works well into 2010.
And if anyone would like to do another diary on this, you are more than welcome to, it would be greatly appreciated to keep this going a bit longer.