Reflections of a STEAC Volunteer

By

Jana Tuton

Where were you in 1967? Probably not in Davis, California, which had a population of fewer than 20,000 people that year. But 1967 was the year that a handful of Davis citizens started the organization known as STEAC—the Short-Term Emergency Aid Committee.

Lois Grau was in Davis in 1967, and she helped found STEAC. Grau, who will celebrate her ninetieth birthday this month, still works as a volunteer for STEAC. She recalls the spring rains which inundated Yolo County in 1967, preventing many migrant workers from getting into the fields to work. The migrant workers, who lived in south Davis off Mace Boulevard at that time, were unable to feed and shelter their families.

This crisis prompted a group of volunteers from several Davis churches to start providing assistance as best they could to the migrant families and to others in need.

“Their condition prompted five concerned people to provide blankets, food and other supplies,” Grau says. The handful of volunteers soon grew to include many others, who met around kitchen tables and stored supplies in garages.

In its early years, STEAC had no office, no paid staff, and no status as a nonprofit organization. Volunteers were all members of the “committee”—an informally organized group that provided very personal service to the migrant families and other in need. Grau recalls that volunteers did lots of meal preparation and a lot of driving, since there were no city buses. “We had a little card file with cards of volunteers’ names and what they had volunteered to do,” Grau says.

“One of the things that was so neat about the whole thing was working together with different churches, different community groups and whole families,” recalls Carol Walker, another of the STEAC founders. “It was family community service. Fathers would help build shelves, children would help stock the shelves and mothers were involved in sorting bags. Whole families would sort clothes and make sure things were clean.”

In those days, STEAC’s food closet was the garage next to the Newman Catholic Parish in downtown Davis. Volunteers would receive the telephone requests for food at their homes, and then grab grocery bags and bicycle down to the garage to meet the needy families to give them food.

Grau describes her 41 years of volunteer work for STEAC as “rewarding and very satisfying.” She says that the decades that she (together with her late husband, Dick Grau) has spent volunteering with STEAC has had a positive effect on not only her own children, but also on her children’s friends, who have told her that she and Dick were models for them.

Although Davis is now nearly three times the size it was in 1967, dedicated volunteers are still the heart of STEAC. Over 75 people regularly volunteer in STEAC’s programs, doing everything from stocking the food closet to answering telephones to coordinating financial assistance to help a family avoid homelessness.

Many more people volunteer for special programs, such as STEAC’s holiday program and food drives. Last Saturday found scores of eager Boy Scouts and their parents and Scout leaders picking up, sorting, and boxing food for their annual food drive for STEAC.

While records going back 41 years are hard to pin down, the staff estimates that STEAC has helped more than 70,000 families, made up of some 200,000 individuals, since 1967. Today, STEAC helps about 2,600 families and 7,700 individuals each year.

In the past few years, new programs have been added to augment the initial work of emergency assistance for rent and utilities, food, clothing, and holiday gifts.

These new programs are referred to by volunteers and staff as “helping-people-help-themselves” assistance. These newer programs involve such aid as providing clothes for job interviews( through the Suit Up for Success Program); paying for books, supplies and tuition with the Educational Assistance Program; and providing funds to help low-income residents move into long-term housing with the First Month’s Rent Program.

Lois Grau and all the volunteers at STEAC, old and new, are looking forward to many more years of serving Davis and Yolo County.

Jana Tuton serves as STEAC board president.