For 27 years, Barry Del Buono gave a voice to some of the most
ignored and powerless members of the South County community.
GILROY
For 27 years, Barry Del Buono gave a voice to some of the most ignored and powerless members of the South County community.
Del Buono, 56, left his post in August as president and chief executive officer of EHC LifeBuilders, a nonprofit seeking to end homelessness in the county, and is sorely missed by his colleagues.
“Barry was a real visionary,” said interim CEO, Jennifer Hodgson Loving. “He had a big heart and recognized that there wasn’t a lot happening for the homeless. He knew how to make things happen. He put his money where his mouth is.”
Hodgson Loving is filling the vacancy Del Buono left behind when he decided to move on.
“We built a pretty formidable organization, but it was time to let some fresh, young Turks take up the challenge and for me to move on,” Del Buono said of his decision. “You hit a certain age and you want to take another shot at doing something meaningful. It’s invigorating.”
These days, Del Buono is teaching a course called “Ethics, Immigration and Racism” at San Jose City College.
Driven by Del Buono’s energy and perseverance, EHC LifeBuilders constructed more than a dozen homeless shelters during the past 27 years. South County homeless can find shelter at the Boccardo Family Living Center in San Martin, which offers emergency, transitional and migrant farm worker housing. Seasonal shelter is available at the National Guard armory on Wren Avenue in Gilroy and Del Buono and LifeBuilders worked with South County Housing to build the Sobrato Transitional Apartments on Monterey Road in Gilroy. The 60-unit facility offers long-term, very affordable housing to South County’s homeless.
An additional year-round homeless shelter is planned for the land in front of the Sobrato apartments that will replace the armory, Del Buono said. This project will cost $6 million and only half the funds had been raised at the time of Del Buono’s departure from LifeBuilders. Without him, the organization will face some major obstacles in raising that money and the project has been put on hold indefinitely, said Dina Campeau who worked at LifeBuilders as a grant writer from 1997 to 2004.
“He provided services during the day and wrote grant applications at night,” Campeau said of Del Buono’s dedication. “He uncovered in himself a talent for raising money.”
In addition to building several shelters in South County, Del Buono helped Gilroyans found the Lord’s Table Hot Meals Program at St. Mary Catholic Parish. The concept was modeled after a San Jose soup kitchen that Del Buono had founded during his five-year stint as a Catholic priest. Although Del Buono discovered that the ministry was not for him, his time spent in the seminary and the priesthood “tapped into this great passion I had to care for others.” He chose to apply that to the homeless issue by founding LifeBuilders.
He guided Gilroy locals, Alice Sousa and Louise Weske, in the formation of the Lord’s Table.
“He was our mentor,” Sousa said of Del Buono. “I knew him from when he was a kid in the seminary. With the help of the Holy Spirit and Barry, we opened the Lord’s Table in 1983.”
The Lord’s Table still operates and serves a hot dinner to Gilroy’s homeless every Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday night.
The goal that guided him over the years was to “empower the homeless and get them back in the mainstream,” he said. He approached the issue from a proactive stance, offering them educational and job training services in addition to food and shelter.
“By tapping into people’s passions” and with the help of numerous organizations, he was able to chip away at the problem, he said.
“People in this county have a passion for caring about others,” Del Buono said. “There’s an unwritten Good Samaritan law in South County.”
