Turning over a new leaf via Doe Fund

Many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) work as pressure or lobby groups, but rarely do we hear about NGOs whose primary focus is changing people's lives.

Enter The Doe Fund, Inc. Its small offices in the Upper East Side of New York City hold numerous heartening stories of street people and ex-cons who were able to start new lives thanks to the care and empathy of the group.

The Fund teaches new trainees to develop dignity and instills them with a sense of responsibility over their own lives.

Trainees must attend a drug-testing program and vocational and educational classes at separate facilities in Brooklyn, Harlem, Jersey City and Philadelphia. They are taught the life skills that will prepare them to make a living.

Successful graduates act as role models for new trainees, whose general profile reads as follows: homeless with an average age of 32, possessing no job history except drug dealing, little education and with a long history of legal problems and debts.

"We're helping men -- mostly minority men -- take their rightful place in society: as fathers to their children; as husbands to their wives; as good employees. It never ceases to amaze me how they go through this program and just blossom like flowers," Nazerine Griffin, the Fund's program director at its facility in Harlem, says on the group's website (http://www.doe.org).

Craig Trotta, the Fund's director of work and training at the Harlem facility, recalled that in 1997 he was homeless, drifting on the streets as a drug dealer, and had spent five years in jail before going to the Fund.

Today he has a home, a car, a job, a savings account and is the proud father of a child.

"Here, we treat the guys like men. We don't treat you like you are somebody else. I work and get paid US$7 a day, $35 a week, but ultimately, satisfaction comes from the fact that I love what I am doing today.

"I have a child who was born in August, and this is something I never thought I would have accomplished. People who see me today just don't believe it," Trotta said.

The Doe Fund was set up by George McDonald in the mid 1980s, when the homelessness crisis was starting to peak in New York. McDonald, a clothing executive who would spend up to $200 on a meal at a fancy restaurant, could not ignore the growing problem of homelessness in the city.

His Catholic upbringing taught him that those in a position to help the less fortunate must do so. So he volunteered nights distributing sandwiches to homeless people in and around Grand Central Station, listening to their stories and winning their trust.

The Fund is named after a homeless black woman who died of exposure on Christmas Eve 1985 after being evicted from Grand Central Station. McDonald and other homeless people knew her only as "Mama". It dawned on him that there was an urgent need to form and incorporate an organization to find a permanent solution to homelessness, and it would be named The Doe Fund in honor of "Mama" and the countless other anonymous homeless people, according to the group's website.

The Fund's objective is to get paying jobs and homes for its graduates while keeping them off drugs. It also runs low-income housing at three separate sites in New York for graduates. (Ivy Susanti)