Santa Rosa auto repair shop devoted to helping single moms
When Angie Angerman’s 12-year-old Dodge Magnum died last year, it wasn’t just a hassle and financial hit. It was a disaster, upending everything in her precariously balanced life.
As a single mother of two, who works part time while juggling classes at Santa Rosa Junior College, she couldn’t come even close to paying $1,000 to get the car back on the road.
“It was a nightmare,” she said.
She was forced to get up at 5:30 in the morning to get her 2½-year-old daughter to day care by 8 a.m. The journey entailed a trip from her Rincon Valley bus stop to the Downtown Transit Mall, where she would then have to wait an hour for a county bus to get her to the day care. She would then have to wait another 45 minutes for a bus that would get her to Santa Rosa Junior College. She would have to do it in reverse at the end of the day.
Weekends were even worse. She had to get to her job as assistant manager for a storage facility on Sebastopol Road but also get her daughter to a day care downtown, with fewer buses running. She found herself frequently walking and losing weight.
“I was spending four to six hours on the bus every day. I’m grateful for public transit, but it’s hard to do anything when you’re a parent and you’ve got to work and go to school to survive,” she said. “I felt like I was doing all this work and I couldn’t get a break.”
But relief came when a counselor at CalWORKS, which oversees a welfare to work program for single parents at Santa Rosa Junior College, told her about a little-known auto shop on Santa Rosa Avenue that repairs cars for free for single mothers working hard to pull themselves out of poverty.
For the past year, SAL Auto has operated largely under the radar. It is the brainchild of Matthew Nalywaiko, a 35-year-old Santa Rosa man who for the past eight years has dedicated his entrepreneurship to helping others. In 2009, he founded a local nonprofit he called Serve a Little, which marshaled an army of professional tradesmen, mechanics and skilled handymen, to help low-income single mothers and military wives with home and auto repairs. The organization also took donated cars and refurbished them for needy moms.
“We were spread very thin being an all-volunteer organization. We leaned toward the greatest need and the greatest need was automotive repair, particularly for single moms,” said Nalywaiko,
Shifted gears
Without working wheels a young mom barely making ends meet can’t get kids to school and day care, to jobs, medical appointments and college classes to lift themselves out of poverty. So he shifted gears and set about figuring out how to keep more struggling mothers mobile.
He put together a business plan for his vision of a nonprofit car repair shop, that would use the proceeds from full-paying clients to subsidize free repair work for qualifying single moms. A man in commercial real estate who Nalywaiko met in a yoga class heard about the project and offered to buy a building and lease it back to the nonprofit at a huge discount to get the shop going. Then a whole village of benefactors stepped forward to renovate a former motorcycle shop on Santa Rosa Avenue into an enviable auto shop stocked with professional tools, lifts and four bays.
SAL is a full-service auto repair shop, open to the public. On the outside, it doesn’t look any different than any other car repair shop. But on the walls inside are the painted words, “We Keep Single Mothers Moving Forward.”
“There was a study done, and it takes about three hours to go less than 20 miles anywhere in Sonoma County. If you think of a single mom who is trying to go to school, trying to get her kids to school, do the grocery shopping, run the errands and go to work, all on a bus, that just makes your long day even longer,” Nalywaiko said. “And these moms who are on the social service side of it have these vehicles that are just barely running. And most of the time when those cars die they just won’t be able to afford to fix them.”
Angerman said when she picked up her car from SAL, fully operational and at no charge, she was completely overcome.
“I started crying. They had just saved my life” she said. “Here I was feeling this despair, almost hopelessness, and then this amazing act of kindness.”
At the moment SAL works exclusively through the CalWORKS program at Santa Rosa Junior College and the YWCA, agencies equipped to screen potential recipients. So far the shop has been able to do several free repair jobs a month. As paying business increases, they are hoping to hire more mechanics to add to the one full-time and one part-time mechanic already on staff, giving them the ability to serve even more needy mothers. SAL is equipped to do most all types of repair work on every make of vehicle, as well as routine maintenance required of manufacturer’s warranties.
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