Ready, Willing & Able | The Doe Fund

"You are doing a great job," wrote a woman who enclosed $25. "Wish I were able to give more, but I am on Social Security." Mr. McDonald's favorite was from a boy who drew a picture of what he wants to be when he grows up: a street cleaner in a blue uniform labeled "Ready, Willing and Able."

Five years ago, when the Doe Fund started its street-cleaning program, it counted on only 60 donors. "Now we have 22,000 donors," Mr. McDonald said. "The Coalition for the Homeless may not appreciate what we're doing, but the public does."

It's not that the Coalition for the Homeless actively opposes Mr. McDonald's "Ready, Willing and Able" program, which provides shelter, food, social services and paid work to homeless men. Certainly no one opposes the results: more than 900 graduates now have regular jobs and support themselves in their own homes.

But there is an ideological divide between Mr. McDonald and the advocates now battling Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's attempts to impose work requirements in the city's homeless shelters. Mr. McDonald, who is 55, has come a long way since his days as a volunteer with the Coalition for the Homeless in the early 1980's. By his count, he spent 700 straight nights handing out food in Grand Central Terminal.

"Over and over people told me they appreciated the sandwich, but what they really needed was a room and a job to pay for it," Mr. McDonald recalled. "Eventually I thought, well, maybe that's the truth." In 1985, he started the Doe Fund, which was named after a homeless woman found frozen to death that year in Grand Central.

He opened a homeless shelter in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, that required men to stay off drugs and work full time. Later, the men began cleaning streets, and Mr. McDonald began operating shelters in Manhattan, Jersey City and Washington, typically for homeless men who are drug addicts with criminal records.

According to an independent auditor, 62 percent of the men graduate from the yearlong program to permanent jobs and housing.

"Work works," Mr. McDonald said. "The homeless don't need handouts or elaborate job-training programs. Job training is getting up in the morning, going to work sweeping the street, learning to get along with others, and getting up the next day and doing it again." He faults other groups, especially the one he calls "the Coalition Against the Homeless," for opposing work requirements.

"Why would anyone want to protect someone's right to lie around a shelter doing nothing?" Mr. McDonald said. "The advocates want to give the homeless an unconditional right to shelter and isolate them in government housing and special jobs programs. But what they need is to assume personal responsibility and be brought back into the economic mainstream."

His wife, Harriet Karr-McDonald, the vice president of the Doe Fund, put it more forcefully. "It makes me sick," she said, "to hear these white advocates talking about the homeless population, which is largely minority, as if they were so frail that they can't make it on their own. Well, these black men do not need good white liberals like us to protect them. They need the opportunity to take care of themselves.

THAT is not, of course, the way that the advocates see themselves. "Work is not a bad thing," said Steven Banks, the counsel for the Coalition for the Homeless. "The debate is not about work or no work. The issue is whether or not the government should have the right to throw vulnerable New Yorkers on the streets of the city in the winter, and whether the government should be investing money in permanent housing."

While Mr. McDonald exults at the men who finish his program and find jobs, Mr. Banks worries that some of them still aren't making enough to pay the rent. And what about the ones who drop out, and the ones who wouldn't even consider enrolling? If some people aren't ready to work, should they freeze on the streets?

Those are good questions, and they will be addressed by Mr. Banks when he challenges the city's work requirements in court on Jan. 7. In the meantime, it would not hurt to hear from some of the men in Mr. McDonald's program. Their stories will appear on Saturday.