Here Are People who don't bother about the darkness ,everyone see in the SO CALLED "Cruel and Bad" World, and trying to bring LIGHT their own way. Its "Light of Hope".These are the people who always see "A Half Filled Glass" when they get problems.No one knows them when they are in their process.These are the people who are creating a ripple effect and increasing the circle of small good people, and making this world a better place to live.
When your full body is perfect and your knee goes hurt, your attention will turn to it. Its Human Psyche.
Every thing on Earth is about PERCEPTION.
What Do you see in a glass half filled with water, you see it half empty ?,try too see it other way as these people did.
1.Dr.Govindappa Venkataswamy (Dr.V)
Born in 1918 in Vadamalapuram in Tamil Nadu, India, Dr.G.Venkataswamy, Founder, Aravind Eye Hospital had his education at American College, Madurai, Stanley Medical College, Madras and qualified for MS Ophthalmology at the Government Ophthalmic Hospital, Madras. He first joined the Indian Army as Physician during 1945-48. He then was appointed Head of Department of Ophthalmology at the Government Madurai Medical College, and eye surgeon at the Government Erskine Hospital at Madurai. He held these posts for 20 years and made remarkable contributions to research, clinical service and community programmes. And with a willpower and dedication far beyond the ordinary, he went on to perform over one hundred thousand successful eye surgeries, and that too with fingers that were badly affected with a rare disease. As a young man he followed the teachings of Gandhi.
More than a century and a half after the German poet and dramatist Von Goethe’s impassioned plea, ophthalmologist Dr.G.Venkataswamy persuaded his colleagues and staff to action: “If you can do something, then you must go ahead and do it.”
A quarter of a century ago, at mandatory retirement age, fifty eight year old Dr.Venkataswamy, a man known to most of us simply as Dr.V, founded the Aravind Eye Hospital at Madurai in 1977. In an eleven-bed hospital manned by four medical officers, he saw the potential for what is today, one of the largest facilities in the world for eye care. Over the years, this organisation has evolved into a sophisticated system dedicated to compassionate service for sight. The mission of this organisation in the words of its founder was “to eradicate needless blindness”. The endeavour required a leap of imagination, vision and innovation. In India alone, there are 12 million who are blind, and 80% of these are blind due to cataract. To this enormous number another 2 to 3 million are added every year. Despite staggering obstacles, Dr.V. and his team persisted. Using mass marketing and an operating system that resembles an assembly line, they helped the modest hospital to grow steadily in service delivery and infrastructure. And a system that enabled Aravind to provide free eye care to two-thirds of its patients from the revenue generated from its one-third paying patients. Twenty-five years later that system is still in place.
Only a biography can say enough of a man who makes use of every second, every paise and every inch of space. He has an amazing ability to use everyone effectively. He is the father of Community Ophthalmology, and because of his ‘Vision’ numerous people have been able to see again. It was his dream of being able to market ‘good eye-sight’ to the world, the way McDonald’s sells hamburgers. It is no wonder that around eight hundred thousand surgeries have been performed and lakhs of people have benefited from services rendered through his organisations. In his words “ in Aravind, we scan new horizons and look forward to exploring new vistas in eye care”.
Dr.Venkataswamy was conferred Padma Shri by the Government of India in 1973.
2.Kailash Satyarthi
3.Shaheen Mistry
Kailash Satyarthi (born on January 11, 1954) is an Indian human rights activist who has been at the forefront of the global movement to end child slavery and exploitative child labour since 1980. As a grassroots activist, he has led the rescue of over 67,000 child slaves and developed a successful model for their education and rehabilitation. As a worldwide campaigner, he has been the architect of the single largest civil society network for the most exploited children, the Global March Against Child Labor, active in over 140 countries. As an analytical thinker, he made the issue of child labor as a human rights issue, not a welfare matter or charitable cause. With forceful arguments he has established that child labor is, in fact, responsible for the perpetuation of poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, population explosion and many other social evils. He has also played an important role in linking the fight against child labor with the efforts for achieving 'Education for All'.
Shaheen Mistri
Chief Executive Officer Shaheen Mistri is the founder of the Akanksha Foundation, a non-profit organization with a mission to impact the lives of less privileged children, enabling them to maximise their potential and change their lives. Akanksha works primarily in the field of education, addressing non formal education through the Akanksha centre model and also formal education by initiating school reform. Over the past 19 years, the organization has expanded from 15 children in one centre to over 3,500 children across Mumbai and Pune. Mistri is an Ashoka Fellow (2001), a Global Leader for Tomorrow at the World Economic Forum (2002), an Asia Society 21 Leader (2006) and serves on the boards of Ummeed, The Thermax Social Initiatives Foundation and is an advisor to the Latika Roy Foundation. Mistri has been working on the idea of Teach For India from 2007, and serves as its founding CEO and one of its founding Board Members.Early life
Shaheen Mistri was born in Mumbai, India in a Parsi family. She is a graduate of University of Mumbai.
Career
Shaheen Mistri, as a young college girl, walked into Mumbai slums and expressed her desire to teach the less privileged children who roamed the streets.[1] She later founded Akanksha Foundation, a non-profit organisation working primarily in education, to impact the lives of such children.
She is also on the boards of Ummeed, The Thermax Social Initiatives Foundation and is an advisor to the Latika Roy Foundation.Awards
- Ashoka Fellow (2001)
- Global Leader for Tomorrow at the World Economic Forum (2002)
- Asia Society 21 Leader (2006)
Dr. Sunitha Krishnan, born in 1969, is an Indian social activist and chief functionary and co-founder of Prajwala, an institution that assists trafficked women and girls in finding shelter. The organization also helps pay for the education of five thousand children infected with HIV/AIDS in Hyderabad.[1] Prajwala’s “second-generation” prevention program operates in 17 transition centers and has served thousands of children of prostituted mothers. The NGO’s strategy is to remove women from brothels by giving their children educational and career opportunities. Krishnan and her staff train survivors in carpentry, welding, printing, masonry and housekeeping
Early life
Born in Bangalore she did her Ph.D. (Social Work), MSW (Psychiatric Social Work) and B.Sc. (Environmental Science).
Career
Sunitha Krishnan works in the areas such as * Anti Human trafficking, Psychiatric rehabilitation and Social policy. She was invited to speak at TED-India 2009 at Infosys Campus, Mysore.
"She brought the house down in Mysore today ( TED Video ). And by that, I mean that she broke hearts and moved people to action. The audience listened painfully to some of the stories of the more than 3,200 girls she has rescued, girls who had endured unimaginable torture and yet, somehow, nevertheless found the will to heal and thrive. She spoke of the need for everyone to overcome silence about the phenomenon of human trafficking, the modern form of slavery, and for us not only to offer our love and compassion to its victims, but to be willing to accept them in our communities. She admitted that rescuing girls is never a very safe business, sharing that she can no longer hear out of her right ear, and that she has been beaten up during interventions more than a dozen times. Her strong voice and powerful body language ensured that no one could claim to have misunderstood her points." - The Shambhala Sun Report (TED 2009)
Awards& Honours
- Global Leadership Award, 2011
- Vanitha Women of the year 2009
- Real Hero Award - 2008 , Awarded by Reliance Industries Limited and CNN-IBN Network. IBN 7 & CNN-IBN salute the 'real heroes' of our nation
- Perdita Houston International Award for Human Rights - 2007 Awarded by United Nations Association of the National Capital, Washington DC
- Stree Shakti Puraskar - Government of India Women's Day awards announced - The Hindu
Quotes
- ...Each minute counts. Sometimes, we get information about minor girls, some as young as three, and by the time, we marshal the man power and police protection to mount a rescue operation, it would be too late to prevent the child from being sold into the flesh trade.
- ...I have never let obstacles of any kind stop me from helping people from less privileged strata of society; something I used to do as a school student. In those days, I used to teach children in my neighbourhood. But, in my teens, when I was living with my parents Raju Krishnan and Nalini Krishnan in Bangalore, my attention turned towards women who were sexually exploited.
- ...I have this deep-rooted belief that my life is a providence by itself, and God has brought me in this world to do what I'm doing, and God will allow me to stay in this world so long as he believes that my mission is not done, and therefore I do believe that the day God believes that my work is done, I'll be killed or I'll die naturally, or whichever way that is possible.
- ...There's so much desensitization that has happened, so much normalization of exploitation that has happened, so much internalization of trauma that has happened..
Sunitha's Blog HERE
5.Mimi Silbert
Project: Delancey Street Foundation
Location: San Francisco, Calif. U.S.A.
In 1971 Mimi Silbert founded Delancey Street with four residents, a thousand dollar loan and a dream. She envisioned a place where substance abusers, former felons and others who had hit bottom would, through their own efforts, be able to turn their lives around.
Silbert has since built an empire grossing 20 million dollars a year with locations in New York, New Mexico, North Carolina and Los Angeles. She has never accepted a single penny of government funds.
Since those early days in a single house, Mimi Silbert has empowered more than 14,000 people to lead crime-free, drug-free lives in mainstream society. They have acquired skills, they attend college and they are part of the workforce.
Silbert says she has spent her career cultivating a "university of the streets." She calls it a "Harvard for losers," where the students are former pimps, prostitutes, junkies, drug dealers and armed robbers.
Her program's name comes from Silbert's own past. Delancey Street is a place on Manhattan's lower east side where immigrants like her parents came to make a new life for themselves.
What Does the Delancey Street Foundation Do?
The Delancey Street Foundation is a residential education center where drug addicts, criminals and the homeless learn to lead productive, crime-free lives. It has been called the most successful rehabilitation project in the United States.
The foundation runs at no cost to the taxpayer or client. They earn revenue by operating more than 20 businesses, including the Delancey Street Restaurant and Café and the Delancey Street Moving Company. These "training schools" not only generate income, they teach residents marketable skills and inculcate in them habits of self-control and self-discipline.
Each resident spends up to four years at the facility and must pass equivalency exams to obtain a high school diploma in order to graduate. They also need to line up a job and a place to live. Silbert likes to see each of her students graduate with three marketable skills to ensure their job success.
Silbert reports that 65 percent of the organization's operating costs are paid for by revenue from its businesses. She originally rejected foundation money, fearing it would deter from the participants' feeling that their survival depended on the success of the businesses. Today, the organization receives more than ten million dollars from private donations every year.
Silbert and Delancey Street are always facing new challenges. Today, offenders are often third-generation criminals. Silbert used to tell clients that their parents wanted a better life for them. Since participants' parents are often criminals as well, the draw to go back to the streets can be strong. Fortunately, after more than 30 years, Mimi Silbert isn't about to give up.
The Mimi Silbert story
Re-cycling ex-cons, addicts and prostitutes
By Jerr Boschee and Syl Jones
PROLOGUE
They call themselves “human garbage” . . .
Burglars, car thieves, armed robbers, pushers, prostitutes, even murderers. Only sex offenders are not welcome. They come to Delancey Street with an average of 18 felony convictions, seven years in prison and no better than an eighth grade education. Most are illiterate, and few have ever held a skilled job for more than a few months. More than 85 per cent have been heroin addicts for an average of ten years, and better than 60 per cent have abused two or more drugs. They range in age from 18 to 68, are equally divided between African Americans, Latinos and Anglos, and one-fourth are women.
It’s a recipe for disaster, especially since Delancey Street uses no staff counselors, no social workers and no paid professionals -- the traditional gurus who speak the language of social and psychological pathology.
“These are people who have really hit bottom,” says Mimi Silbert, who’s led the organization since she and John Maher started it in 1971. “They’re angry and hopeless . . . and they hate everybody. They hate each other and they hate themselves. But it doesn’t matter to us what they’ve done. We take the people everybody else thinks are losers . . . our only criteria is that they want to change badly enough.”
The residents stay at Delancey Street for an average of four years and soak up an education that spans vocational, cultural and social training. The “professors” are the reformed convicts and junkies themselves . . . and not all of them make it. The attrition rate is 35 per cent, but, as Silbert says, “Delancey Street attracts the worst of the worst, and some people just aren’t ready to make the kind of commitment we make here.”
Each resident is required to earn a high school equivalency degree and learn three marketable skills. One must involve physical labor such as construction, moving or automotive; another must be accounting- or secretarial- or computer-related; and, finally, every resident is exposed to people occupations such as waiting tables or doing sales. Once they've experienced all three, residents are free to major in one of them.
Delancey Street has never sought philanthropic or government support. Most of its annual operating budget of $24 million comes from the profits generated by more than 20 businesses, each of which doubles as a training school. Approximately 1,500 residents live in five facilities around the United States, including a spectacular residential and retail complex on San Francisco’s waterfront (built by the residents themselves), a ranch in New Mexico, a castle in rural New York, and facilities in Los Angeles and North Carolina.
To date, Delancey Street has graduated more than 12,000 people, many of whom have gone on to become lawyers, doctors, teachers, police officers, business owners, firefighters, electricians, mechanics, contractors, salespeople . . .
And, after all these years, the organization is still led by a 95-pound dynamo who stands less than five feet tall, her hands and arms constantly moving, emotions racing across her tanned and weathered face . . .
Copyright ® 2000 The Institute for Social Entrepreneurs. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part
in any form or medium without express written permission of The Institute for Social Entrepreneurs is prohibited.
2 – The Mimi Silbert story
“WHATEVER WILL HURT THE MOST . . . ”
Mimi Silbert is a realist.
“You don’t do this and not get burned,” she says. “Repeatedly. The people who come here are self-destructive. They’re nasty, vicious, violent, greedy, take-and-run users.
“My job is to be the chief believer, to believe in them when they don’t believe in themselves . . . but that means they go out of their way to prove to me how wrong I am . . . because they’re scared pissless that they don’t have it . . . and that if they ever really try, they won’t make it anyway . . .
“So everything in them wants to prove it’s all bullshit, and they do everything they can to betray my belief in them. Sometimes that self-destructiveness wins, and they’ll choose the meanest thing they can think of to hurt me . . . whatever it is I’ve been begging them to do, or yelling at them to do, that’s what they’ll say to me on their way down and out, whatever will hurt the most.”
Then her passion fills the room.
“But I deal with it . . . because there have been thousands more that are the opposite . . . and the courage it takes for them to succeed is so much greater than the courage it takes for somebody like me to say, ‘Yeah, somebody burned me.’ That’s the business I’m in. Get over it, honey. It isn’t easy, but it’s what you have to do. It isn’t easy to change their lives. It isn’t easy for me, either. I cry, I get depressed, but I choose to remain naive. It is my choice in life to insist upon always believing in the best of everybody . . . because I’ve seen the most incredible people at the bottom rise to become the absolute best of themselves.
“I don't mean they have to become lawyers or something. I mean, we have people who were such dirtbags in the past and they have gained integrity. Yeah, they make a good living, they do well, many of them. But they are so decent and helpful to others. That's what's really important . . . ”
She pauses, catching her breath, and after a quiet moment she looks up and says: "I guess when I think about it, what happens here at Delancey Street is that I’m the role model for the residents when they first come here. Then, later, they become my role models."
THE HALPERS
And Mimi Silbert remembers.
Every day, before dinner, she and her parents would gather around the radio for the news of the day. If they heard about three boys stealing from an elderly woman, her parents would “go from saying, ‘Imagine, that poor little lady . . . ’ to ‘Imagine how miserable their lives must be for those kids to steal from a little old lady.’
“I was really lucky in the draw,” she says. “I had two of the most loving, supportive parents, and they had a deep sense of justice.” Born in 1942 and raised just outside Boston, she was the only child of Dena and Herbert Halper, European Jewish immigrants who came to America at the turn of the century, two of many who lived in tenements on the original Delancey Street on the lower east side of New York.
At Seder, a holiday usually reserved for family members, her father would invite poor strangers to their dinner table, and his generosity carried over to his business. He owned and operated a corner drugstore, where his daughter worked as a soda jerk. “I remember some old and poor people coming in,” she once told the San Francisco Examiner. “My father would say, ‘When they go to buy something, put it in a large bag, and when they go to the cash register, turn around and don’t look.’” Once, she turned and saw an older man dumping an aspirin bottle into his bag. She said, “Daddy, I think so-and-so is taking something,” and she remembers how angry he became. “He said, ‘I told you not to look. That man needs those things. Something is very wrong when he can’t buy them. We don’t want him to feel he’s taking charity. You’re not to turn around again because you’re not to make him feel bad.’
3 – The Mimi Silbert story
“I came of age in a place and time where the blacks spoke Yiddish,” she recalls, “and the Jews spoke their own version of black Southern dialect. My dad came from Poland, my mom from Lithuania. My grandparents and uncles and aunts and cousins lived with us because the idea was to help each other get up and out of the ghetto. Eventually, most everyone in that neighborhood went on to become doctors and lawyers. The level of loyalty and support was fantastic in those days. Not like it is today. It was an absolutely wonderful place to grow up,” and Silbert has been working for nearly 30 years to create an organization that replicates the kind of neighborhood and the kind of upbringing she received as a child.
In high school, Silbert became a cheerleader . . . who read Dostoyevsky when she wasn’t doing flips. She was voted “nicest girl” in her high school class, an “honor” she found so humiliating that “right afterwards, I taught myself how to swear.”
While still in high school, she began helping kids in trouble, and she continued reaching out during her years at the University of Massachusetts. One day she went to a local drugstore for an ice cream sundae and “found a kid who hung around there who clearly should have been in school. I started talking to him and, sure enough, he was cutting school. I slowly worked with him. I figured out what was wrong. I brought him back to school, went to see his family and patched things up. There was a lot of hostility going on in the house. No one even knew he had dropped out of school.” Some years later, her dropout graduated from MIT.
After college, Mimi studied under the famous existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in Paris. From him she learned “there is no given meaning to life, that you have to make that meaning . . . ”
Later, at the University of California at Berkeley, she earned a double doctorate in psychology and criminology and then taught at Berkeley and San Francisco State. She became a consultant to prisons, mental health programs, halfway houses and police departments. By 1971 she was married and raising twin sons.
ENTER THE EX-CON
That’s when she was approached by an ex-con named John Maher, a recovering alcoholic and heroin addict who had served prison time for what Silbert describes as a series of petty crimes. He suggested they set up a self-supporting rehab center for ex-cons, an idea Silbert had also been considering.
Maher argued that traditional rehab programs don’t work, that it takes an ex-addict to understand the gut-wrenching pain of quitting heroin cold turkey, the misery of shivering in an alley on a winter night, the wasted hours behind prison walls. It takes an ex-con to see through all the sob stories, the excuses for wrongdoing.
And there are excuses. “When they come in here,” says Silbert with a laugh, “they have it down. They know when to cry, ‘I’m so hostile, I don’ wanna be hostile no more . . . ’ and then we say, ‘Cut the crap . . . ’”
Silbert and Maher discussed the possibility of ex-cons and addicts not only living together and helping one another off drugs, but also teaching each other how to get a high-school diploma or college degree, learn a legitimate trade, hold a job and, most importantly, develop self-esteem. The organization would be run like a family, with a combination of entrepreneurial zeal and old-fashioned tough-mindedness. Residents who’d been in the program the longest would guide and discipline the newer arrivals, who in turn would do the same for the next residents. Rather than depending on government handouts, participants would earn their keep and become hard-working, tax-paying citizens.
Silbert and Maher started Delancey Street soon afterwards by borrowing $1,000 from a loan shark. Ten recovering addicts and one criminal psychologist all crowded into a cramped, one-bedroom apartment, an unorthodox combination of residential center and entrepreneurial incubator. “It was heaven,” Mimi told People magazine in 1998. She divorced her first husband, Ken Silbert, and became romantically involved with Maher. “We got the opportunity to fall in love,” she said, “and also to make the thing we’d dreamed about come true.” Maher, Silbert and her sons David and Greg lived at Delancey Street and treated the ex-cons as an extended family. David told People, “I thought everyone had former pimps and prostitutes picking them up at school . . . ”
4 – The Mimi Silbert story
In 1985, Maher, who had resumed drinking, left Delancey Street, and in 1988 he died of a heart attack. Since then, Silbert has expanded the organization’s operations. “I absolutely adore my life,” she says. “For 29 years I’ve seen the lowest 10 per cent come through the door . . . but a few years later, strong, decent human beings walk out . . . ”
“RUNNING IN THE WRONG DIRECTION . . . ”
Seventy percent of the residents come to Delancey Street as an alternative to prison or a condition of parole, the rest from the street. And the letters from supplicants never cease: “I have watched helplessly as my brother’s life slowly drains from his very being” . . . “When not high on drugs, my husband is a caring, loving father” . . . “I thought maybe here was a place that could help our son.” Unfortunately, because of space limitations, Silbert has to turn down 90 per cent of the applicants: “There are ten people waiting,” she says, “for every one of our beds.”
Some of those who arrive are still hooked on drugs, but Delancey Street doesn’t treat addiction. Silbert says, “we just tell our new residents that ‘from this day forward, you will use no more drugs. We have no idea why you can’t use them and some other people can. But you can’t, because you’ll go all the way down . . . so you’ll never use them again.’” She and the other residents let the addicts “dry out on our living room couch with a lot of chicken soup and a lot of love. As soon as they’re slightly bleary-eyed we’ll stand them up, put a broom in their hands and try to get them to function.”
Once they’re on their feet, the residents begin a regimen of thrice-weekly rap sessions and a daily routine of work, meetings and seminars, all of them led by other residents. “The people who’d be considered patients elsewhere are in charge here,” says Silbert.
But that doesn’t seem strange to Silbert, because she’s “always liked criminals. I like their energy, their . . . it’s all ass-backwards, see, but at least they’re active about life. They’re charging, headlong . . . they’re all just running in the wrong direction. But they do have energy. They have loyalty. They haven’t just given up and gone inward and died with their nightmares. They’re punching out. They’re doing it wrongly, but at least it’s a sign of life.”
Silbert believes it’s paradoxical to attempt to confer self-reliance and self-respect on people through a staff of experts, no matter how highly trained they may be. Therefore, Delancey Street has no staff, and the rules of living apply equally to everyone, including her. Although she has never had a problem with alcohol, she gave up drinking wine. "I don't drink any more because we don't drink," she says.
Despite their long and brutal histories, residents have never committed a single act of violence after they’ve begun their stay at Delancey Street, and there haven’t been any arrests. No external controls, weapons or drugs are used. Peer pressure is a powerful deterrent, and the residents use negative sanctions, positive rewards and role modeling to support each other. According to them, getting through Delancey Street is tougher than surviving prison. “In jail you’re responsible for nothing,” says Silbert. “At Delancey Street you’re responsible for everything you do. It doesn’t matter why you were an addict or a burglar. What matters is that you believe in your ability to change all that.”
THE DELANCEY STREET PHILOSOPHY
Delancey Street is actually a replica “of the neighborhood I grew up in,” says Silbert. “It’s based on the two models I learned in childhood . . . the extended family model, where people learn to be dependent on each other while they develop their identities and their independence, and the education model.
“I came from immigrant parents who, you know, everything is ‘the children, the children, the children’ . . . the American dream, the children will do everything. I was an overachiever. I went to school to get extra degrees. I had to get two masters and two doctorates . . . you know, absurd, but that’s what I knew how to do. I knew how to go to school and how to teach school.”
5 – The Mimi Silbert story
Silbert says she tried desperately in the early part of her career, as a criminologist and psychologist, to change the lives of people she believes never escaped the ghetto. "They've been stuck there for generations,” she says, “and they hate everybody who got out.
“So I was training police. I was training probation officers. I was desperately running around trying to find a way to change the lives of the people who didn’t get out like I did. And everybody was saying, ‘You’re so wonderful.’ I felt terrific because I was always helping people.
“Then one day it struck me that everybody should feel that way. No one should be in the position of only receiving. That would tend to make you violent and depressed or give you a victim’s view of life. We’re all entitled to give in to being victimized and feeling victimized and getting bitter and not trusting and all of that -- but none of us should! It takes us down and it takes down the people around us and it makes society move backwards. The victim mentality is death . . . ”
Silbert believes that being an insider within the California Prison System forced her to explore the role of the militant outsider.
“If you spend any time at all in prison,” she says, “and you have a job like mine, to be a prison psychologist and turn people’s lives around, you find out it isn’t therapy they need. Therapy doesn’t change behavior all that much. You change your behavior by changing your behavior . . . and awareness doesn’t necessarily lead to a different behavior.”
During those years, “at the end of the day, a lot of people would say to me, ‘thank you, thank you, thank you, you’ve meant so much to me,’ and I would finish my day and say “what a good girl Mimi is” because I was helping so many people and, you know, doing what I was brought up to do with my life. And it really wasn’t until a few years went by that it struck me one day: Who wants to be on the other side of that? Who wants to be the person that says about her life, ‘Thank you so much, you did so much for me, the asshole.’
“Nobody should be only a receiver. If people are going to feel good and be accomplished and be part of something, they have to be doing something they can be proud of. We ought to set it up as a circle, so you’re always receiving and giving simultaneously. That’s really the only way to become somebody, and everybody wants to become somebody. For this group of people, the only place they are somebody is in a gang or in prison or in the anti-world they’ve set up. So if we want them to be pro-society, then we ought to set up the vehicles that help them be somebody in more traditionally socially positive ways.
“You know,” she says, “there are plenty of middle-class and wealthy people who commit horrible crimes, but they aren’t filling up the jails. We as a society are not mad at them. We’re mad at this underclass because they are disgusting and violent and vicious and nasty and stupid and ignorant and mean.
“They are all of these things. But no one has helped them not to be. If we’re ever going to solve social problems, we have to teach them to be decent, to have integrity, to be kind, compassionate, forgiving. We have to teach them how to be productive, to take the same piece of pie that everybody else wants to take . . . and take it legitimately.
“These people are just as capable as anybody else out there. Just because they haven’t learned in traditional ways doesn’t mean they can’t learn . . . and we’ll keep looking for non-traditional ways to help them until we succeed . . . ”
LIVING COMMUNALLY
Once they arrive, residents quickly learn about some of the core values that guide the people at Delancey Street.
To begin with, everybody’s in it together.
“This is a new family,” says Silbert. “We start all over again. We say, ‘Yeah, those were all the things you were . . . but I’m not interested in that any more, because now we’re going to teach you to care for other
6 – The Mimi Silbert story
people. Since we have no staff, we have to rely on you. You’re going to have to take care of the person under you, and I’m going to teach you how to do it. And I know you won’t care whether that person lives or dies, but you have to act as if you care because he’s got nobody but you. And you’ve got nobody but the person right over you . . . and he doesn’t know what he’s doing either! So we have nobody to rely on but each other. It’s up to you.
“And I say to them at the beginning, ‘This is not my Delancey Street. I do not get paid a salary for doing this. We’re climbing a mountain together. I’m at the top of the mountain. The newest person in the door is at the bottom. But we’re holding hands. So if all of you are pulling downward, we’ll all go down together. If all of us pull upward, we’ll all go up together. But we’re hanging in together. It’s your organization. You want to tear it down, like you have everything else in your life, I’ll take my doctorate degrees, I’ll go out and earn a few hundred bucks an hour and you’ll go out to shit. So don’t do this for me. I’m willing to climb with you, but goddamn it we’re walking this way and I’m not interested in being pulled down.’
“Our lives are very simple,” she says. “If they don’t learn to work, we don’t eat. If we all want to eat, then we all have to learn how to work. Because that’s what any family is like, bringing the money in -- us, all of us together.”
So the residents pool their resources, “because, when you’re poor, if you pool things, it turns out that together you have some power, you have some money. My check goes into the communal pot. Somebody else who can cook is the communal cook. Somebody else who figured out how to repair the roof became the communal head of construction. And all of us make an extended family.”
THE MINYAN
The emphasis on family begins on the first day of a resident’s stay when he or she is placed in a group of ten people. “We call it a ‘minyan,’” she says, “because in the Jewish religion, if you don’t have a leader, it takes equal cooperation from ten people of good faith and you can call yourself a congregation. You don’t need a rabbi or anything. The ten people become the rabbi. Those ten residents are taught to be responsible for one another instead of just themselves.
“So we have ten people who, of course, are sworn to kill each other, because there’s a Mexican Mafia member in with a member of the Aryan brotherhood in with a . . . you know. They all don’t just dislike one another, they despise everything about each other. And here they are in this little minyan and they have to work together. They sleep together in a crowded dorm . . . and all we want from them in those early days is the basics. Show up to work, which is simply pushing a broom. Try to do what you’re told, try to get through the day, you know, no threats, no nastiness. And pretty soon they get tangled up with each other all day long, saying, ‘What’s going on here, he’s got the good broom and I got the shitty broom! . . . people think I’m not working, but I’m working harder than he is! . . . you like him better, you gave him the good broom!’’”
CELEBRATING DIFFERENCES
Silbert believes it’s important to not only put people in touch with the community they’re comfortable with, “but all the ones they’re uncomfortable with . . . you’ve got to teach them how to interact, how to get up out of their ghetto mentality and into the mainstream, how to deal with every race, every ethnic group, every kind of person, every skill.
“We celebrate every . . . you can’t imagine how many liberation days there are. We get to know all the foods and we learn all about the cultures and the customs of everybody. It isn’t just that the African Americans learn African American pride. Everybody learns that pride. And everybody learns. Thursday we’re having a Seder . . . so everybody learns what it was like to escape from being slaves in Egypt. Then comes Cinco De Mayo. Everybody learns that story. And on and on.
“It isn’t enough in life to just take care of yourself,” she says. “We’ll say to a resident, ‘So you knew George was screwed up like that and thinking crazy and gonna die and you didn’t give a shit? You didn’t do
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anything to help him?’ Then we’ll scream at that resident harder than we’ll scream at George. This is about people helping each other. It isn’t enough in life to take care of yourself. Life isn’t just about you.”
And she’s proud of the results. “People end up so gentle with each other . . . at the same time they still haven’t overcome all their own anger and hatred. Put someone under their care and watch them, you know, it’s like giving things to a little bird . . . ”
SEX AND FRIENDSHIP
Living communally also means throwing hundreds of horny male residents into the same residence with hundreds of women, many of whom have been repeatedly raped or have developed destructive-seductive strategies for dealing with the men in their lives.
"It’s our biggest problem," says Silbert, “the one addiction everybody has -- ‘I’m not real good at relationships’ . . . so we teach them, twenty-four hours a day.
"Most of the women, in addition to whatever else they've done, have also been prostitutes. They typically have one pattern . . . you know, do anything for any guy any time any place, and then he beats the shit out of them and that’s what’s supposed to happen. And then they’ll do more for him . . .
“So we set a period of time in which residents are not allowed to touch or even say, 'Hey, you and me baby, in six months.' It's like grammar school. Then it moves on to high school and, pretty soon, there's two women living in an apartment and two men next door. It's fascinating because most of the guys . . . "
Silbert pauses, tilts her head slightly and smiles. She gestures toward a tall African American man, calls him over and gives us, in her own matter-of-fact way, a thumbnail sketch of his background:
Silbert: Gerald was born in Spanish Harlem. He's an average resident in terms of the number of felonies committed, the number of years in prison. He's been here -- how long?
Gerald: Five, going on six, years.
Silbert: He's my administrative assistant. How old are you, Gerald?
Gerald: Forty.
Silbert: Most of the residents are in their thirties. Most of our male residents, like Gerald, have never slept with a woman without being loaded and have never gone out on a real date before they arrive here. So, we have all these archaic rules. You have to court each other, like in the olden days.
Gerald: (laughing) It's very uncomfortable. It's like being in a relationship and having fifty of your girlfriend's brothers and sisters monitoring you. You have to be nice, which is a learning process for everyone.
Silbert: They go for walks in the park, ice cream, movies . . .
Gerald: You start by going out in a group of people. Then, after a month, it progresses to 'relationship status' by mutual agreement. You say, 'I still like you. Do you still like me?' If you want to go beyond that point, you have to go before a council of your peers and tell them you want to pursue the relationship. You have to state your intentions . . .
Silbert: And they must be honorable!
It sounds suspiciously like an old Jewish family ritual, and Silbert explodes with enthusiasm. "Absolutely! It's all about learning. We do it openly, in groups, and everyone knows everything about everyone. We have no secrets from each other . . . and friendships are as big an issue as sexual relationships. The residents are worse at friendships than even the boy/girl thing.”
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Gerald agrees. He says the hardest part about living at Delancey Street was "learning to open up and allow myself to be close to someone. I'd never really trusted anyone. I came from an upside down world where the people closest to you were the ones who hurt you first. Here you just talk about things. I never talked about anything . . . and I used to be so far removed from everything that was decent. Delancey Street gave me a chance to get connected.”
CLIMBING THE LADDER
The fundamental philosophy at Delancey Street is simple: A helps B and A gets well. “If you read at an eighth-grade level,” says Silbert, “you teach someone who reads at a sixth-grade level -- and that person teaches someone who reads at a fourth-grade level. You’re always both a student and a teacher.”
It’s the same in the 20 businesses. “In our restaurant, for example, the chefs teach the prep cooks, and the prep cooks teach the dishwashers . . . you’re just forever climbing a ladder.”
Changing ladders, too. “As soon as you learn how to be a waiter,” says Silbert, “we might move you into construction. We’re always pushing you to the next uncomfortable level, trying to help you find your dream . . . become the type of person you want to be . . . sometimes it takes a long time, but you can find it if we move you around and let you try out different possibilities . . . ”
By constantly teaching one another, Silbert says residents “learn a fundamental lesson . . . that they have something to offer. These are people who have always been passive. The bottom of society is passive. They receive everything. They receive welfare, never enough. They receive therapy, never enough. They receive punishment. But strength and power come from being on the giving end.
“I guess in some ways we take a revolutionary position,” she says. “We believe there is enough for everybody in America . . . that the people on the bottom can learn to do everything that the people on the top are doing . . . and that they don’t need billions of experts and dollars to teach them to do it. Nor do they need thousands of doctors. I mean there are people who are sick and they need doctors. There are people who need mental health care. But the majority of angry, screwed up people on the bottom can learn to make their way to the top.”
ACTING AS IF
But communal living and climbing the ladder aren’t the only keys to the Delancey Street philosophy. There’s another piece that’s equally fundamental.
“Every minute of every day,” says Silbert, “our residents are doing what we call ‘acting as if’ . . . they have to do things they don’t know how to do . . . and that takes tremendous strength and courage.”
She has enormous admiration for people who fight their way through the terrors of change. “They go through the tunnel,” she says. “They’re terrified to change. I mean, we’re asking them to give up everything. All their self-destructive instincts tell them, ‘March to the left, march to the left, march to the . . .’ compulsively, over and over. And we’re standing there saying, ‘Come to the right, come to the right, come to the right.’ And it takes tremendous courage to keep doing things that you don’t know how to do.
“They have to act as if they care about each other. They have to be there for each other. They have to hold each other when the other person wants to give up. They have to talk that person into staying and believing when they don’t believe themselves. They work all day at jobs they have no idea how to do, acting as if they do know how to do them. They have to get high school equivalencies and then take literature classes and art classes and go to museums and the opera and learn an entire world that they know nothing about . . . and they do it.
“If you don’t have the stuff and you have to be on the giving end, the only way to do it is to ‘act as if’ you have those qualities. I believe that’s how all the rest of us learned them to begin with. We were lucky to
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learn them when we were three, four, five and six. We followed some kind of positive role model. And we pretended we were how they were . . . and then we became that.
“So that’s what we do here. I tell them to ‘act as if’ you are a businessman, and we put them in coats and ties. And pretty soon you become comfortable in that suit the same way you became comfortable with your tattoos and with that absurd walk that rolls the shoulders . . . that’s not a natural walk either. You have to pretend that walk first. And then you learn to do it.
“So we’re lucky in the fact that our people have hit bottom. We ‘act as if’ we are all the things we want to become. We ‘act as if’ we’re decent and caring and bright and talented. And we eventually become those things.”
EXPOSING HER WEAKNESS
A good example is the process Silbert herself followed in the late 1980s when it came time to find a new home for Delancey Street in San Francisco . . . a project that led to construction of a 370,000-square-foot residential and retail complex on the Embarcadero.
She remembers that “everybody kept patting me on the head and saying, ‘You’ve certainly been very good at the things you’re doing, but construction, Mimi, is a very different thing’ . . . like we’re talking about brain surgery! So we had to become our own general contractors,” and that exposed one of her weaknesses.
“When I was in school,” she laughs, “I was a bright little girl. They used to give us all these aptitude tests and I was scoring in the 99-plus percentile . . . so that’s how I expected to score on everything!
“And then one day, in the sixth grade . . . I mean I can remember where I was standing when they gave us a mechanical aptitude test. I even remember pieces of the test. There were pictures of thumbs and you had to say whether the thumb came from a left hand or a right hand. Well, I was standing and turning this way and that -- but no one else was doing that! They were all sitting and . . .
“Well, it came back that I scored in the sixth percentile, and the teacher stood there, I can still remember her saying, ‘That means 94 per cent of the people in the United States are better at mechanical aptitude than you are.’ I just wanted to kill her. I was standing there saying to myself, ‘I know they are . . . because I’m in the 99-plus percentile in math!’
“Well, from that day until the day we had to build this place, I’d never looked at a machine or changed a light bulb. If you asked me to do anything like that, I’d say, ‘Oh, I can’t do that. I have no mechanical aptitude!’ And that would be the end of that.
“But then we didn’t have the money to buy a place, and we needed a big place, so we had to build. And there was me. I was pretty much going to have to come up with the design and learn to read the blueprints and become the general contractor and the developer. You know, I just sat there over and over saying, ‘I have no mechanical aptitude. Doesn’t anybody understand this?’
“And then, of course, I had to do what I make every resident do, find the thing that’s most uncomfortable and make a public ass of yourself while you learn to do it. And that’s what I did. I pretty much designed the building. I can’t tell you how long it took me to read those blueprints. I was like a crazy person. The guys in Delancey Street would have to sit with me until three in the morning because I’d do the design work and then I kept having to get up and walk around it. They’d all say, ‘See, there . . .’ and I’d go, ‘Which one is the apartment?’ . . . over and over, I kept walking and turning and looking and . . . I just didn’t get it. I publicly didn’t get it. Every week I had to stand up and announce how stupid I was.”
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RISK-TAKING
But even that experience taught Silbert a lesson. “If you’re going to become good at something, you have to take the kinds of risks that mean you’ll fail because you won’t know what you’re doing . . . that’s what a risk means, by definition.
“So you have to practice . . . with everybody watching. And then you eventually become good it . . . and you no longer have to look good because then you are good enough to say, ‘Oh, I made a mistake.’ You need to get rid of this false pride that says, you know, everything we do we have to succeed in right away. You have to have real confidence to say, ‘Oh, sorry. My mistake. I screwed that up. How can I fix it?’ Because if you believe you are a mistake, which is what our people believe about who they are, then you have to defend everything you do . . . ”
EARLY DAYS
The complex on the Embarcadero came years after the early days of struggle. By late 1972, the original ten ex-cons had grown to more than 100 and Delancey Street needed space. Silbert wanted her people far from the underworld of pushers and prostitutes.
So, while the group scrimped and saved, she and Maher came up with a find: A magnificent former Russian consulate in San Francisco’s fashionable Pacific Heights area. Delancey Street bought the mansion for $160,000, with a small down payment and a big mortgage.
“It was huge,” she recalls. “Forty rooms -- but it wasn’t zoned correctly. It was still considered a private home, from the days of the robber barons. It clearly wasn’t a single home, but because the Russians had been using it, it never got re-zoned. And then it stayed empty for a few years, and it was kind of run down.
“We bought it and the neighborhood went completely crazy. I mean completely crazy. You know, it was 1972, and here came a hundred large, dark former criminals moving into this gorgeous mansion on the top of the hill in the nicest neighborhood. So the neighbors went nuts and they fought us . . . and we went out to win them over.
“We went from door to door in our . . . you know, we’re a very rigid organization . . . everybody is in a suit and tie with short hair . . . I always tell my friends in professional groups you’ll be able to distinguish the dope fiends from the professionals because we’re the ones in the coats and ties. So we went around offering our services, volunteering to do anything anybody wanted us to do just so they could get to know us. We wanted to prove we were going to be good neighbors.
“We re-did our building right away to show them that property values would go up . . . and we patrolled the neighborhood so crime would go down . . . because their fears were just the opposite . . . crime up and property values down. And we kept saying, ‘please get to know us . . . we’re going to be the best neighbors . . .’”
THE FIRST BUSINESS VENTURE
And it was here that Silbert and the other residents stumbled onto their first business opportunity.
“One of the neighbors asked us to help them clear out their living room for a party. I was standing there when a resident picked up the grand piano and said, ‘What do you want me to do with this?’
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“That’s when I went, ‘Boing, boing, boing, boing!’ We’re a natural moving company! These guys sit in prison all day getting buffed, lifting weights eight hours a day. So we went home and wrote ‘Moving’ in real kooky letters, and ‘We’ll do it for less,’ and we put a flyer under the windshield of every car and we just leafleted, leafleted, leafleted for months, actually. Until somebody finally called the phone number. And they described a job to us . . . and then, oh my god, we didn’t know what to do, we didn’t know what to charge . . .
“So we called a major moving company and described the job to them. They gave us a quote . . . and we did it for less. We rented a truck. We rented little uniforms. We lost money on the first job, of course, but that was all right. We told our people, ‘This is it. This is the whole reputation of Delancey Street resting on your shoulders. We’re gonna teach these people who we are. We can do anything they can do. We can do it better, politer, so speak in your best language. Smile no matter what. And let’s get this job done.’
“Well, we did a great job, and the customers recommended us. We started doing similar jobs. And then one day the Public Utilities Commission found me. It turned out moving companies are a regulated, licensed industry. Who knew? I said, ‘Oh, sorry! We didn’t know.’ We paid our fines. We got all the paperwork that we needed. And then we did it correctly.”
Today Delancey Street Movers has a fleet of trucks and the company has expanded into catering, furniture design and transport services for senior citizens and people who are handicapped.
THE SECOND BUSINESS VENTURE
The renovation of “Russia,” as the residents called it, became a hallmark of the Delancey Street approach. Ex-cons who initially knew nothing about fixing up houses took on the task themselves, trimming wood, nailing molding, repairing plaster . . . and the work led to the creation of still another business.
“We started a construction company,” says Silbert . . . and the first outside job came in the usual unexpected manner.
“We were trying to find a private school for one of our residents,” she recalls, “a young girl who’d been a prostitute . . . and her mother was a prostitute . . . her sisters were prostitutes. We didn’t want her to go back to public schools, so we went to all the private schools in the area and said, ‘We’ll trade you. We’re able-bodied people. We know how to build things. Whatever you want . . . ’
“One school agreed to take her. First they asked us to paint the school inside and out, so we went to a paint store and asked the man what to buy and how to paint. He told us. Then they asked us to build a kinder-gym with a slide and swings, so I bought a copy of Sunset magazine, it had a ‘Build Your Own Back Yard’ section. As the ‘intellectual’ of the group, I read it out loud. I’m terrible with my hands, so other people figured out what I was talking about. We built that thing. As it turned out . . . I mean we sanded it, it was just gorgeous. But when we got it put together, you know, when you climbed up the steps . . . the slide shot upwards like a cannon! We had to dismantle the whole thing. It took us about six tries, but we did it.
“Then we re-did the building we were living in and bought a second building. We re-did the second building . . . and sold it for ten times more than we paid for it. That’s how we got the money to buy our third building . . . and years later, we built this whole complex.”
When the Delancey Street residents began working on the Embarcadero, only five of them knew anything about construction, and their expertise came either from prison or the streets . . . the labor foreman had learned by helping to pour concrete for the handball court at San Quentin. But the residents rolled up their sleeves and took on the job of designing and building the entire complex. People with experience mostly as thieves, murderers and unskilled dope fiends became plumbers, electricians and pile drivers.
“We taught the building trades to 350 people while we were building this place,” says Silbert, some of it with the help of volunteers from the community. “And we put up some of these walls six or seven times. We’d put them up . . . we’d put them up wrong . . . we’d say, ‘Does the whole thing look as if it’s tilted to you?’ . . . ‘Yep’ . . . ‘OK. Down it comes.’”
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THE ETHNIC AMERICAN BISTRO
The moving company and the construction company were just the first of the more than 20 businesses Delancey Street has operated, including a funky restaurant that’s become a favorite spot for San Franciscans. Even here, though, the Delancey Street approach was different.
"A couple of professional restaurateurs came out to advise us,” remembers Silbert. “They said, 'You have to do a market analysis of who is going to come to your restaurant and what kind of food they want to eat.’ Well, I'm not going to do that! Number one, we don't have the people to do it and, number two, we can only cook the food we know how to cook. We are a multi-ethnic, old-fashioned American organization. That's how we live, how we speak and how we cook. We call ourselves an Ethnic American Bistro, which means we've used recipes from all of our backgrounds. Not the new versions -- more like Grandma's.
"I'll give you an example: I went to the mother of one of our residents who had given me a sweet potato pie as a Christmas present for taking care of her Sonny, as she called him, and I asked her to teach our people how to make her sweet potato pie. Now it's on the menu and it's called ‘Sonny's Mother's Sweet Potato Pie.’ What could be more simple than that? We also have a policy that if somebody wants something and it's not on the menu and we have the ingredients, we'll try to cook it.
“And we're nice to people, which isn't always easy. Nice can be hard. But it's part of what we do. In fact, the Michelin Guide called us the friendliest restaurant in San Francisco. It takes great courage to do what our people do. They have to walk around smiling at customers they are terrified to even talk to, maybe are even paranoid about. They have to say, 'Here is your hamburger, sir.' When the customer says, 'I ordered it medium rare,' they have to say, 'Oh, I'm terribly sorry, sir' instead of saying, 'No, you stupid asshole, you didn't order it medium rare!' Which is what they want to say because they’re angry at everyone all the time. Friendly is not an easy quality.”
THE “ADORABLE” CREDIT UNION MAN
Each of the 20 businesses functions as a training school for the residents, and Silbert discovered early on that newly arrived residents almost always fell into a stereotypical trap when choosing what skills to learn.
“If we asked them, ‘What do you want to get trained in?,’” she recalls, “they all picked the social stereotype that exists for them. All the women picked secretarial skills. All the minority guys picked physical labor. All the little Italian and Jewish boys picked sales. I mean it was really . . . it was like a joke. And so I realized, oh my god, in every way these people buy into what everybody sells them about who they are . . . ”
Most of the training schools don’t earn any money, but Silbert says “we don’t differentiate. The whole point is for the residents to learn three marketable skills. Some of them bring in money, some of them don’t . . . they just help us run the organization.”
For example, says Silbert, “we keep all our own books, so there’s a finance and accounting training school. Residents start out by learning to file alphabetically. Then they learn to add . . . then to keep accounts receivable for one of our departments . . . then for a couple of departments . . . then for everything! Then they learn accounts payable . . . then the general ledger . . . and then they can go on and become a CPA, as many of our graduates have done.”
Delancey Street also became the first federal credit union run by and for ex-felons, a crucial step in the organization’s development because the inability to get credit often influences the decision to return to a life of crime.
“It was adorable,” remembers Silbert, “when the man came and did ‘every American is entitled to credit’ . . . that was great. Although he did become a little hysterical when he was trying to get a sense of who our people were. He said, ‘Well, you know, we’re going to teach you check writing. How many of you have ever written checks?’ Everybody’s hand went up. ‘How many of you have ever written major checks for a large amount of money?’ About half the hands went up. And he said, ‘Oh, well, then, they’re pretty experienced.’ And I said, ‘No, you forgot the other question. How many of you have ever written legitimate checks of your
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own?’ Three little hands went in the air. I thought he was going to die. But it was too late. They had already chartered us.”
THE ANTI-PLANNER
The business opportunities have been many. In addition to the moving company, the construction company and the restaurant, the list includes an advertising incentives company, a Christmas tree lot that generates more than $1 million in revenue per year, and more than a dozen others . . . but Silbert says “I have never once done a business plan. I have never read a business book. If you asked me a question about being a social entrepreneur, I’d have no idea what it means.”
In many respects, she has applied the concept of “acting as if” to her entrepreneurial adventures. “I don’t know anything about business,” she says. “To this day, I’ve never read so much as an article . . . and the residents were furious with me one day when Forbes called and I forgot to call them back! When I finally get a chance to read, I want to read novels or poetry. I want to be elevated. So I really don’t know the field.
“What I do know,” she says, “is that we’ve proved you can be very decent, very communally minded, not the slightest individualistic . . . and you can still succeed on the bottom line . . . whatever the hell that bottom line is. I’m not big on planning. I don't make a budget, I don't make projections.
“Take the restaurant . . . I don't say it has to earn a certain amount of money. We've been around for eight years now and we’ve done unbelievably well since the day we opened. Tuesdays are slow; the weekends are usually overcrowded. Some days there’s a line around the block -- and we have no idea why or when that's going to happen! For the most part, we serve about 280 lunches -- and about 400 meals -- a day. What I spend my time doing is tasting things to make sure they're fresh, and dealing with people issues . . . ”
“YOU GET THEM BY EARNING THEM . . . ”
Six months into their residency, most residents have usually gained enough confidence to be able to look honestly at their past for the first time. "We do this in a weekend marathon session called a Dissipation," says Silbert, "which is set up to help them shed the guilt of past behaviors. This is very important because our residents are caught in a downward spiral of self-destructive acts that lead to guilt, which leads, in turn, to self-hatred."
Residents spend the weekend in groups of 15 or so, reliving every horrible deed they've ever committed so they can rid themselves of the guilt. The marathon concludes with the older residents guiding the newer ones toward an understanding that they have, indeed, become someone new and are capable of behaving differently.
But dissipation is just part of the program. In addition, residents are encouraged to help others in the community. They work with senior citizens, juveniles from poor areas, people who are disabled, and they give back to the community in myriad ways, including picking up trash on surrounding streets and running a food-distribution service for 60 charitable organizations in the San Francisco area. And while they're learning to understand themselves, residents are also actively teaching newer ones, thus pulling others up the ladder with them.
“Everybody essentially finds places to rise,” says Silbert. “You don’t get pride or self-respect or self-esteem or any of those words by saying to each other in groups, ‘I think you’re a good person.’ You get them by earning them in life. You can’t just sit around and say, ‘I have pride.’ So we decided we would train people in everything they needed to know to be successful.”
For that reason, it doesn’t matter to the people at Delancey Street whether a resident works in a profitable business or a training school that loses money. “It’s not that because you’re a good mechanic that you’re hot shit or because you earn more money that makes you better,” says Silbert. “Everything . . . we
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consider everything equal . . . actually, in all honesty, we tilt toward the people stuff. . . . the people doing the people stuff are held in the highest esteem. So the guys running the moving company -- which nets two million dollars a year -- I mean, we’re proud that everybody in the moving company is doing well, but we’re most proud when the thing they talk about the most is the guys working together, the guys making a team, the guys showing our best face to the customers . . . ”
THE VATICAN ROOM
As they wend their way through the days at Delancey Street, residents are constantly moving from one figurative “room” to another. “We use a lot of humor,” says Silbert, “and we try very hard not to take ourselves at all seriously.” So the three rooms are called The Vatican Room (where residents work on their people skills), The State Room (where they handle administrative chores) and The War Room (where they manage the businesses and training schools).
A clear hierarchy exists within each of the rooms, but a resident might be a junior person in one of them and a senior person in another. For example, a resident might work in the restaurant, which places him under the authority of six other people in The War Room, but that same person might be a “barber” in The Vatican Room, “somebody who yells at others when they screw up. They’re known as ‘barbers,’” says Silbert, “because on the street, yelling at somebody’s called giving someone a haircut.”
The Vatican Room is the place where the residents mend their souls . . . but The State Room and The War Room are the places that keep the organization going. For example, says Silbert, “the people in The State Room are the ones who do the accounting . . . the people who make everybody fill out an eight-part form that nobody wants to fill out when they have to go buy something . . . the people in charge of housing . . . the people who fix the vehicles . . . the people who tell you whether you can have a car tonight. The rules and regs people.”
According to Silbert, “most of our time and attention is spent on interpersonal issues. ‘How is everybody? Who’s mad? Who’s hurt?’ The whole point of The Vatican Room is to help the individual. How do we get somebody to change and become decent, to become a good human being?
“All day long it’s like having a tape recorder in which you’re always pressing the ‘pause’ button and staying ‘Stop! That wasn’t the right way to do it.’ We’re constantly telling people, ‘You don’t talk to somebody that way. You don’t do that. Please help him. What’s going on with you? Well, then, learn to say it. Instead of pretending you’re mad about the dinner and throwing food on the ground, why can’t you say, ’I got a bad phone call today.’ Let’s focus where it really is.’
“That’s pretty much what goes on here all day every day. ‘Don’t talk to each other that way. If this were a real job, you’d be fired. Get that through your head. That is not the way you talk to your boss. Now let’s go back and do it over again. And let’s do it correctly.’”
RIGHT AND WRONG
Of course there are some who wonder how Silbert knows what the “correct” way should be . . . but she’s scornful of their concern.
“I believe everybody knows basic right from basic wrong,” she says. “I don’t need two doctorates to know that. Everybody knows that. Everybody knows what’s decent and what’s indecent behavior. Everybody knows when you set somebody up, you know, don’t do that. It’s not nice, even if you could have gotten away with it and looked good. If you find a dollar on the street and nobody saw you, turn it in. That’s the right thing to do. Everybody knows that. You don’t pocket it. That’s the wrong thing to do.
“So we’re pretty basic on right and wrong. Take our restaurant, for example . . . you try to be nice to your customers. You set your prices at a fair and reasonable rate so you’re not undercutting the market but you’re not charging so much for food that only certain people get to go to restaurants. You make a restaurant so that regular folk can come and be comfortable. And you treat them absolutely all equally, as if
15 – The Mimi Silbert story
they’re all the most important people on earth. You know that’s right . . . if you stopped anybody on the street, they'd tell you that's common sense . . . ”
NO GOVERNMENT FUNDING
All this sounds too good to be true, of course -- especially when you consider the business side of the equation. Unlike nearly every other rehabilitation program in the nation, Delancey Street refuses to take any money from the state or federal government.
“We’ve never taken any government money for several reasons,” says Silbert. “First of all, the government would never have given us money to begin with. They didn’t approve of our methods. The idea of having no staff, of relying on the people who are the problem to be the solution, which is our basic premise, just doesn’t make sense to the government.”
In addition, government agencies have difficulty pinpointing Delancey Street’s mission.
“We’ve refused to be a one-issue organization,” says Silbert. “For years, everybody wanted to know what we were. ‘Are you a drug program?’ No. ‘But your people are all drug addicts.’ Yes, but that’s not what we’re about. ‘Well, most of your people are criminals, so are you a rehab organization?’ No. ‘Everybody has to get a high school equivalency degree -- does that make you a literacy center?’ No. ‘Are you a vocational training center?’ No.
“You see, we teach people everything they need to know. We teach them how to set a table -- but we’re not a table-setting organization! We teach them what clothes to wear and how to wear them and what wool and polyester and cotton are . . . we teach them everything. But that doesn’t make us a clothing organization. And on and on and on.”
But there’s a more important reason why Silbert refuses government funding. “People have to earn their own self-respect,” she says. “Sitting around waiting for a welfare check is just as bad as the members of a wealthy family waiting for their daddy to die so they can become 'heir' heads. If the government gave us our money, it would be just like a welfare check, we wouldn't need to rely on our residents . . . and they wouldn't have to develop their strengths. This way, if our residents don’t become talented very quickly, then we don’t eat.”
Avoiding government funding also insulates Delancey Street from one of the most common criticisms received by nonprofits. “It costs us far less to house and feed a person at Delancey Street than it does to keep someone in jail,” says Silbert, “and we don’t use taxpayer money to do it!”
Although it eschews government funding, Delancey Street does rely on donations . . . not so much of money, but of products. “Almost all our clothes are donated,” says Silbert. “The glass for the restaurant windows was donated, and the copper that makes the bar. But we etched the glass ourselves, and pounded the copper. We put in the acoustical tile, but the tile was donated.
“We’ve never gone out after money. We don’t even have a fundraising department. We don’t have a brochure. We don’t have a mailing. We’ve never once contacted the media or a PR firm, our restaurant doesn’t advertise . . .
“Occasionally people give us money, and we accept it. And we do go out after product.” For example, she and the other residents wear donated clothing that comes from places such as The Gap and Brooks Brothers, who are among the many corporate entities that believe in her work. And there have been other ways to help, as well: Bank of America provided a $10 million unsecured construction loan to help build the complex on the San Francisco waterfront.
16 – The Mimi Silbert story
WHAT’S NEXT?
After completing that new residential-retail complex on the Embarcadero in 1989, Delancey Street became world-famous. ABC’s “20/20” program did a half-hour special, People magazine came calling. With a 17-acre ranch in rural New Mexico, a large castle on 90 acres in Brewster, New York, and additional facilities in Los Angeles and North Carolina, Delancey Street is a proven entity. So what comes next?
“I don’t want to grow too much ourselves,” says Silbert, “because if we get too big, we aren’t who we are . . . but we're training people to create their own Delancey Street . . . and we’re taking over the entire juvenile justice system in San Francisco. We hope we can turn it into a model for the country . . . our residents feel that it's on our backs to fix things so these kids don't end up forty and hopeless on the streets.”
There are those who say Delancey Street is an experiment that cannot be repeated without her, but Silbert disagrees. “This process is bigger than any of us,” she says. “Delancey Street has been built by every resident who’s ever come through here . . . each of them putting on another brick.”
But she does admit replication will be difficult because it “requires vastly different thinking about how to solve social problems. You’ve got to be burning with fire in your belly.” Aside from that, she says, “you really don’t need much money or much expertise . . . just a lot of dedication! And there are so many bored people out there desperately searching for something to do . . . I think they’d be in heaven doing something like this . . . ”
“WE HAVEN’T EVEN BEGUN . . . ”
But Silbert has the nagging feeling she’s failed in one important way: Making people understand what Delancey Street is all about. Despite the myriad news reports, awards and honors that have been heaped on her, she speaks despairingly about those who come to visit.
“I’ve met with Presidents and with their top staff,” she says. “They go away and I think it’s about to happen. And then they come back and say, “We want to replicate you as a . . . whatever . . . and then we have to be one thing -- like a welfare reform program. And I say, ‘No. You missed the point. You’ve got to start making schools. Different kinds of colleges. Make another Harvard where you’ve got to be in the bottom five per cent of the population to get in . . . but your goals are the same.’
“But no one has gotten that yet . . . I keep thinking that finally someone will see us on television or someplace and come to understand that we as a society must change the way we deal with the underclass . . . but they don’t . . . and we haven’t even begun . . .”
EPILOGUE
The cab driver is shaking his head.
“Delancey Street,” he says. “Yeah, I heard of that place, I know where it is . . . it’s got all those junkies running it. They’re in charge, right? Just what you need, junkies running their own treatment center . . .”
It’s a common perspective -- the idea that people who were once criminals are rotten to the core. Images of strung-out addicts and seedy prostitutes loom large . . . and there’s no possibility of true rehabilitation, because thecrook, the junkie and the whore are inherently flawed, from the inside out, and cannot be redeemed.
As for the idea of making money honestly . . .
“Naw, I never been inside,” says the cab driver, “but I read about it in the papers. They get a lot of press. I guess they do a good job, but, I don’t know . . . ”
17 – The Mimi Silbert story
He shakes his head again. “They’ve got this new headquarters, huge, very fancy. It’s part of a big complex they own . . . the whole thing, I’m pretty sure. And they’re making money hand over fist . . .
“A bunch of junkies!”
6.Moses Zulu
Project: Development Aid from People to People in Zambia (Children's Town)
Location: Lusaka, Zambia
Moses Zulu is a dynamic 40-year-old with a winning smile and extraordinary determination. In 1990 Zulu opened Children's Town to serve Zambian children orphaned by the AIDS epidemic and other causes. He is devoted to helping these orphans find their way in life.
The program has grown from a handful of children living in tent shelters to almost 300 children and a staff of 22 living in six different houses. The grounds include a primary school and a community center. Zulu's vision includes a plan to make Children's Town self sustaining.
Zulu offers hope and inspiration to his young charges. "At our core," he says, "we enable our children to have dreams, to believe in themselves and to take responsibility for their lives."
What Does Children's Town Do?
According to UNICEF, by the end of 2004, nearly one million children were AIDS orphans. Many come from rural areas and, after their parents' deaths, they are force to flee to African cities, where their only means of survival may be working as a street vendor, or resorting to crime or prostitution — behavior that brings an extremely high risk of contracting AIDS and other illnesses. In Zambia's capital, Lusaka, alone, it is estimated that there are more than 75,000 AIDS orphans
For these children, basic needs are unaffordable luxuries. They have no childhood, no time to play, no future. They are overwhelmed by chronic illness, lack of shelter and frequent abuse by adults.
Children's Town is a residential education and vocational training institution in the African village of Malambanyama, Zambia, designed to give some of these children basic life skills and hope for the future.
Each child goes through a five-year program in which they are taught life skills, responsibility, values and self-care. They graduate with vocational training in agriculture or crafts and business management, as well as a ninth-grade diploma.
Children's Town has trained more than 90 students in agriculture, 50 in business and 400 in agribusiness. They are socialized, taught academic subjects like reading and math, and given practical skills like running a farm and doing carpentry. Children also attend counseling sessions and steel band rehearsal and interact with the local community at least once a week.
Although the future looks bleak for many African children, Moses Zulu's Children's Town provides an oasis of hope and a vitally important example for how poor countries with high numbers of orphans can respond with humanity and compassion to the next generation of the AIDS crisis.
"A child in the street is a child that has been exposed to a lot of vices. And this child has developed hate. This child has developed no passion whatsoever. This child has no love at all. This child has no respect for himself or herself. He sees everybody as an enemy, he can’t trust anyone."
Who is Moses Zulu talking about? Are there even people who live like that? Sadly, in truth, there are. They happen to be the Zambian children that my hero, Moses Zulu, helps to improve their lives. Zulu gives many children the hope to live even though they might have AIDS. Without his hard, determined work through his organization of Children’s Town, many Zambian children would have been forced to survive in an African city by getting a job as a street vendor, or resorting to crime or prostitution.
As many heroes do, Moses Zulu makes an impact on the world. In 1990, Moses Zulu established Children’s Town in Zambia, where one million children have been orphaned, largely due to the AIDS epidemic. Children’s Town teaches children the basic life skills needed for their future. Each child goes through a five-year training program where they’re taught responsibility, values, and self-care. They graduate with training in agriculture or crafts and business management, as well as a 9th grade diploma. Zulu’s Children’s Town provides an oasis of hope for less fortunate children, and it is a vital example of how people should respond to the next AIDS crisis.
I hope that when people look back in time, they, too, will think that he is a hero for providing many people with the hope and inspiration that they would not have had without his help. Zulu’s contribution to today’s modern world society teaches us to lend a helping hand to others who are not as privileged as those of us who are. He teaches us to make a difference in the world by helping others. "At our core," he says, "we enable our children to have dreams, to believe in themselves and to take responsibility for their lives."
Finding out about Moses Zulu and his work, I knew that he was the hero that I wanted to share with the world. I read about his generous, warm-hearted aid to Zambian children who were barely living, and it reminded me of how I have always wanted to help children, as well as adults, in need. Although I have never felt the pains of poverty, the hardships of not having a home, the loneliness of not having a family to care for me, or ill health and AIDS, I know that thousands, if not millions, of people in the world have gone through these terrifying, agonizing, and miserable experiences. Learning from Moses Zulu that it is possible to help these people in a way that could change their lives forever, I know that my hero and I share some of the same interests, goals, and dreams.
As we all know, a hero can basically be defined as any person who is admired for their qualities and achievements and is regarded as an ideal or model. Moses Zulu is someone who fits my meaning of a hero. I learned that there are not many people in the world who are willing to help others in need, as Moses Zulu does. Others in the world might not even know that these children and adults exist at all. That is why we have to raise awareness about them and try to solve this crisis. And from now on, if you ever throw away your banana just because it’s all brown-specked and mushy, well, remember that a group of people suffering from AIDS, homelessness, poverty, or other causes, would fight each other just to get their hands on a single, over-ripe banana.
6.Nick Moon and Martin Fisher
Project: ApproTEC (Appropriate Technology for Enterprise Creation)
Location: Nairobi, Kenya, offices in Tanzania, Mali and San Francisco, Calif.
Nick Moon and Martin Fisher founded ApproTEC out of their belief that poor people don't need handouts, they need concrete opportunities to use their skills and initiative. ApproTEC provides these opportunities by specially designing and manufacturing tools that help people work more productively, allowing them to break the cycle of poverty.
"The concept of poor people is really that they need handouts, they need help," says Moon. "We say that a poor person is a very entrepreneurial person and the one thing they want in life is to get ahead."
Moon says his company takes a business-like approach to the business of development, "otherwise we're going to be locked forever in this cycle of handouts and giveaways and bleeding-heart social welfare programs."
Fisher says he believes a private sector solution like ApproTEC is the only sustainable economic model for developing the world. He says that on average, income goes up by a factor of 10 after people buy an ApproTEC product — providing a return on investment that would be hard to beat anywhere in the world.
"It's transforming their lives," says Fisher, "moving them from poverty into the middle class. If you look at the problems in Africa, in other developing countries -- the solution is to create a middle class."
What Does ApproTEC Do?
ApproTEC develops and markets new technologies in Africa. The company's product lines include a series of manually operated micro-irrigation "MoneyMaker" pumps and the "Mafuta Mali" sunflower and sesame seed oil press. These low-cost tools are bought by local entrepreneurs and used to establish new small businesses. The technologies not only create jobs, they create new wealth.
All of ApproTEC's tools are designed to be profitable, affordable, durable, easy to operate and easy to maintain. Most of the equipment is manually operated because electricity and fuel are expensive. The tools are also designed to be mass-produced locally in Africa.
ApproTEC has developed a sophisticated monitoring program in order to gauge impact. According to their latest research, 35,000 new businesses have been started with their products (about 800 per month), 35 million dollars a year in new profits and wages have been generated, and new incomes drawn from the businesses account for more than .5 percent of Kenya's GDP and .2 percent of Tanzania's.
KickStart’s mission is to help millions of people out of poverty. We promote sustainable economic growth and employment creation in Kenya and other countries. We develop and promote technologies that can be used by dynamic entrepreneurs to establish and run profitable small scale enterprises.
KickStart believes that self-motivated private entrepreneurs managing small-scale enterprises can play a dynamic role in the economies of developing countries.
These entrepreneurs can raise small amounts of capital ($100-$1,000 US) to start a new enterprise. KickStart then helps them to identify viable business opportunities and access the technologies required to launch the new enterprises.
In addition to promoting small enterprise development, KickStart’s technologies, expertise, and methods are widely applied throughout Africa to support programs in agriculture, shelter, water, sanitation, health, and relief.
Our History
IN 1991, Martin Fisher and Nick Moon founded ApproTEC, which in 2005 became KickStart. Their model was based on a five-step process to develop, launch and promote simple money-making tools that poor entrepreneurs could use to create their own profitable businesses.
KickStart’s early efforts focused on building and food processing technologies. But in Africa, 80% of the poor are small-scale farmers. They depend on unreliable rain to grow their crops and have, at most, two harvests per year. With two valuable assets, a small plot of land and basic farming skills, KickStart realized that irrigation would allow people to move from subsistence farming to commercial agriculture.
In 1998, KickStart developed a line of manually operated MoneyMaker Irrigation Pumps that allow farmers to easily pull water from a river, pond or shallow well (as deep as 25 feet deep), pressurize it through a hose pipe (even up a hill) and irrigate up to two acres of land. Our pumps are easy to transport and install and retail between $35 and $95. They are easy to operate and, because they are pressurized, they allow farmers to direct water where it is needed. It is a very efficient use of water, and unlike flood irrigation, does not lead to the build up of salts in the soil.
With irrigation , farmers can grow crops year-round. They can grow higher value crops like fruits and vegetables, get higher yields (The Food and Agriculture Organization reports that irrigation increases crop yield by 100-400%) and most importantly, they can produce crops in the dry seasons when food supplies dwindle and the market prices are high. Because of the long dry seasons and growing population, there is potential for many thousands of farmers to start irrigating without flooding the market. There are local, urban and even export markets for the new crops.
Since 1991, 111,800 successful new businesses have been started in Africa using our tools. Today more than 800 new businesses are being created each month. Since each of these enterprises supports a family, we conservatively estimate that these businesses have already lifted 559,300 people out of poverty. Each year these businesses generate over $113 million in new profits and wages and have created 80,000 new waged jobs. In Kenya alone, the users of our tools are generating new revenues equivalent to 0.6% of the GDP.
KickStart continued to expand across Kenya, proving that our model was scalable. In 2000, KickStart expanded into Tanzania, and in 2004, we expanded into Mali. Both countries were significantly different from Kenya, yet our programs in both countries have flourished and grown, proving that our model is replicable. Other organizations have distributed our pumps across Africa and today, thousands are in use in Uganda, Malawi, Zambia, Sudan and Rwanda.
The Beginning of the End of Poverty
To read the news on a regular basis, it is easy to think that Africa is hopeless--civil wars, AIDS, genocide, drought, famine. It becomes easy to blame the lack of progress in eradicating poverty (or more accurately, the increasing problem) on natural or man-made disasters.
But statistics and grim headlines mask the real problem. The reason efforts have failed is because they are the wrong efforts. Yet these same failed efforts are used over and over again.
KickStart was created to break this cycle and to create a new, successful, scalable, replicable, and sustainable solution to poverty. (There are a lot of buzz-words in that sentence, but for KickStart, each has a specific meaning and measurement, see "When we say..." for more information)
Front-Line Experience
KickStart founders, Nick Moon and Martin Fisher, have more than 40 years of combined experience fighting poverty in Africa. KickStart's radically different model grew from their personal experience and the lessons they learned on the front lines of this effort. Martin Fisher earned his Ph.D. in engineering from Stanford University. After finishing his degree, he realized that his training gave him three career options--the oil industry, the defense industry, or academia. None of these appealed to him.
Martin went trekking in the Peruvian Andes to ponder the direction of his life. It was in Peru that he first encountered Third-World poverty. As an engineer, he knew that the right technology could change the lives of millions of people. Martin realized that poverty presented perhaps the greatest engineering challenge facing mankind. And there he found his calling.
He returned to the States, won a Fulbright Scholarship, and went off to Kenya to study the "Appropriate Technology Movement." He planned to be in Kenya for ten months. He stayed for seventeen years.
Nick Moon spent his early childhood in the far reaches of the British Empire--first in India, later in Singapore. He went to England for his education. He was a talented scholar, but also a strong-willed idealist. He left school at age 17 to train as woodworker and craftsman. Nick's skills as a carpenter took him to projects around Europe and Asia. A small want ad for a French-speaking carpenter got him a job building a recording studio in Togo and his first experience of Africa.
He returned to the UK to start his own business restoring Georgian homes around London. The business was successful, but to Nick, unfulfilling. Wishing to use his skills in the service of others, he joined Voluntary Service Overseas (the British Peace Corps). In 1982, Nick came to Kenya to teach carpentry skills and small business management to poor youth in a rural village.
In 1985, after his stint with VSO, Nick joined ActionAid, to work on construction training and job development programs where he met Martin.
Academic Rigor Meets Common Sense
At ActionAid, Nick and Martin worked on many projects. They built schoolhouses. They designed and built complex water systems of dams, canals and wells. They ran programs to train craftsmen and set up enterprises to make tools. On the surface, these projects seemed successful, but when they went back to visit these projects, they found the schools unused, the water systems crumbling, the craftsmen unemployed and the enterprises out of business.
How could such well-intentioned and well implemented projects fail?
As scholars they realized they could learn as much from failures as successes, so they took a very rigorous look at the shortcomings of their own projects. What they found was that development projects fall into four categories, each with serious shortcomings.
- Donation of Capital Equipment to a Local CommunityAfrica is littered with broken down windmills, water pumps, generators, and tractors given to communities. These gifts are expensive, but the recipient communities lack the organizational skills, tools, spare parts and the cash needed to maintain or fuel this equipment. When these machines break down, they are rarely repaired or replaced, leaving the community no better off for the investment.
- Donation of Tools and Equipment and Training to Start a Community BusinessNick and Martin spent years providing tools, equipment, and training to local groups. Typically these businesses did not produce sufficient profits to provide operating capital, let alone to share among the many members. The survival of the businesses is dependent on the presence and subsidy of a development agency. So when Martin and Nick moved on, the business would fail because there was no strong entrepreneurial leader with a vested interest in making the business a success.
- Donation of General Goods or ServicesTogether they worked on programs that donated goods and or services to people in poor villages. But by its very nature, a giveaway program cannot be sustainable. No matter how large the charity, the distribution will end at some point and the organization will move on. Martin and Nick noticed that there were often private sector businesses in the community offering these goods or services for a fee. The giveaway programs were not only unsustainable, they often put private enterprises out of business--killing the entrepreneurial spirit. The result? The village is left without access to these goods and services, again leaving them worse for the investment.
- Products That Save Time, LaborNick and Martin were probably as guilty as any aid worker who assume that time and labor saving devices improve the quality of life. But what they came to see was that poor have an abundance of two valuable resources--their time and their labor. To minimize the value of these two non-cash assets, just pushes a person deeper into poverty.
The pair took their findings to their supervisors and other leaders of the major aid programs in the region. What they found were big bureaucracies closed to new ideas. Critical self-examination was not only discouraged, it was considered dangerous.
Nick and Martin remained convinced that there was a better way to address poverty--a model that would bring together the power of technology with the proven sustainability of the marketplace and private sector.
So in 1991 they founded ApproTEC, now KickStart and to date, Martin and Nick's innovation has helped over 559,300 people get out of poverty forever.
Our Founders
Martin Fisher, Ph.D. and Nick Moon took different paths to Africa, but both went with altruistic visions of using their skills to make a difference.
Nick, born and raised in the far corners of the British empire, first came to Africa after answering an ad in a London paper looking for a French-speaking carpenter to build a music studio in Togo. He went to Kenya as part of the VSO, the British Peace Corps. After many years of wandering the globe, in Kenya he found his home.
Martin, born in London and raised in Ithaca, NY, went to Kenya on a Fulbright Fellowship to study the Appropriate Technology Movement. His friendships with fellow graduate students from developing countries and his own experience traveling in the remote Andes, starting him thinking about the role technology plays in increasing wealth. He was supposed to stay in Kenya for 10 months. He stayed for 17 years.
The two met while working for a large British aid organization and over a period of five years, they worked on just about every kind of development "intervention," from building rural water systems, to building schools, and creating job training programs.
At first glance, all of these efforts seemed like a success. Eventually the funding would end and they would be sent off to the next project. But when they would revisit their former projects, not a single one was still operational.
It would have been easy to be discouraged, but instead, they took a look at their projects (and the sector as a whole) with dispassionate, scholarly eyes. They knew that you can learn more from failure than success.
By understanding what went wrong, they were able to build a new model to correct the failures of the past and create a successful way to help people escape poverty.
7.Albina Ruiz
Project: Ciudad Saludable
Location: Peru
Albina Ruiz started worrying about health and environmental problems caused by garbage in Peru when she was a student studying industrial engineering. After writing her thesis, she came up with an idea for a new community-managed system of waste collection that she hoped would serve as a model for urban and rural communities around Peru.
One of the first neighborhoods she worked with was El Cono Norte in Lima, where1.6 million people produced about 600 metric tons of garbage daily. The municipal authorities were only able to process about half of the community's trash. People tossed the rest in streets, rivers and vacant lots, causing serious health problems as well as creating a perpetually ugly environment that many residents found dispiriting.
Ruiz's idea called for micro-entrepreneurs — small business people chosen from the community — to take charge of collecting and processing the garbage, at once addressing another serious problem in the community: unemployment. She helped these businesses get going and set the monthly fee for the service at about $1.50, the cost of a beer, and came up with a wide array of creative marketing schemes — including special gift baskets — to entice families to use the services and, importantly, pay for them regularly and on time.
Ruiz started doing the work alone nearly 20 years ago. She now oversees projects in 20 cities across Peru, employs more than 150 people and serves over 3 million residents. Her approach to waste management is so successful that she has been asked to come up with a national plan for Peru, while other Latin American countries have expressed interest in emulating her method.
Even though her organization has grown, Ruiz remains central to the operations on the ground. She still visits municipalities overwhelmed by garbage, checks on neighborhoods involved in her program and meets with government officials.
Ruiz says that where most people see a problem, she sees a possibility. Her ultimate goal is to change the way people think.
What Does Ciudad Saludable Do?
Ciudad Saludable develops efficient solid waste management systems that generate employment and contribute to better quality-of-life and cleaner cities.
Ruiz created the organization because government-run garbage collection in Peru had not been effective and illegal dumping was causing environmental deterioration and ground water contamination. The garbage crisis arose partly because municipalities failed to collect the funds necessary to maintain the infrastructure. Because the system wasn't working, people didn't pay their monthly fees, making the garbage problem worse. Ruiz set out to break that cycle.
In addition to taking care of the garbage problem, her micro-enterprise model provides self-employment opportunities to local residents in neighborhoods where unemployment rates are high. The businesses are often run by women who go door to door collecting garbage and fees, and educating people about respecting and protecting their environment. Some women have even built profitable businesses by creating products like organic fertilizer out of the trash they collect.
By generating income for local residents and involving them in the process of improving their neighborhood, Ruiz has succeeded in obtaining pay rates of up to 98 percent. The government collection pay rates sunk as low as 40 percent.
Ruiz's simple idea has become a successful business and community-organizing model that benefits large numbers of people and has worldwide potential.
Albina Ruiz is convinced that the inadequacy of public-sector solid waste disposal services, and the consequent accumulation of huge masses of garbage and other forms of refuse in urban areas, pose increasingly serious public health threats.
She also believes that the most promising solution to the problem is a community-based initiative that combines an integrated system of micro-enterprises engaged in the collection, storage, recycling, composting and re-use of solid waste with related public information and education programs.
Working through a nongovernmental organization that has succeeded in enlisting the cooperation of the relevant public authorities and marshaling the necessary funding from a wide variety of sources, Albina has developed, and is now expanding, a remarkably effective demonstration in poor and crowded communities in the northern outskirts of Lima. With the aid of a revolving loan fund, she has stimulated the formation of micro-enterprises that are engaged in the collection and processing of garbage and trash throughout the area. In addition to producing marked improvements in health and living conditions, the program is generating much-needed employment opportunities for community residents.
Building on the success of the current initiative, Albina intends to expand her initiative to other parts of Lima and to other major cities in Peru.
8.Maria Teresa
Project: Coopa-Roca
Location: Rio de Janerio, Brazil
Maria Teresa Leal founded Coopa-Roca, a sewing cooperative located in Rocinha, the largest favela (slum) in Rio de Janeiro, in 1981. Nicknamed "Tetê," Leal has a college degree in social science and a license to teach elementary school.
It is unusual for a middle-class or wealthy Brazilian to set foot in a favela. But when Leal visited the favela with her housekeeper, who lived there, she saw that many poor women in the favela were skilled seamstresses — yet they had no opportunity to use their skills to generate income. So she got the idea to start a co-operative, which would recycle fabric remnants to produce attractive quilts and pillows. Gradually, as the women gained experience and developed skills in manufacturing and marketing, the work grew more professional.
In the early 90s Tetê attracted interest from Rio's fashion world, and in 1994 Coopa-Roca began producing clothes for the catwalk. In order to acquire the luxurious fabrics for high-quality designer clothes, Tetê sought out donations. She also convinced fashion designers to teach the women about production skills and trends. Coopa-Roca started getting media attention, which helped Tetê get more fabric and more contracts.
Pieces produced by the co-op are unique, combining a particular type of craftsmanship originated in northern Brazil with luxe fabrics found in couture fashion.
Tetê recently signed a contract with the European clothes manufacturer C&A, which she hopes will allow the co-op to expand its offerings and multiply the number of women who benefit from it.
What Does Coopa Roca Do?
Coopa-Roca's mission is to provide flexible employment opportunities to women from low-income families who live in Rocinha, particularly opportunities for single mothers to work from home.
The co-operative formed as an offshoot from a recycling project involving local children. The first group of women was organized to produce decorative craftwork made with textile remnants and using traditional Brazilian techniques such as drawstring appliqué, crochet, knot work and patchwork.
The co-op employs more than 150 women, most of whom are homemakers who had never worked before. Its office is still based in the middle of the favela. All decisions are made collectively and the women share the responsibilities of production, administration and publicity. Most women work from home, but they come to the office to bring their finished pieces and to get more fabric.
At first the co-op's biggest challenge was finding outlets for their products. As the project has grown, Tetê has been able to focus on training younger women as new leaders in the community. Although conditions in the favela are still difficult, the women say the co-op has given them a chance to improve their quality of life dramatically.
9.Muhammad Yunus
Project: Grameen Bank
Location: Bangladesh, other services under the "Grameen Family of Organizations" operate worldwide.
Muhammad Yunus has had phenomenal success helping people lift themselves out of poverty in rural Bangladesh by providing them with credit without requiring collateral. Yunus developed his revolutionary micro-credit system with the belief that it would be a cost effective and scalable weapon to fight poverty.
Yunus told his story and that of the bank in the book "Banker to the Poor," co-authored by him and Alan Jolis. In the book, Yunus recalls that in 1974 he was teaching economics at a Chittagong University in southern Bangladesh, when the country experienced a terrible famine in which thousands starved to death.
"We tried to ignore it," he says. "But then skeleton-like people began showing up in the capital, Dhaka. Soon the trickle became a flood. Hungry people were everywhere. Often they sat so still that one could not be sure whether they were alive or dead. They all looked alike: men, women, children. Old people looked like children, and children looked like old people.
The thrill he had once experienced studying economics and teaching his students elegant economic theories that could supposedly cure societal problems soon left him entirely. As the famine worsened he began to dread his own lectures.
"Nothing in the economic theories I taught reflected the life around me. How could I go on telling my students make believe stories in the name of economics? I needed to run away from these theories and from my textbooks and discover the real-life economics of a poor person's existence."
Yunus went to the nearby village of Jobra where he learned the economic realities of the poor. Yunus wanted to help, and he cooked up several plans working with his students. He found that one of his many ideas was more successful than the rest: offering people tiny loans for self-employment. Grameen Bank was born and an economic revolution had begun.
What Does Grameen Bank Do?
Grameen Bank has reversed conventional banking wisdom by focusing on women borrowers, dispensing of the requirement of collateral and extending loans only to the very poorest borrowers. In fact, to qualify for a loan from the Grameen Bank, a villager must demonstrate that her family owns less than one half acre of land.
The bank has provided $4.7 billion dollars to 4.4 million families in rural Bangladesh. With 1,417 branches, Grameen provides services in 51,000 villages, covering three quarters of all the villages in Bangladesh. Yet its system is largely based on mutual trust and the enterprise and accountability of millions of women villagers.
Today, more than 250 institutions in nearly 100 countries operate micro-credit programs based on the Grameen Bank model, while thousands of other micro-credit programs have emulated, adapted or been inspired by the Grameen Bank. According to one expert in innovative government, the program established by Yunus at the Grameen Bank "is the single most important development in the third world in the last 100 years, and I don't think any two people will disagree."
Project: Ruchika School Social Service Organization (RSSO), Train Platform Schools
Location: Orissa, India
As a schoolteacher, Inderjit Khurana used to take the train to work. And each day, in the stations, she would come into contact with dozens of children who spent their days begging from train passengers rather than attending school. She learned that it was not a rare or isolated problem and that millions of children in India live on the streets.
Convinced that these children would never be able to escape their conditions of poverty and homelessness without education, and realizing that it would be impossible to enroll these children in school, Inderjit decided to create a model program for "taking the school to the most out-of-school children."
Khurana's "train platform schools" aim to provide a creative school atmosphere and equip children with the basic levels of education necessary to allow them to work productively, enjoy many of life's pleasures, and become positive contributors to their communities.
Khurana's ultimate goals reach far beyond the 20 platform schools she and her colleagues have created in India's Bhubaneswar region. She is determined that her program become a model for effectively changing the lives of the poorest children throughout India and the world.
What Does RSSO Do?
In response to the challenges faced by children who live in the slums of Bhubaneswar, India, Inderjit Khurana founded the Ruchika Social Service Organization (RSSO) in 1985. The program is dedicated to creating a society free of child labor, destitution and exploitation by advancing the opportunities of extremely underprivileged children through education.
Initially the program consisted of a single train platform school. Today the organization reaches out to more than 4,000 underprivileged children and their families. Remarkably, the train school program is inexpensive and cost effective.
Teachers gather the children together between the stops of the train for reading, writing, arithmetic, geography and history taught through song, puppetry and other teaching devices such as the train schedules themselves.
RSSO targets mostly street children, child laborers and children of impoverished families, providing basic literacy, vocational training, nutritional information, medical treatment and emergency assistance. Some of the children are orphans who live on the street and beg to acquire the barest necessities. The rest of the children live in the slums and are sent by their parents to beg at the train station.
Khurana recently came to realize that the education of these children is practically impossible when the most basic needs of their families are not being met. So she expanded the program to provide food and medicine to their families.
Khurana maintains that every child has the right to an education and vows that if the child cannot come to the school, then the school must come to the child.
Inderjit Khurana was founder and principal of the Ruchika Primary School in Bhubaneswar, Orissa, when she began paying special attention to the neglected children who begged for a living on the platforms of the Bhubaneswar railway station. She wished they could somehow experience the rewards of education that her own upper-class students were enjoying at Ruchika. But with their street lifestyle, these platform children would never be able to afford tuition or find access to public schools.
One Sunday morning with two cloth bags "full of fun and magic for children " and an innovative idea, Inderjit Khurana stepped onto the railway platform and began teaching. The idea was extremely simple and remarkably effective : rather than working to get children into the schools, why not just bring the school to them?
Within a few months, the "platform school," as it became known, had over 100 students sitting within its chalk-drawn boundaries, all absorbed in the song, dance, drama, music and puppetry that was helping make them literate. "We were not trying to make academics out of them," explains Inderjit. "We just wanted them to learn numeracy and language up to class III standard. Promising or hard-working children could then continue further to Class V, and the director of public instruction in Orissa agreed that a scholarship could be arranged for students who showed exceptional ability."
But as Inderjit encountered children pained by hunger, deprived of medical care, or lapsing into drug use or prostitution, she realized that one cannot educate children who are not healthy enough to learn. Education for these destitute children must be accompanied by a program of medical aid, counseling, basic job training, recreational activities, and for some even shelter. So she integrated these elements as needed into her informal educational centers and expanded into the slums. She also gradually extended her work backward from the platforms to the children in the slums and their families.
She is now expanding her work to other towns and cities along the railway line and has begun discussions with the Indian Railways to obtain access to their stations nationally.
Project: The Baby Academy
Location: Cairo, Egypt
When Dina Abdel Wahab's son Ali was born with Down syndrome, she was unable to find a preschool to meet his needs. Children with Down syndrome do not benefit from environments where they are kept apart from mainstream society. They need to be integrated in classrooms with non-disabled children whom they can interact with and enjoy mutually-beneficial learning experiences. In Cairo, at the time, Dina had no such options for her son. If such a place was going to exist, she would have to create it herself.
Abdel Wahab felt that preschooling in Egypt amounted to little more than babysitting. Early childhood education was not grounded in the science of child development and psychology, as it is in European and American schools. Determined to help Ali lead a normal life and to improve preschool education in her country, Abdel Wahab made a brave choice: She decided to open her own school where Ali would become the first student.
"I didn't want to change my son's lifestyle, so I decided to try to change society," she said.
"Being an entrepreneur I had the flexibility of doing what I really believe in. In my past development work there was too much bureaucracy, too many agendas. Now I could put away the papers and be there to give what I felt the children needed."
What Does The Baby Academy Do?
The Baby Academy is a chain of preschools for children three months to five years old. The school's child-centered philosophy is based on love, learning and play and its curriculum is tailored to children's developmental needs and designed to inspire children to achieve their potential.
Today the business is thriving with a remarkable 20 percent of its preschoolers children with special needs. Abdel Wahab recently opened a new branch in Cairo and plans to open two more schools in the next two years. Eventually she'd like to franchise the concept.
According to a United Nations report, less than four percent of Arab children have access to preschool education. The mission of The Baby Academy is to become a leader in early childhood education throughout Egypt and the Middle East.
Now that her private model is working, Abdel Wahab is preparing to work with the government. Since not everyone can afford The Baby Academy, she advocates for inclusion opportunities for special needs children in Egypt's mainstream education system. She believes it is the role of entrepreneurs to envision new ideas to solve society's problems and assume the risks of bringing them to life.
She says, "It is easier for me as an entrepreneur to take the risk and do something, than for the government to do that on a mass scale. I do think that this is the future, I do think we can work together as partners."
In Egyptian society, as in many societies, brain and genetic disorders are not well understood by the public. People who have, for example, autism or a severe learning disability are shunned, pushed to society's margins, and written off as burdensome to families and society. Faulty public perception, shaped by ignorance and misunderstanding, is the condemning factor that underlies all others. Dina, the mother of a five-year-old with Down's syndrome, sees that to change attitudes and pave the way for societal reform, children are the place to start. In fact, the early preschool years offer an especially promising opportunity to realize important advances in societal integration by setting a different expectation of normalcy early on. This insight has led to the first of what Dina hopes will be a regional network of preschools that prioritize the integration of children with special needs and children without them. Now in its third year, the inaugural school offers a stimulating environment for all children to learn together, play together, and develop friendships. Furthermore, the adults in the picture–teachers and parents–learn to see special needs in a far more tolerant light. Having demonstrated success with her first school, Dina plans to introduce school-based integration of children with special needs throughout the Middle East and, with other parents and supporters, influence public policy and opinion through advocacy and education.
Dina Abdel-Wahab is pioneering the integration of special needs children with “normal” children in schools, a first important step toward achieving society-wide integration in Egypt. She recognizes that the early preschool years offer an especially promising opportunity to change attitudes, pave the way for broader societal reform, and set a different expectation of normalcy early in life.
At least two million Egyptians are disabled or have special needs as a result of genetic or neurological problems, and half of these are children. Only about one percent of children and adults with special needs receive services from the government and citizen sector organizations.
Rather than focusing narrowly on special needs, Abdel- Wahab focuses broadly on excellence in learning for all children. This produces schools that attract parents of “normal” students because the quality of education for all children is excellent. Children learn and play together in a stimulating environment, developing friendships with classmates who may have autism or a severe learning disability. The adults—teachers and parents—also learn to see special needs in a far more tolerant light.
Abdel-Wahab plans to spread her idea to a regional network of preschools throughout the Middle East and, with the help of parents and supporters, to influence public policy and opinion through advocacy and education. She is establishing an association that raises awareness, addresses policy issues such as changing the law that blocks school-based inclusion, and provides advanced and continuous training to teachers.
Abdel-Wahab operates a preschool in Cairo and within five years she plans to further consolidate and spread her idea by opening three more schools in Egypt and one in another Arab country. She will raise funds from private business and by having some parents as shareholders. Within fi ve years, she expects to ensure that at least one percent of all children with special needs are integrated into schools and at least ten percent of Egypt’s teachers know how to work in an integrated classroom.
Abdel-Wahab is the mother of a five-year-old with Down’s syndrome. She and her son had to travel to France and to the United States for tests and development skills assessments. During this period, she learned of practices, treatments, and educational opportunities available in other settings to children with Down’s syndrome. She draws parents into an informal support group that extends to parents of children who don’t attend her school. Poised, articulate, and determined, Abdel-Wahab is a powerful role model. (Read more on this ashoka-page).
A Cairo native, Dina had grown up in an upper-middle-class family. Her family provided her with an excellent education–French Lycée school, Sacre Coeur, American University of Cairo–and instilled in her a sense of social responsibility. In 1992, while a university student, she formed the Environmental Awareness Association, a student group she initially chaired. Dina’s interests in politics and economics led her to pursue work experiences with the United National Development Program, Save the Children, and other development groups, from which she gained broad exposure to development in the Middle East, and to tools like microcredit.
In 1995 Dina married and, two years later, delivered her first child, Ali. Initially, things seemed entirely normal. But when Ali was thee months old, he got sick and a doctor who was not the boy’s routine doctor examined him. Dina watched the doctor examine her child–he looked carefully at Ali’s ears and palms and head–and she realized that something was wrong, something she and her husband had not been told. She asked, then demanded, that the doctor tell her what was wrong. She learned that Ali had Down’s syndrome.
Project: Development and Education Program for Daughters & Community Center (DEPDC)
Location: Mae Sai,Thailand and Mekong sub-region (including Laos, Burma and the Yunnan Province of China)
Sompop Jantraka has put his life on the line to save young women sold into prostitution by poor farming families. He is also proving that these women can be far more valuable to Thailand as educated members of the work force than as sex slaves.
Jantraka offers the poor families of young women between the ages of 8 and 18 (who are often desperate for income and easily deceived by brothel owners) an alternative to sending their daughters into prostitution by providing the girls with education, job training and employment assistance. Eight different projects focus on children at risk, children's rights, child sexual abuse and forced labor.
Since 1989 when he founded the Daughters Education Program, Jantraka's work has directly affected more than 1,000 children. Starting with an initial group of 19 students, the program is now supporting more than 360 girls and boys.
Jantraka considers education and training the keys to allow these girls to find alternative employment, improve their communities and reach their full potential.
What Does DEPDC Do?
The Development and Education Program for Daughters & Community Center (DEPDC) is an organization that offers education and full-time accommodation to at-risk children in order to prevent them from being trafficked into the sex industry or other types of forced labor. The program offers alternatives through education and life-skills training, as well as by strengthening families and communities.
Human sex trafficking is a worldwide problem, but it is especially tenacious in Thailand. Victims can be Thai women and children, ethnic hill tribe minorities, and women who migrate illegally from Burma, China and Laos.
Without citizenship or land tenure, the majority of northern Thailand's hill tribe people live in poverty without access to education, health care or legitimate work opportunities. Drug addiction and HIV/AIDS infection are also pervasive problems in the region.
Brothel owners have networks of agents who comb villages and seek out troubled families. The traffickers offer to exchange the families' young daughters for money. The problem consists of a complicated web involving relatives, village and city authorities, police, government officials and business people who all profit from the girls' labor.
Every year, in conjunction with teachers, village leaders and monks, DEPDC identifies children most at risk. They may be orphans or have parents who are drug addicts. Many have older sisters or other relatives already working as prostitutes.
Jantraka hopes that the schooling and vocational training these children receive through DEPDC offers a viable alternative to the sex industry, providing them with a good start to leading a healthy life.
My hero is a man who has given life to over 1,000 young children in Thailand. His love for children has shown through his work and willingness to put everything aside to save lives. Sompop Jantraka has taken young girls and boys off the streets to protect them from prostitution. He has saved them from lives in brothels and the dangers of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. He is a man who has been through a lot to get where he is today.
Sompop Jantraka currently is living in Mae Sai, a town in northern Thailand. He is from Surat Thani in the south of Thailand. As a kid he roamed the streets and lived a life of poverty. “Sompop wasn’t the kind of kid anyone expected to grow up to be a hero.” (Horn, 2006, p. 1) It was not until an American woman gave him the chance to get an education and gave him the confidence and knowledge that he could make something of himself that his life found a purpose. Since then, he has worked hard to do the same thing for other young children.
He is the founder of Development and Education Programme for Daughters and Communities. It is a program that gives young children, who live in poverty, the chance to receive an education to get a good job so that they can help provide for their family and, at the same time, stay away from Thai brothels, which only want to use these children as sex slaves. Ampha Srivichai said, “He is the one who gives new life to several children who think they are worthless… He gives everything, love, willpower, so they can fight for their own life.” (Mintier, 2002, p. 2) Ampha is one of many young girls who have been saved by Sompop Jantraka.
As a result of Sompop’s movement, people in Thailand are now speaking out against child trafficking. He has improved our world today by making it a priority to stop child trafficking. He is important to me because he has a passion for unfortunate children who are born into poverty and have nowhere to go. He has provided for these young kids and helped them make better lives for themselves. He has done what the world needs to do more of. Sompop is my hero because he is working towards saving the next generation.
They say that God can't be everywhere so he created mothers
Sou. Sindhutai Sapkal, also known as Mother of Orphans is an Indian social worker and social activist known particularly for her work for raising orphan children.
Childhood nickname "Chindi" meaning torn cloth. She was named thus as an unwanted child. She could only attend school until 4th grade, attended part-time due to other family responsibilities. She was brought up in abject poverty. Got married at the age of 9. Her husband abandoned her at the age of 20, and she left home with her infant daughter. She later donated her biological child to the trust Shrimant Dagdu sheth halwai, Pune, only to eliminate the feeling of partiality between her daughter and the adopted ones. As of 1998 Sindhutai Sapkal has nurtured about 1042 orphaned children. Many of the children that she adopted are well educated lawyers and doctors, and some including her biological daughter are running their independent orphanages. One of her child is doing phd on her life. Till date she is honoured by 272 awards. She used all that money to buy land to make home for her orphan children. She has started construction and still looking for more help from world.
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