Day and night, the calls keep coming at Love Christian Clearinghouse in Westmont.
A single working mother, struggling to make ends meet, can’t afford Christmas gifts for her children. Can the clearinghouse, a charitable network of 83 churches in southeastern DuPage County, play Santa?
Another caller has fallen behind on rent and faces imminent eviction. Can the clearinghouse help?
A man rings the clearinghouse at 630-920-9272 with a sad story involving costly car repairs that he can’t afford. Without a car, he will lose his job. Can the clearinghouse come up with some cash?
“You walk into the office in the morning, and there are anywhere from 10 to 15 messages on the answering machine,” said program director Bert Vandermar, a retired chemist who volunteers two days a week at clearinghouse headquarters. (To discourage drop-ins, the clearinghouse does not disclose its address.) “The phone is ringing while you’re trying to return the calls from the night before.”
For Good Samaritans like Vandermar, the challenge is to match up steadily escalating numbers of folks who need a hand with churches that can help them–once volunteers have determined that the callers’ pleas for help are legitimate.
The working mother and her brood, for example, were “adopted” by members of a Bible study group at a clearinghouse church and received a Christmas tree, holiday groceries and toys. Another church chipped in to come up with funds for the second caller’s rent payment.
As for the caller who supposedly needed cash for car repairs, volunteers made a few calls and discovered that the man didn’t even own a vehicle. His request was turned down.
“It’s disappointing when you realize that there are people who try to take advantage of you and abuse the system,” Vandermar acknowledged. “But there are many people out there who are trying hard and just need a little boost to get back on their feet, and you feel good about helping them.”
For many kindhearted congregations faced with pleas for donations, separating the deserving poor from the scam artists can be difficult. So, 12 years ago, a handful of southeast DuPage County churches joined forces to establish the clearinghouse for handling the burgeoning numbers of charitable requests.
The first year, the coalition served fewer than 150 families and individuals. By 1994, that number had risen to 645, and the number of member churches had increased more than tenfold.
Last year, according to Executive Director Robert Davis, the network provided $133,000 in assistance to about 2,000 needy families, many of them referred by area social agencies, and fielded several thousand additional calls.
About half of the requests are accommodated. The rest, Davis said, are not fulfilled because the person finds help elsewhere or trained clearinghouse volunteers turn up evidence of fraud.
Now the clearinghouse has plans to expand westward, mobilizing churches in Wheaton, Warrenville and other far western suburbs to serve residents of those areas.
“There has been a definite increase in calls for help in the last few years,” said Davis. “Part of the increase is due to the fact that we have become more proactive and developed collaborations with some federally funded programs, such as Head Start and Women, Infants and Children.”
The WIC program, administered by the DuPage County Health Department, provides healthy foods, such as milk, cereal and iron-fortified infant formula, to pregnant low-income women or mothers of small children. But about 10 percent of eligible mothers encounter problems in getting to county health centers, according to WIC nutrition coordinator Mary Anne Woodcock.
“A lot of our clients have moved to DuPage from Chicago, where there are bus stops on every corner, and they don’t have a car,” Woodcock said. “So what happens is that they weren’t able to access our services. Love Christian Clearinghouse got a church to provide transportation for women who needed rides.
“There is a lot of strength in the churches working together,” said Rev. Robert Geelhoed, a pastor at Christ Church of Oak Brook. Christ Church, which has about 5,000 members, helps with 20 to 25 clearinghouse requests annually.
