This year in New York City, 1,000 men will enroll in Ready, Willing & Able.
Robin Hood Portfolio: Jobs & Economic Security
Website:
www.doe.org
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The Doe Fund’s Ready, Willing & Able transitional work program offers job training and placement activities to men with histories of homelessness, addiction and incarceration. Dressed in blue jumpsuits, the men clean streets on Manhattan’s upper east and west sides, Brooklyn Heights, northern Queens and the Bronx. Doe Fund street teams will clean more than 160 miles of sidewalks this year.
“I came to the end of my road in 1993,” recalls Nazerine Griffin. He’d been using drugs since the early 1970s, and nothing—not jail, not homelessness—stopped him from using drugs. Afraid he was going to die, he took himself to New Jersey’s St. Barnabas emergency room, only to be told their detox beds were full.
Eventually, a spot opened up for Griffin, and he entered a 12-step program that helped him beat his addiction, but there was nothing to takes its place. “I was living in a warehouse of human beings—no light, no hope, no structure,” he says of the city shelter.
In 1995, he started hearing about the Doe Fund’s 70-bed Gates Avenue facility in Brooklyn and decided to give it a shot. It’s more than a shelter. The organization’s Ready, Willing & Able program, which Robin Hood began supporting in 1991, includes transitional housing (the typical stay is 12-18 months), counseling to prevent relapse and supported work. Their most visible workforce: the street cleaners. Job placement rounds out the program model. Robin Hood also helped launch Pests at Rest, Doe’s revenue-generating extermination service.
Griffin was hired as a dispatcher in the newly opened Harlem facility. “I am a product of the Doe Fund,” he says. “I’ve grown with the organization.” In 2001, he helped launch a replication of the program in Philadelphia, where homeless men face the same barriers to employment as they do in New York, and today he is Program Director at the Harlem center.
This year in New York City, 1,000 men—all of whom have struggled with homelessness, drug addiction and other severe barriers to employment such as histories of incarceration and low education levels—will enroll in Ready, Willing & Able. Griffin credits Doe Fund founders George and Harriet McDonald for their vision. “They built this place by listening to people when they said, ‘Don’t just give me a three hots and a cot. Give me an opportunity to earn something for myself’.”
The Doe Fund is featured on Sirius Satellite Radio’s Robin Hood Stories. To hear this or other Robin Hood Stories, visit www.sirius.com/robinhood.
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