Letter to Ask Joe From The DOE Fund.

by Joe B.

George McDonald

Founder and President

The Doe Fund
232 East 84th

Street, NY, NY 10028

(212) 628-5207

Dear Joe:

It seems that you have misunderstood the information you read on The Doe Fund's web site.

Please allow me to clarify what our Ready,
Willing & Able program has done to find permanent solutions to homelessness.

Since the program's inception in 1990, over 1,200 homeless
men and women have transformed their lives through paid work.

Today they are
drug and alcohol free, living in their own apartments and working in
full-time private sector jobs.

Not one of them has gone on to become a
sanitation worker.

I invite you to re-visit our site and read the section
entitled "Success Stories."

I am sure that these program graduates' personal
accounts of transformation would challenge your demeaning characterization
of them as "wage slaves."

I would invite you to speak personally with Mr.
Doug Smith or Mr. Nazerine Griffin, both of whom can be reached at (718) 622-0634.

Since you suggest that our program does not provide our participants with the chance to "improve and grow," I invite you to also
read about the education component of Ready, Willing & Able.

You will learn that participants are provided with the opportunity to develop their literacy skills, obtain their GED certificates and acquire the computer skills necessary to succeed in today's workforce.

On March 21st, 2002, The Doe Fund celebrated its annual graduation ceremony.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and City Council Speaker
Gifford Miller addressed the 180 graduates and praised them for their hard
work and determination to re-enter mainstream society.

Graduates' parents,
spouses and children were also there to support their loved-ones and welcome
them back to their communities as positive role models.

Graduates all obtained private sector employment, sobriety and their own market rate apartments.

Their average hourly wage was $10.

Again, I encourage you to contact Mr. Doug Smith or Mr. Nazerine Griffin and any other Ready, Willing & Able program participant you
wish. Our contact information is on our web site. I am certain that talking with them will clarify whether The Doe Fund is "real or hype."

Sincerely,
George McDonald
Founder and President
The Doe Fund

ASKJoe Responds;

To: Mr. George McDonald,
Doe Fund Founder and President.

Sir, I
received the letter from you urging me to look up your website, read it thoroughly for errors I could have made in describing it to others in my Ask Joe Column.

To be fair, I will browse the site after lunch at Saint Anthony’s.

Word to the wise, don’t ever go to St Anthony's free meals on the 1st or 15th of each month to lunch if you have pressing appointments afterwards. After eating four servings of a type of curie over rice, lettuce, donuts, with apple juice, and water.

The curry is working through both ends of me, making me dash to my SRO. (Single Room Occupancy) to sleep or be at work funny how this frequently happens and be constantly in the restroom. So discretion at home is the better part of bladder-uh, valor today.

First of all, it’s both surprising, gratifying, and a little disturbing to get responses to my article [Doe Fund Real or Hype 1/25/02] which I wrote way back in January.

As I look at the DOE web-site, I see the "WORK" works logo with long push broom and large garbage can. Then I browsed to the Events section of your site and I find The 3rd Annual "Sweep The Green" Golf Outing At Quake Ridge Golf Course in Scarsdale, NY. I find a listing for "Sweep The Green For The Men In Blue"

I hope its the Ready, Willing, And Able employees/people that are being honored.

The list of Employer’s are from small, mid sized and mega- corporations.Employee’s are working, some even have careers starting at $5.50, $6.50 even $10.00 an hour. My feeling; maybe it isn’t slave labor but its not much better.

I knock DOE Fund Inc's.-Ready, Willing and Able program because this dignity-in-toil works when companies did pay workers fair wages that matched cost-of-living.

These days most don’t, the same hard-working men, women, get less and less-the fair bosses, companies are distant memories, those that stay true to fair wage ethic are like secrets passed from worker to worker precious as gem stones to be guarded.

I got to say it, do you have ads with PC’s, programming schematics, architecture blueprints, test tubes, laptops, cell phones, or palms, (compact internet-machines) showing alternative ways of working in these high tech fields-along with custodial sweep-mop jobs?

Nothing wrong with street sweeping but many people with a second chance would like a chance in those fields too and if that’s part of the skills program then I stand corrected.

Program participants, Mr. Robert Wright, William Williamson, Vincent Moore, Al Johnson are sterling examples of Ready, Willing and Able (RWA) program.

What I’d like to know about is after RWA graduation, lets say weeks or months (I know you have a follow-up program too) still I’d like to know from them independent of DOE and RWA of what were the rough patches.

Are graduates taught some of the basic, midlevel, and advanced computer skills?

One more thing, Mr. Gavin Newsom visited New York a few months back, toured the
DOE program deeming it worthy. Problem: if your model works cloning it to San Francisco the way he wanted it won’t work unless modifications are worked out.

This centralized theme works only if people can get to without taking hours, taking into account "the human factor" of economic, family, and being in areas that do become danger zones for folks at certain hours of the day and night.

Another thing, the Past Alumni of the programs from 1999, 2001, if they are out there doing well or not so well, I’d like to know what they did or how the programs after graduation helped them.

This is a chance for New Yorker’s to tell me and Mr.George McDonald what’s up in old Gotham.

But mostly its for ‘Yorker’s from all over who may have left the city because of economic reasons.

I will not apologize for some of my remarks, though I may have been in error on some points, but this debate, it is no longer up to either of us not even ‘Cali’s and ‘Yorker’s but nation wide as house-less, joblessness continue.

Its not drugs and alcohol, our economy and technology has slowed but still changes so fast that no job or career is safe.

So folks as I said before email me at askjoe@poormagazine.org - but remember, I only answer ask questions.