Automotive Program Aids Drug Abusers

“Cars for Jesus” is what Jerry Roberg, executive director of Ventura County Rescue Mission, calls the automotive vocational-training program for recovering drug and alcohol abusers his group started last year.

In December, the group received in donation a $450,000 building in downtown Santa Paula that once housed a Chevrolet dealership.

“I would probably be incarcerated if it wasn’t for this program,” said silver-haired Ventura resident Bobby Roberts, taking a break from working under the hood of a sports car.

“If a person is sincere about getting their life together, it’s given them a good opportunity,” the 54-year-old said of the yearlong residential program that gives former alcoholics and drug addicts practical training for careers in the automotive industry.

The vocational program began last August in the mission’s Harrison Avenue parking lot in Oxnard. The five people in the program shifted the operation indoors, to the former dealership on North Mills Road, about two weeks ago.

Donated by the Morris family, which operates dealerships in Simi Valley and Fillmore, the old building offers protection from the elements and more room to work on donated vehicles.

“A lot of these guys never thought they could do anything,” said Roberg, who worked in the automotive business for more than 20 years. “Our goal is to get them back on the tax rolls and get them to be taxpaying citizens, get them back off the streets and not living off the government, but supporting the government.”

The program appears to be working. Last month more than 60 donated vehicles were repaired and 53 were sold from the mission’s Oxnard lot. Sales proceeds will help pay for a $1.2-million, 20,000-square-foot mission--scheduled for completion May 1--that will house up to 150 men, Roberg said.

More growth in the program is afoot. By week’s end, a second car-sales lot is expected to open in the parking lot behind the mission’s downtown Ventura store at 294 E. Main St. And Roberg is looking for volunteer mechanics and others with automotive expertise willing to help train the program’s students. For more information, call 487-1234, Ext. 238.

“It saved my life,” said Tom Cash, 45, who swapped more than a quarter-century of drinking and drugs for a potential career in automotive sales. He graduates from the program in a month. “It’s still in the process of teaching me how to live a good, clean, full, spiritual life. I’ve never been as content as I am now in my entire life.”