Labors of Love program builds neighborly bonds, debuts in Newport Beach
A vintage wooden bookcase holds small planters displayed on the porch of an old house in the 100 block of East Balboa Boulevard, about 1.5 miles past Newport Beach Pier. Tin and ceramic pots sit arranged near the center of tables placed at either corner of the home’s narrow frontyard.
“They’re dead,” Birdi Kumar, project coordinator for the nonprofit Trellis, said of the potted plants. “But they’re there, and they were obviously intentionally placed. It’s very evident, if you stop and pay attention, that there’s someone here. A person lives here.”
But weeds have conquered most of the lawn, some growing taller than the wall separating them from the front porch. Layers of recently applied paint fail to hide the contours of older, crackled layers. The wood furniture out front has warped and faded due to exposure to the elements, and patches of rust have grown on those made of metal.
The homeowner is a woman living on a fixed income who is approaching her 90s, and she’s gotten some help with maintenance from one of her neighbors, Kumar said. But they’ve struggled to keep up in recent years.
The woman’s home has gotten such a reputation for being messy that others occasionally dump their junk in her yard, Kumar said. Meanwhile neighbors have been sending complaints about about the state of the residence to the city’s code enforcement department.
Those complaints can lead to hundreds of dollars in fines or more, which can be a tremendous burden on people on a fixed income. From there, it can be a slippery slope to losing one’s home, Kumar said.
To keep that from happening to this homeowner, Trellis, which oversees efforts known as Love Newport Beach and Love Costa Mesa, has put together a team of 15 volunteers from local churches and community organizations to help get her yard back up to code. Over a three-hour period on Saturday, Sept. 14, they’ll pull weeds, haul away old junk and replace it with durable outdoor furniture.
The project is an extension of Labors of Love, a program Trellis began in Costa Mesa in April 2022 to foster a sense of community between neighbors by coming to the aid of some of the most vulnerable among them. The cleanup event on Balboa Boulevard will be its debut in Newport Beach.
“People are aging everywhere,” Kumar said. “Yes, there are plenty of calls. There’s plenty of need in the community.”
When Kumar joined Trellis about a year ago, she said they were able to find people who might benefit from the Labors of Love program but who didn’t immediately trust the nonprofit. They were wary of scams that prey upon the elderly and skeptical of strangers offering kindness for free.
“That’s a result of lack of neighboring,” Kumar said. “It’s something that’s fallen out of our culture to be neighborly, just to say ‘hello,’ ‘good morning,’ to chat or ask someone over for a beer or cup of coffee.”
But after word spread of the program, more people came forward to suggest homeowners who might benefit from its efforts. As of September, Trellis had enough projects lined up in Costa Mesa to schedule one each month for a year. Organization officials would like to make the same sort of impact in Newport Beach and beyond.
Labor of Love projects in Costa Mesa happen every first Saturday of the month, and Trellis plans on running that same schedule in Newport Beach. The nonprofit invites people to recommend people in the community who could use a hand or to sign up as volunteers. Kumar said she hopes that as the program grows, it will foster relationships within communities and encourage people to see each other as neighbors.
“You can be aware of what your Saturday morning’s effort could mean to someone if you just paid attention and carved out a little time,” Kumar said. “The hope is that in building ‘neighboring’ that we would start to notice one another a little more and reach out a hand to take in someone’s trash cans when they’re elderly, or to pull their weeds, say ‘Hey, can I help you out with that?’ In that way, folks don’t feel so alone.”
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