Center Serving Cancer Patients to Close July 15 : Social services: The Wellness Community’s founder says private funding ‘just dried up.’

SANTA ANA — The Wellness Community of Orange County, which has offered “hope and friendship” to nearly 1,000 cancer patients since 1990, will close on July 15 because of a shortage of money, the executive director said Friday.

“I’m not only sad, I feel drained, emotionally drained,” Shirley Lorenz said. “Our current financial condition, combined with the fiscal crisis of Orange County at this particular time, leave us no choice. We are very saddened this action had to occur, but there were no options.”

Harold Benjamin, who started the original Wellness Community in Santa Monica 13 years ago after his wife developed breast cancer, said he tried but failed in recent days to help save the Orange County center.

“We have 13 other facilities around the United States,” he said. “This is the first one that has ever even come close to closing up for lack of funds.”

In Orange County, he said, private funding “just dried up and ran out.”

News of the pending closure is a blow to the approximately 120 men and women who visit the center weekly to attend support groups, speak with counselors and seek tips to help them battle the disease. About 30% of the center’s participants have breast cancer, Lorenz said.

Client Diana Johnson of Fountain Valley said the news was distressing. “A lot of people,” she said, “this is all they have.”

Lorenz said the center has begun dispensing information to clients about other support groups in Orange County. There are also Wellness Community centers in Pasadena, Torrance and San Diego.

Insiders say the Wellness Community is distinctive partly because of its “patient active concept,” which encourages clients to become “fully participating members of their health-care team.”

Benjamin said research has illuminated three crucial problems for cancer patients: “unwanted aloneness,” loss of control and loss of hope. The center seeks to provide an antidote to these problems.

“The Wellness Community is not a place for cancer patients to come to learn to die from cancer or to adapt their lives to cancer,” Benjamin said. “It is a place to come to learn whatever they need to know to fight for their recovery, along with their physicians and other health care professionals.

Some of the clients have been meeting regularly with one another for three years, said Anne DeQuoy, a counselor who runs three sessions a week at the center.

When she told clients this week that the center will be closing, DeQuoy said, many cried and some expressed a determination to find a way to continue meeting.

“People are very upset, very disappointed and generally [experiencing a] feeling of loss,” she said. “Everyone wanted to know what they could do to stop this from happening. People offered their homes, they offered donations, one group suggested a door-to-door solicitation campaign.”

Some clients get help at the center that they can’t find elsewhere.

“A lot of these people have lost their friends. [Cancer] is very taxing on friendships,” Diana Johnson said. And families, she said, “don’t know what to do anymore, and they’re going on with their lives. One gal’s daughter forgot her birthday..”

The center was founded by former Orange County Supervisor Harriett Wieder in memory of her sister, who died of cancer. Wieder has said the final months of her sister’s life were enriched by her attendance at the Wellness Community in Santa Monica.

The Santa Ana center, which has three part-time and three full-time employees, has an annual budget of between $350,000 and $400,000 and relies exclusively on private donations. The county’s bankruptcy “exacerbated an already difficult situation,” Lorenz said, because competition for private funds has increased.

“We’re a small nonprofit, and small nonprofits are struggling now in Orange County,” she said. “We just could not come up with the money. . . . Competition in Orange County is very severe.”

In an attempt to be fiscally responsible, Lorenz said, the center’s board of directors voted earlier last month to close July 15.

Still, she added, “I do believe in miracles, and if we had a miracle we obviously would be elated to continue offering this very special program to Orange County.”