San Ramon Woman Helps Rebuild Lives
By Suzanne Pardington STAFF WRITER

SAN RAMON - In the past five years, Karen Justice-Guard has kicked her drug and alcohol habit, left her husband, gotten off welfare and started her own business.

Now she's helping other women do the same thing.

Justice-Guard, 40, founded a nonprofit organization, Safe Havens for Little People, one year ago, with a vision of helping abused women on welfare from the moment they decide they want to turn their lives around and become self-sufficient. "I've been driven because I want to show the other side," she says. "No matter what you've been through, you have to pull yourself up."

As part of the training program, Safe Havens is teaming up with The Savoy restaurant in San Ramon to prepare women for the working world. Owner Sam Vassiliou and his staff members will teach clients food preparation, customer service, dining room and sales skills, along with "life skills" such as confidence and self-esteem.

"I am helping people to help me," Vassiliou says.

For the past 15 years, the restaurant industry has had a profound shortage of workers, he says.

"We have some of the finest culinary institutes in the world, but we don't seem to get the output fast enough," he says.

Safe Havens participants will skip the step of cooking or restaurant school and go straight to on-the-job training, he says.

Justice-Guard knows what it's like to be broken financially and spiritually. Five years ago, she had a house next to a golf course, a fancy car and her own restaurant. But financial and marriage problems piled up, and she checked out of life by sticking a needle in her arm, she said. She went on an alcoholic binge for two weeks before she realized that she needed to get her life together.

She took her two children to Lake Tahoe, where she drove a junky car without a rear defroster, cleaned houses for a living, went on welfare, took college classes and attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. She was so embarrassed about using food stamps, she wore a disguise and bought groceries in a different town each day.