Ready, Willing & Able | The Doe Fund

The army in blue is the brainchild of George McDonald, who once made his own descent into the life of a street person to look for the cause of the problem. He surfaced with solutions.

"I went from living a very good life to living the life of a mendicant," said McDonald, who left his job as vice president of marketing for a sports apparel company soon after finishing a $200 meal and then stepping over a homeless man sprawled in front of the restaurant. He rented a six-by-nine-foot room in a single-room-occupancy hotel and volunteered for the Coalition for the Homeless.

That was in 1979, soon after Edward I. Koch became mayor. By the end of Koch's tenure, in 1989, McDonald had set up The Doe Fund, named for an anonymous bag lady who died of pneumonia on Christmas in 1985 on a bench in Grand Central Terminal after Metro North Police threw her out the night before.

In the interim, McDonald spent a couple of years feeding denizens of the terminal's tunnels and waiting rooms, in spite of four arrests for doing so.

"I couldn't stop," he told CNY. "I felt an obligation to participate. I got to personally know an incredible number of homeless people -- thousands. And every night they would tell me, 'I appreciate the sandwich, but what I could really use is a job and a room.'

"They were telling me that they were ready, willing and able to work. So we put this program together," he said.

With a grant from the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development. The Doe Fund bought an SRO in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood and renovated it to accommodate 70 men. Then a contract was obtained to renovate vacant city-owned apartment buildings, providing the men with salaried jobs.

McDonald believes in discipline, and the program had some pretty stiff rules, including a curfew and random drug testing.

Building on success, the fund took over a city shelter at 155th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem. The men who live there have breakfast each day at 7 a.m. and board vans that take them to their work stations.

McDonald negotiates contracts with the city and federal government agencies and with businesses so that trainees can clean sidewalks and street fixtures, remove graffiti, rehabilitate housing, prepare meals or staff the fund's data entry and direct mail center. While learning skills such as light construction and general building repairs, they earn $5.50 to $6.50 an hour and pay $65 a week for room and board. They attend classes, counseling sessions, life skills workshops, AA and Narcotics Anonymous meetings.

If a trainee graduates with $1,000 in savings, Doe matches it. The nest egg helps him get his first apartment.

Because many homeless looking for work had been infected with HIV, the fund built A Better Place, an AIDS residence on East 86th Street, not far from Doe's headquarters. In 1994, the fund began collaborating with Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., in a program similar to the one in New York. Soon, Doe will open a project in Jersey City.

Altogether, 350 men and a few women are in the program, which runs for nine or 18 months, and the fund employs about 150 people, many of them graduates.

McDonald, 53, grew up in Spring Lake, N.J., where he attended Catholic schools and served at the altar of St. Catharine's Church, which he remembers as a near replica of St. Peter's Basilica.

"My mother and father were divorced, and my mother died when I was young. What I had to fall back on was my faith. The Church played an overwhelming role in why I do what I do," he said, citing the influence of the Sisters of Charity who taught him. "It's this gnawing thing inside you that says, 'You've got talent and skills that God gave you, so how are you going to use that for the betterment of society?'"

McDonald's sojourn in the streets was full of hardship, but perhaps there was no more poignant a moment than burying a 19-year-old woman who had been living in Grand Central since her mother abandoned her five years earlier. April Savino was one of the 400 people he was feeding nightly. She was addicted to crack.

"She found a handgun, which she tried to sell," McDonald recalled. "But she couldn't, and she ended up shooting herself on the steps of St. Agnes Church."

Harriet Karr, a screenwriter from Beverly Hills, Calif., doing research for a film on abandoned kids, had lived with April for a week. She tried to convince April to go out to California for drug treatment.

"I wanted to adopt April," she said. "She was an extraordinary child. She took care of the old people in the terminal. But she was afraid to change her life."

McDonald gave a eulogy at April's funeral at St. Agnes, and Harriet was there. The drink they had afterward led to a friendship and, about a year later, marriage.

"Because of April's death, I felt I wanted to help homeless people," said Mrs. McDonald, 46, who has joined Doe as director of development and human services.

The average profile of a Doe trainee is a black man in his 30s who has been living in shelters and has become homeless because of drug abuse. He is likely to be single, with little education and a criminal history.

One thing that pleases McDonald is what he calls the "humanization" of his men in the eyes of residents of the Yorkville section, who in an earlier time might have crossed the street to avoid them. Both the predominantly white residents and the workers have found each other to be "not as bad as they thought they were," he said.

"The crew around here are excellent, the way they attend to whatever service they are providing," Msgr. Thomas A. Modugno, pastor of St. Monica's parish and co-vicar of the East Side of Manhattan, told CNY. "They are so respectful in front of the church. There's nothing negative about them. They're happy."

"I'm personally very impressed with the endeavor," added Father Neil J. Connell, O.F.M., pastor and guardian of St. Stephen of Hungary parish on the East Side. "They make the neighborhood very clean and livable. They're assiduous about their work, and they're very polite. McDonald seems to draw this project out of Catholic social teaching."

"It's liberating for people to work," McDonald said. "The human thing to do is offer people something to do. Nine out of 10 people will take advantage of an opportunity to work. It's bad for society and harmful to the individual to keep them on welfare."

He measures success by the individuals who get their lives together in the program. "At the end of it, they're highly motivated and drug free?And they want to see the