“Helping Hand”

PASADENA - Just off Colorado Boulevard, in a stripped-down former Peruvian restaurant, Joe Colletti is making a business pitch to some potential backers. Mama's Hot Tamales, Pasadena, a kitchen incubator and job-training cafe, needs $50,000 to buy a custom 27-foot range hood, and Colletti wants the Pasadena Community Foundation to write the check.

"Starting a small business, for some people that's their dream," he said of the program. "That's the price of the equipment, and without it we can't even get started." But he'll have to get in line. Colletti is just one of 85 nonprofit groups in Pasadena, Altadena and Sierra Madre competing this year for $850,000 in grants available from the foundation.

As they've done for the past 53 years, staff and board members will spend the next few weeks visiting every site that has applied for grants and scrutinizing the business plans of applicants. Funding requests this year include everything from soccer field lighting to music scores for the Pasadena Symphony. On May 9, the board and staffers will sit down at a five-hour meeting to hash out the results and make some tough decisions, said Jennifer DeVoll, the foundation's executive director. The official announcement of this year's recipients will come on June 6.

"We look very closely," said DeVoll. "All the money we own is from the residents of Pasadena, one way or another." This past week, she and board members Wendy Munger and Raymond Ealy listened intently to Colletti's pitch, firing off questions. The annual grants distribution started with Louis Webb – described as a "frugal millionaire" – who created the Pasadena Community Foundation in 1953 with a $1 million donation; the assets now stand at $16 million, DeVoll said. The foundation specializes in small-scale grants, usually of about $10,000 or less, she said.

The $50,000 Colletti is asking for would count as a major donation, she said, though not the largest. That distinction came in February, when the foundation awarded nearly $500,000 to John Muir High School in Pasadena for a three-year youth initiative. But for the most part the grants are small and for very specific purposes, DeVoll said.

"People think of us as computers and phones – and we do a lot of that, too – but we got two tepees for the Girl Scouts, CPR-training mannequins for the Red Cross, even a couple of fork-lifts," DeVoll said. Most grants may be for run-of-the-mill items, board member Wendy Munger said, but small things can change lives in big ways. "You can see it," she said. "Having a freezer so you don't have to go to the market every day makes life easier." Grant applications are up by 18 from last year, and Munger said it's tough to choose between worthy causes. "We go from autistic kids to homeless people to juvenile delinquents," Munger said. "It is a hard decision, yes. And each year it's harder to prioritize."

Ealy, a board member from Altadena, said he has a "soft spot" for programs that benefit children and the elderly. "I tend to focus on areas that touch the most people, the neediest," Ealy said. But trying to fill the gaps left by cutbacks in state and federal spending is "like swimming upstream," he said. "I feel bad about the organizations that didn't make the cut ... but we try to make sure the people who really are needy get it," he added.

Colletti hopes that will include Mama's Hot Tamales - Pasadena, patterned on a successful scheme he started six years ago in the MacArthur Park area of Los Angeles. The City Council has backed the $2.6 million project with a $425,000 loan toward the building's $1.8 million purchase, leaving the group to patch together the rest from public and private sources, including a $600,000 building renovation by Pasadena contractor Barbosa Polverini. Colletti said initial plans are to have about 100 trainees in the Pasadena facility, and applicants can be from any ethnic background. "We're going to be a grant-dependent operation for two years," Colletti said, predicting the kitchen/restaurant would then pay for itself. Their aim? "To bring Pasadena together one tamale at a time," he said.

janette.williams@sgvn.com (626) 578-6300, Ext. 4482

Staff Photo by Walt Mancini (c) 2008 Pasadena Star-News.  All rights reserved.  

Reproduced with the permission of Media NewsGroup, Inc. by NewsBank, Inc. 
Record Number:  8997621

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