Ready, Willing & Able | The Doe Fund

I wrote about McDonald that year and described him as slightly crazy, comparing him to Jim Piersall, the Boston Red Sox outfielder who once ran the bases backward. McDonald, like Piersall, has always marched to his own drumbeat.

Last week the Doe Fund was awarded its biggest contract ever, a $180-million, 22-year-long contract to run a 400-bed shelter in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It will be part of the replacement for the 850-bed 30th Street Men's Shelter at Bellevue Hospital, Manhattan, where a new building is planned.

McDonald, 55, and his wife, Harriet, a former screenwriter, were married after they met in 1987 at a funeral service for a young, homeless woman named April, who shot herself to death on the steps of St. Agnes Church on East 43rd Street, Manhattan. The couple believe in putting the homeless to work. It's a philosophy that enrages other operators of homeless services in the ever-growing industry, one that costs the city $800 million annually.

At the end of this month, the Doe Fund will hold its yearly graduation at St. Ignatius Loyola Church on Park Avenue at 84th Street, Manhattan. It is always a moving occasion, one at which convicts, drug abusers and fathers who have abandoned their children step up to the podium and talk about a new life of work and responsibility.

McDonald has his fans, such as U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Andrew Cuomo, Bronx Borough President Freddie Ferrer, City Comptroller Alan Hevesi and yours truly. He also has his critics, Mary Broshanan and Steve Banks of the Coalition for the Homeless, as well as City Councilman Steve DiBrienza (D-Brooklyn), chairman of the General Welfare Committee. He called the Brooklyn award "scandalous" because he said it smacked of favoritism, meaning that Mayor Rudolph Giuliani had rewarded McDonald out of friendship.

But the fact is that McDonald's program, which began with feeding sandwiches to the homeless in Grand Central Terminal, and step by step progressed to McDonald's first contract with the city in 1989 during the Koch administration, has proven its worth.

If you want proof of this, stop for a minute or two and talk to one of the familiar blue-coated men and women who work the city's streets as cleaners for the Doe Fund, wearing a uniform that includes on its back the notation, "Ready, Willing and Able."

They are welcome figures in the Upper East and West Side communities where they work, earning $5.50 an hour and, more important, staying free of drugs and alcohol, passing twice-a-week drug tests.

These are people who form the underclass but who need a bottom rung to climb onto.

That's where the Doe Fund comes in.

There are incentives that include the requirement that these workers put aside $30 weekly. After nine months, they are given a matching gift of $1,000. "We take people from welfare to work," says McDonald, who notes that 22,000 New Yorkers provide contributions to the fund today.

I ought to note here that McDonald named me winner of its first annual Murray Kempton award a few years back. Kempton, a colleague who died in 1997, took note of my concern for the dispossessed when he autographed a copy of one of his books, "To Dennis, friend of the friendless."

But it was McDonald's fight on behalf of Frank Dowd, a wrongly accused Metro-North Railroad cop whom you will see standing alongside Cardinal John O'Connor - his health allowing - on the steps of St. Patrick's Cathedral during the St. Patrick's Day parade, that convinced me that McDonald was a principled man, a stand-up guy who knew right from wrong.

Dowd, who beat a silly rap against him, is another McDonald admirer. "When I first met him, I thought here's another liberal trying to atone for his sins by passing out bologna sandwiches to the homeless," says Dowd. "I was wrong. He stuck to it, unlike a lot of those limousine liberals who fled when one of the homeless threw up."

Dowd was one of the few friends the homeless had in those years; he was a police officer then. His fellow officers at the terminal did things like pour bleach on the floors where the homeless slept, and wire the terminal's doors open in the winter, allowing the cold air to add to their discomfort.

McDonald now runs shelters for the working homeless in Bedford-Stuyvesant, 100 beds; in Harlem, 200 beds; in Jersey City and in Washington, D.C., 50 beds each. He is talking with officials in Philadelphia and Los Angeles about shelters there as well.

McDonald is an emotional man whom I have seen in tears and in handcuffs. He wanted a political job and when he couldn't get one, he created a job for himself. That job, he says, is providing work and shelter for the indigent.

McDonald doesn't have to prove himself to anyone. He stayed the distance, spending 700 straight nights in the terminal handing out sandwiches and consolation to those you and I give a wide berth.

He gets a lot of mail these days, but the one he likes best is from a boy who drew a picture of what he wants to be when he grows up. It's a street cleaner in a blue uniform with the label, "Ready, Willing and Able."