The Sycamores Celebrates a Century of Aiding Children

There was a time, long ago in genteel old Pasadena, when supporting an orphanage was occasion for the social event of the season.

A 1921 costume ball--held as a fund-raiser for the Pasadena Children’s Training Society--was “one of the most gorgeous and picturesque affairs ever given in Pasadena,” according to the Pasadena Evening Post.

“With well-known society women and popular debutantes garbed in gorgeous costumes, impersonating the famous beauties of history,” the ball, with more than 2,000 attendees, was “the largest and most successful ever given in Pasadena.”

These days, charity events where the well-heeled masquerade as warrior queens and high priestesses are presumably a thing of the past. And support for agencies catering to the children society has left behind is derived more from governmental sources than cotillions.

But the work continues for the Children’s Training Society, which was renamed the Sycamores in the late 1960s after the move from a two-story building in central Pasadena to a leafy campus in northwest Altadena.

Once a place where babies were left on the front steps by parents unable to care for them, the organization, which celebrates its 100th anniversary this year, is flourishing, providing a range of social services for Pasadena-area children and families in need.

The programs vary widely--a residential center for boys removed from their families; three community-based group homes; two non-public schools for children with special needs; a mental health program run in partnership with the Pasadena Unified School District; a transitional living program for foster youths who have reached 18; and a neighborhood-based family resource center. In all, the Sycamores estimates that it reaches more than 1,500 children and families a year.

“We see ourselves as facilitating opportunities for the community and being available to them,” said Debbie Manners, vice president of programs at the Sycamores.

The family resource center, in northwest Pasadena, offers tutoring, recreational activities for children and English as a second language classes and computer instruction for parents.

Judith Barhydt, director of special education for the Pasadena Unified School District, said the nearly 100-year partnership between the Sycamores and the school district is, today, “collaborative and broad-based.”

In addition, Barhydt said, the Sycamores helped students, teachers and staff deal with a series of tragedies that befell students during the last academic year. “Whenever we have a need for support for a crisis,” Barhydt said, “we call one person at the Sycamores, and they send a team. They are at home with the family, at the hospital, with the teachers, with the kids. That’s another important partnership.”

To maintain its intricate web of social services, the Sycamores employs 500 people at 13 sites throughout the Pasadena area. The Sycamores’ annual budget hovers around $25 million--most of which comes from government funding. The $1 million that is raised each year from private sources goes directly to enrichment programs.

Last year, an artist-in-residence worked with a group of boys living at the treatment facility to produce papier-mache masks--a project, said Sycamores president and chief executive William P. Martone, that allowed the boys to find an outlet for their feelings while honing their artistic skills. The masks were displayed this summer in a gallery at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena.

This year, the Sycamores is expanding its enrichment offerings--in part to bring the arts to children who might otherwise never be exposed to them, and in part to offer the boys glimpses of career possibilities. Exploring Music, a project of the Sycamores and the Pasadena POPS Orchestra, introduced boys at the residential facility to orchestral music. A photography project, cooking classes and horticultural lessons are planned.

“Part of what’s been lost in our society is the craftsman, apprenticeship aspect,” Martone said. “That’s dying away. We are looking at bringing some of those people to come back, get some kids interested.”

At a recent session in the Sycamores’ Altadena campus recreation room, Pasadena Pops conductor Rachael Worby held 25 boys rapt for nearly an hour as she and three musicians coaxed music out of bongos, a snare drum, cymbals, a timpani, a tambourine, xylophones and even a whoopee cushion. Later in the week, the boys helped the orchestra set up for a performance at Descanso Gardens and then sat at the concert in the front row, as Worby’s guests.

“There are lots of ways that people grow and change,” Worby said. “But to see these young men emerge on so many different levels in the face of the one thing which has helped me lead a charmed life--music--completes a circle for me that nothing else completes. It means that I am able to impact the parts of this world which otherwise are left to lay fallow far too often.”

For Alicia, 18, who moved into a Sycamores-supported transitional living facility in January after she graduated from the foster care system, the Sycamores is providing a different sort of lifeline: a chance at independent living, with assistance.

The agency secured a lease on an apartment for her and charges her rent on a graduated scale that increases as she gets closer to 21. A case manager offers support on everything from balancing a checkbook to coping with depression. Alicia is working full time at Kinko’s, she said, and plans to begin nursing school in January.

“By the time I’m 21,” she said, “I want to be on my own.”

For now, though, the Sycamores, she said, helps “with the little small things: normal skills for a person who is on their own. Just a little more.”