Oakmont residents greet homeless neighbors at Los Guilicos shelter

Thanks but no thanks, said the sign on the donation box at Star of the Valley Roman Catholic Church in Oakmont.

While the church was grateful for the two pickup truckloads of donations its parishioners had already given to their new neighbors at the Los Guilicos juvenile justice campus, enough was enough.

At the present time, Peter Hardy wrote on the sign posted Monday morning, the homeless people who had just moved into 60 prefabricated units across Highway 12 did not need further assistance. There was hardly any room in their tiny houses for more gifts.

Jackie Kinney’s call for baked goods was met with a similar surge of generosity. “Let’s welcome them with brownies,” she’d suggested online before the first wave of homeless arrived at the brand new village at Los Guilicos. Around 100 of her fellow Oakmonters responded, ensuring that the new arrivals will not want for desserts anytime soon.

At a tense mid-January meeting at Oakmont’s Berger Center attended by some 500 residents of the senior community east of Santa Rosa, people aired a wide range of concerns, including potential crime, safety rules and the possibility that county officials were lying when they said the sanctioned homeless camp would be emptied by the end of April.

The fears expressed at that meeting, combined with hundreds of negative posts on the social media site Nextdoor, created the impression that a large majority of the Oakmont community is virulently opposed to living alongside the homeless.

That’s incorrect, insists Hardy, who laments that some of those Nextdoor threads degenerate into “a dog fight.”

He believes that closer to 20 to 25 percent of the community is “highly indignant” about the situation.

While his wife, Catherine, believes that Los Guilicos is a lousy location for the camp, she also accepts that it’s a done deal.

“They’re here,” she said. “And they’re human beings. We’ve all heard the saying: There but for the grace of God go I.”

If the anti-Los Guilicos crowd was the protest, the counter-protest was led, arguably, by Nadine Condon, whose open letter to the community - posted Jan. 16 on Nextdoor - urged her fellow Oakmonters to open their minds and look into their hearts.

“These unsheltered remain our sons, daughters, Moms and Dads, sisters and brothers,” she wrote. “What if we help them acclimate and even thrive?”

Condon pointed out that Oakmont “has many groups that could assist in visiting, helping with food, clothing, driving to appointments, etc. When we hold ourselves and others to a higher standard, most everyone will rise to the occasion.”

That post has generated over 300 responses, “half congratulating me for taking a stand,” said Condon, “and half telling me that the Huns and the Visigoths are coming to overrun Oakmont.”

Her open letter seems to have succeeded in persuading some Oakmont residents to give Los Guilicos a chance.

When Condon followed up by calling a meeting for volunteers, she was pleasantly surprised when nearly 100 people showed up.

Pointing out that Oakmont has a history of its citizens giving generously of their time, Santa Rosa City Councilman Jack Tibbetts says he hasn’t been surprised by the robust welcome extended to those moving in at Los Guilicos.

“But it has been moving,” he allowed, “to see how many people are reaching out.”

In addition to his role on the City Council, Tibbetts is executive director of the Society of St. Vincent De Paul, which is operating the county’s new homeless camp.

One Oakmont volunteer, Lou Kinzler, went to that Berger Center meeting “with mixed emotions about the homeless moving into my backyard.”

After hearing Tibbetts speak, and take responsibility for the project, Kinzler said, “I thought, ‘I can work with this guy.’?”

Doug Woodard has spent four days at Los Guilicos, welcoming residents and solving problems. The fear of these homeless people, expressed by some Oakmonters, is “reflexive,” he said, and is the result of what he called “othering.”

When you “other” a group, he went on, “you cut yourself off from them, and then it becomes very easy to make them a villain, to make people afraid of them.”

The antidote? If some of the folks most opposed to the presence of these homeless people “would just cross the road and meet them, and spend some time with them,” said Woodard, “then it would be a lot harder to ‘other’ them.”

“You cannot live your life just with fear, you have to move forward,” said Oakmont resident Malka Osserman, a social worker and chaplain.

At a recent meeting of volunteers, she picked up on the positive energy fueling those who’ve decided to help the homeless, whose presence “is giving people a lot of purpose. It gives them a reason for feel good about themselves.”

In this way, the homeless camp across the highway can be seen not as a blight, she said, but as “a gift, a mitzvah.”