Growing up on a soybean-and-corn farm in central Illinois, Rhonda Meister felt connected to the earth and to all of life - however that life was. She notes that all animals, like people, "don't get born perfect."

The folks around the close-knit community of Fisher, with its population under 1,500, were dependent on each other. If a farmer got sick with crops to plant or harvest, neighbors would show up without being asked.

The whole county was practically all white, with Catholics in the minority. But her parents went out of their way to educate Rhonda and her two younger brothers and sister about people of other cultures, religions and races. Somehow her mother would find tortillas and other Mexican food in cans to serve occasionally. And when anti-Semitism raised its ugly head, the kids would get an impromptu talking about "how everybody is a human being with gifts and potential, and everybody needs to be respected."

Wayne and Ann Meister would even drive their children to special events at the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana 80 miles away so they could see and mix with nonwhites.

"Those influences were very formative for me in how I viewed the world and viewed other people," she reports.

Meister wound up studying psychology at then-Newton College of the Sacred Heart (which merged with Boston College) in Massachusetts, where the family had moved, before earning a master's degree in divinity at a Presbyterian seminary in Chicago. "I never had my ministry as affirmed as I did there," she reports.

After she moved to Los Angeles in 1983 with friends from graduate school, she took a job at the House of Ruth battered women's shelter in East L.A. doing family counseling and case management. Driving from Venice, she'd go by a little store-front building at Fourth and Rose avenues called the St. Joseph Center, and learned later that it was founded by two Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet in 1976. Lots of days, there would be a long line of homeless people waiting to get in.

Curious, one morning she stopped and met a co-founder of the place, Sister Marilyn Rudy, who told her they had an urgent opening for a case manager in the homeless services program. And because she was tired of fighting cross-town traffic, she decided to take it.

After about 12 months, Sister Rudy asked Meister to be the acting director while she was on sabbatical. The Midwesterner agreed, as long as somebody would help handle the financial part of the job.

Another year went by and Sister Rudy showed up to take her to lunch. The nun announced she wasn't coming back and was going to recommend to the board that they make the acting director permanent head of the growing center.

"I was in total shock," Meister says, still looking surprised.

New vision needed
During the next 23 years, she guided the nonprofit with a dozen paid workers running a mom-and-pop daytime homeless center, food pantry and job placement program serving 500 people a year to one of the westside's leading private social service organizations, reaching nearly 7,000 low-income working and homeless individuals last year.

Today, 100-plus staffers and 400 volunteers keep 10 different programs going at eight sites in Santa Monica and Venice. Family services include a family center and food pantry, infant toddler development center, early learning center and culinary training program. A homeless service center, affordable housing program, senior services and the Bread and Roses Café make up the homeless services part. Under money management services fall the monetary advisory program and veterans representative payee program.

This summer a two-story, 30,000 square-feet complex will open on Hampton Drive in Venice, replacing the eight-room former parochial school that had housed most of the St. Joseph Center's family programs since the mid-'80s. It will be home for the food pantry, culinary training program, housing department, senior services, family case management services plus administration.

With the new headquarters, the director of the St. Joseph Center thought it was also a good time to bring in new leadership. So she retired this spring. The Santa Monica City Council proclaimed in March that that 58-year-old woman was a "consistent and compelling voice in support of the underserved and marginalized in Santa Monica and throughout Los Angeles County."

"I felt like it's a moment when I've brought the center to where I can bring it," she says. "It's just the right time for someone younger with a new vision to bring it to the next level. It was just an internal sense that I had.

"And also," she adds, "I want to be able to focus a little more of my time on my family. I have a 16-year-old daughter, and I want something that's a little less 24/7."

Meister is proud of the commitment and dedication of her staff, from the delivery drivers to top management, as well as working closely with other area service providers to create a network of stronger services. But there's something else that excites her even more.

"I think what I'm proudest of," she says, "is just the creation of the services that meet the needs of working poor people and homeless people, and the breadth of those services and how targeted they are.

"From veterans with our specialized services at the VA, to people with disabilities who need help managing their money to our senior program to our children programs - which include both homeless and housed families, which is not very common - to the programs here that help working poor families who are struggling harder than they've struggled in a lot of years just to maintain their housing."

After a moment, she adds, "We've responded to needs at different times. And I feel proud of having built something that comprehensive and responsive to the needs."

But there have been, and still are, challenges.

One ongoing major hurdle is finding locales and buildings to house services for society's down-and-outers, especially the homeless. She says the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) attitude remains alive and well, even on the liberal westside. Since the homeless services day center moved to its new location at Lincoln Boulevard and Flower Avenue in Venice a year ago, some residents have complained and steadfastly fought it.

Meister says she understands people's concerns, but the St. Joseph Center has added roving and evening security, which has actually helped to clean up a nearby parking lot and alley once inhabited by drug dealers and prostitutes.

"I think in the final analysis, homeless people getting services makes a lot more sense than homeless people laying on sidewalks and being in the community without services, in terms of safety and in terms of everybody's well-being," she points out, shaking her head. "Residents' opposition tells me that there's still so much education work to do - to see the homeless as people, as human beings."

The other big challenge has just been raising money, year after year, to keep all the programs going. The center gets about 50 percent of its operating budget from public funding sources, 25 to 30 percent from foundations and the rest from individual donors. "It's a constant struggle, no matter how hard you try," she notes.

Changing poverty
During the last two decades, poverty in West L.A. has changed, according to Meister. Large pockets of poor people can still be found in Venice, but gentrification during the last five years has displaced many, who have had to move farther south and east to find affordable housing.

She readily agrees with most social observers about the growing gap between haves and have-nots, with drastic rent hikes driving the divide. Blaming the victim, whether that's the homeless or immigrant families, is also on the rise.

"God, that's so bad," she laments about a recent Gallup poll finding that only five percent of Americans believe poverty and homelessness are important national issues. "People's lives are so packed and busy that they don't have the time to think about much else other than themselves and their family.

"And especially about the homeless, I think there's a lot of fear," she explains. "There is a fear maybe at some level that something could happen to them, that they're going to be hurt or get a disease if they get close to a homeless person. And so, therefore, you make homeless persons not human and then you don't have to deal with them."

But Meister doesn't think the Southland's poverty crisis is so intractable nothing can really be done about it. In fact, she believes that right now is an opportune time, because both the city and county of Los Angeles seem to be gearing up to face the issue head-on.

"There's an opportunity, there's a moment to be grasped," she says. "So I think maybe something can get done on homelessness. And that's where the religious community could help, especially with locating landlords who are willing to lease and rent to poor families and individuals.

"It would be fantastic if Catholic parishes took in the homeless," she continues. "But even if priests just preached on helping the poor, because of the tremendous need in our community. The homeless and poor people need to be acknowledged, and they need programs to help them."

The former farm girl has learned a lot in 23 years in the big city at the helm of the St. Joseph Center. Recently, a study of the homeless in Santa Monica documented just how both physically and mentally ill people living on the street really are. The nighttime survey found that almost half (42 percent) of the city's homeless population is at risk of dying prematurely.

She's also come to see that the poor not only often go hungry, but what they do eat gravely impacts their health. Cheaper food goes together with bad eating habits, which contributes to the obesity epidemic, to diabetes and, eventually, to deadly heart disease.

This is the first time in Rhonda Meister's life where she doesn't know exactly what she wants to do next. But the Illinois native is sure that she wants to get more into policy work, where there's a chance to bring about concrete change. In the meantime, she's doing some consulting with foundations about the homeless projects they fund and is still on the board of the St. Joseph Center. She is also probably going to be volunteering at the Bread and Roses Café, while spending more quality time with her daughter, Mahalea, and husband, Paul Alperin, a psychiatric social worker.

"I don't know exactly where policy work might lead me," she admits. "But I do know that 20 years from now I don't want Los Angeles to still be the homeless capital of the United States. We can do better."