Countywide : Agency Finds Jobs for ‘Unemployable’

With his dark glasses masking eyes that cannot see, Burt Burden worked methodically on a stack of flyers, folding them and carefully placing them in a box in front of him at the Veterans Charity of Orange County.

The 46-year-old Santa Ana man, who was seated at a long table with a dozen other men performing the same task, is one of about 25 disabled veterans who work daily for the Santa Ana-based nonprofit agency at 201 S. Sullivan St. Many of them cannot get work elsewhere.

Burden, who lost his vision to a degenerative eye disease many years ago, said he is grateful to the agency and proud to have been able to earn wages and work at a job for the last five years.

“Thank God for this place,” said Burden, who served in the Army and Navy from 1973 to 1978.

“I was disabled and sitting at home for 30 months. I always wanted to get out of the house. I’ve worked all my life, and to go from that to nothing was pretty boring for me. But now, I feel better.”

John Bell, director of the veterans’ center, said the charity has provided disabled veterans a chance at “meaningful employment” since 1971.

The program is funded by the Veterans Thrift Store in Garden Grove, which is also run by the charity.

“We provide work for people who would otherwise be unemployable; we employ the hard-to-employ,” said Bell, who added that the work gives these people self-esteem and puts them in close touch with others like themselves.

Under the program, these veterans--whom Bell prefers to call “handi-capable”--make from $2.40 to $4.25 an hour, tax-free, doing light assembly work.

On one recent day, the tasks included folding safety instructions for a Huntington Beach pellet-gun manufacturing company.

They are paid below the minimum wage, in part because paying them more could jeopardize their government benefits.

For Douglas Hemig, the job is the difference “between life and death.” Without it, he wondered whether he would ever find another place to work.

“I work too slow to hold down a job anywhere else,” said the 44-year-old Long Beach man, who was wounded in Vietnam by sniper fire.

“There are people here who are too disabled and don’t produce enough work for them to keep a real job.”

Hemig, who said he suffers from chronic paranoid schizophrenia, said the work is also important for his self-esteem because “I’m accepted here.”

People interested in donating money, food or usable or salable items may send them to Veterans Charities of Orange County, 201 S. Sullivan St., Santa Ana.

For more information, call (714) 547-0615.