I had no intention of writing about MEND when I went to the charity's benefit tea Saturday.
I planned to load up on those little cucumber sandwiches, snag some nice gifts at the silent auction, catch up with old friends, and go home feeling good about helping a group that does so much to help others.
Instead, I came away astounded by the power of a dream and grass-roots team.
MEND -- Meet Each Need With Dignity -- has been around for almost 40 years and is probably the San Fernando Valley's best-known charity. It's where teenagers go when they need to do community service, where schools drop off canned goods for Thanksgiving baskets, where families send old clothes when they clean out their closets.
It's grown from a handful of nuns and Catholic do-gooders, handing out food and used clothing from a cramped storefront in Pacoima, to a $7-million operation, serving almost half a million clients last year with 19 employees.
And 2,600 volunteers.
The groundwork for MEND was laid in the late 1960s with a truckload of furniture -- castoff couches, tables and beds collected from middle-class friends and delivered by Ed and Carolyn Rose to poor families in a corner of the Valley that missed out on the region's suburban prosperity.
The Roses helped organize volunteers in their parish, Our Lady of Peace, and in three other northeast Valley churches; began collecting food and clothes; and spread the word to local schools, churches and community groups that families could come to them for help.
Seventeen years later, MEND hired its first paid staffer, director Marianne Haver Hill. By then, 400 volunteers were feeding, clothing and teaching English to 40,000 residents.
Last year, 488,269 clients sought help at MEND's new headquarters, a brightly colored 40,000-square-foot building that resembles a child's Lego project amid the cheap motels and auto repair shops along San Fernando Boulevard.
Inside, MEND looks like a suburban mall, with a clothing store, cafe, child-care center, spacious kitchen and food storage areas.
Upstairs, there is a medical clinic with 10 exam rooms, a dental office with eight chairs, a vision center, private counseling rooms, a pharmacy and lab. And all the doctors, dentists, nurses, counselors and technicians are volunteers.
The clinic got its start 15 years ago, Ed Rose said, "when a woman doctor came in and said she'd like to volunteer. The lady walks in off the street and sets up a little area to look at patients. And that grew to what we have here." The clinics served more than 4,000 patients last year.
