Profile: CCP Family Liaison Angelica Ornelas

Ornelas leads family liaison program at CCP

BY NOE PADILLA

For the past 11 years, Angelica Ornelas has been working behind the scenes at the Carpinteria Children’s Project (CCP) as the nonprofit’s lead family liaison. She has been quietly, but actively, working to help the community through serving as a conduit of information and public aid.

Originally from León, a city in Guanajuato, Mexico, Ornelas immigrated to the United States at 12-years-old, and settled in Carpinteria where her parents had been working for some time. She grew up in Carpinteria and eventually became a part-time instructional assistant and family advocate at Canalino Preschool.

In 2009, CCP opened and became a centralized nexus of social services and early childhood education for the community. Ornelas transferred to CCP as the non-profit’s lead family liaison. As a liaison, she’s helped connect families with the services they may need and has helped parents prepare their children for school.

“We’re here to support every family,” said Ornelas. “Any resources that they need our Promotores will come out to the community and hand out flyers and give out information, we are there for them.”

Prior to CCP, it was difficult for families to find the aid they needed in Carpinteria, many had to drive to Santa Barbara in order to find support. Now, this task is less arduous, as CCP hosts a broad range of services, including, family support, childcare, financial assistance and hospice.

Over the past 11 years, Ornelas has witnessed the growth of CCP, from partnering with food banks, to becoming a distribution hub for families in need of food, to helping other agencies reach families they normally wouldn’t be able to.

“The Santa Barbara Bike Coalition wants to be involved here,” said Ornelas. “They’ve been here before selling helmets at a low cost and providing refurbished bikes to the little ones; and now they want to come back and do a helmet and light distribution.”

While at CCP, Ornelas has worked to engage Hispanic communities and to promote the benefits of CCP to the community. With the help of the local Promotores group, she has been able to keep many families informed and connected to CCP.

“If we see that there’s a family that needs support that we don’t have, or maybe a mestizo family moving up this way, we connect with and provide them with what they need, for example, a translator,” said Ornelas.

Ornelas noted that during the pandemic reaching out to the many communities in Carpinteria has become difficult. Many families have found it hard to adjust to remote aid, she said. Sometimes a document that might have been finished in one trip, now takes dozens of emails before it is finished, and for some parents, this process is impossible without help from their children.

“When Medi-Cal and Calfresh enrollments were due, since I wasn’t seeing them for one-on-one appointments, it was so hard for them to get their packets done,” said Ornelas. “A lot of the families unfortunately lost their benefits because they didn’t have anyone to help them with their enrollment… The school used to help them but since their offices weren’t open, we couldn’t.”

With Covid-19 restrictions lessening in the state’s reopening transition, Ornelas has been able to get many of these families their benefits back. For families in need of food, CCP has tried to support them with a biweekly onsite food bank. Near the beginning of the pandemic, they were serving around 500 families, now it’s around 385 families.

Through it all, Ornelas has worked hard to support the families of the Carpinteria community and always remembers the joys of the job.

“Sometimes I get to see the families out on the streets,” said Ornelas. “Some of these families I’ve known since they were little, and it’s funny how I get to see

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Family liaison Angelica Ornelas stands outside her office at the Carpinteria Children’s Project ready to help the community.

them as parents and see how they’re taking care of their kids in a better way than their parents did. It’s a good feeling.”

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