Ready, Willing & Able | The Doe Fund

Call it sour grapes, but after spending $225,000 in vain to keep our award-winning homeless program running in Washington, we think the city has a lot to learn before that deadline arrives if its homeless problem is to be prevented from becoming worse.

Emergency shelter is considered an antiquated approach to homelessness--so antiquated that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) no longer funds emergency shelter beds. But emergency shelter is the principal strategy employed in the District now that our work-and-residence program, Ready, Willing and Able, has closed its D.C. operations because the mayor's office never delivered promised funding.

Sue Marshall heads the Community Partnership for the Prevention of Homelessness in Washington and works closely with the D.C. Department of Human Services in determining how to spend homeless funds. She has stated that a program such as ours has no place in Washington because of the need to fund emergency shelter beds.

And what is our program?

For five years Ready, Willing & Able, which was named by HUD as a National Best Practices Award winner last year, operated out of a Florida Avenue facility. That facility is closed now, but our program continues to serve 350 formerly homeless men and women in Harlem, Brooklyn, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Jersey City. We require that residents work and remain drug free, and we pay them a decent wage. We mandate savings and match savings dollar for dollar. Residents graduate only when they have a job and their name on a lease.

D.C. residents may remember seeing men and women from our program dressed in blue uniforms with the U.S. flag on the shoulder cleaning D.C. streets -- at no cost to taxpayers.

New York City is expanding our program, and other cities are asking us to set up shop. Innovation is percolating nationwide in the arena of homeless services but not in Washington. And it's not that the District government hasn't been given ample opportunity to be creative. In the mid-'90s, HUD awarded the city special funds because of the severity of its homeless problem. Yet the D.C. Department of Human Services has not budged from its belief that emergency beds must be the primary focus.

Emergency shelter doesn't teach job skills, and it doesn't give homeless men and women a glimpse of a productive future. When the D.C. Department of Human Services tried to move women from welfare to work, it spent $52 million and could not document one success story.

Until the District is willing to try innovative yet tested ideas, to embrace the creativity that is changing lives across the country, its failures will continue.