The Conservative Heart Page 9

  Those big moments started piling up. He had always put on a macho façade, but as he held the first paycheck of his entire life in his hands, Dallas began to cry. The Doe Fund pays more than the minimum wage, but the amount on the check was not what moved Dallas to tears. It was what the check represented. “Someone really believed I could do something—and that it was worth paying me to do it.” That had never happened to him before.

  After three months of pushing the bucket, Dallas was unstoppable. He enrolled in one of the Doe Fund’s skilled jobs programs that taught energy-efficient-building maintenance. That meant waking up daily at 4:30 a.m. to study before breakfast. He learned how to fix boilers and sprinklers, received certification from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and finished at the top of his class. Just imagine how that felt to a guy who had dropped out of middle school and spent twenty years thinking he had zero value and zero future.

  Dallas was even chosen to address his fellow graduates as the Doe Fund’s commencement speaker. “My name is Dallas Davis,” he began. “And I am proud to say that I am standing here before you tonight with a full-time job and my own place to live, with my finances in order, with a renewed relationship with my children.” The place went wild.

  Looking back, Dallas says that Ready, Willing & Able did for him “what my teachers couldn’t do, and what those judges and program directors couldn’t do, [and that] is show me that I have potential. . . . That is what George McDonald must have seen in my eyes all those years ago in Grand Central Terminal.”

  Dallas Davis’s story is remarkable. But even more remarkably, it is not unique. Since 1990, the Doe Fund has helped more than 22,000 people reclaim their lives. Its success is amazing when you consider that most of its trainees are drug-addicted, homeless felons—many previously incarcerated for violent crimes. These are the hardest of the hard cases. These are the people who many, deep down, do not see as capable of taking part in the American Dream. They are the ones whom polite society has given up on, and who have given up on themselves. But the Doe Fund has found a way to help them reassemble the shards of their lives into new, meaningful, and dignified adventures.

  How do they do it? How does the Doe Fund succeed where so many have failed? I needed to go to New York and find out for myself.

  Walking through the doors of the former schoolhouse that is now the Doe Fund’s Harlem Center for Opportunity is like stepping into an oasis of hope. Outside is one of New York’s toughest, bleakest neighborhoods. But inside there are signs of edification and encouragement everywhere you look.

  One of the first things you see when you enter is a sign that reads, “Work is love made visible.” The cafeteria, where formerly homeless people train for restaurant work, features the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.” From Naz’s office to the dishwashing area, that principle is on display everywhere.

  When George and Harriet took over the old school, they refurbished the dilapidated building. In came a wood-paneled library, classrooms with computers, a recreation room with a big-screen TV, and a beautiful patio that overlooks the Harlem River. These furnishings contradicted some advice from on high. “The city and government officials said, ‘You don’t want to make them too nice because they won’t want to leave,’” George told me, amused. “Of course, that’s from a person who has not slept in a room with nine other men.” But George insisted on facilities that offered a physical manifestation of the Doe Fund’s core principle: serious, genuine investment in every man who comes through its doors.

  I had come to the Doe Fund because George and Harriet invited me to give a lecture for the trainees. I was all set to discuss some of my latest research exploring the factors that make for a happy life. But five minutes talking with the Men in Blue made me want to throw away my notes. These men didn’t need any PhD lectures from a skinny think tank president with hipster glasses. I needed to learn from them.

  And the more I listened, the more I kept thinking: It’s not just me. America needs to hear this. These principles and practices are how this country can repair its broken approach to poverty. As the last chapter made clear, our society—through conventional welfare policies—has been all too willing to write off some subset of our neighbors, seeing them as burdens to be managed at minimal expense. We must reject this, and proclaim that all people are moral equals. The men and women of the Doe Fund understand this, because they have experienced it in their own lives. They have more to teach us about the conservative heart than any government study ever could.

  I promised my new friends I would share what they taught me. So here are four key lessons that animate the work of the Doe Fund. These are the lessons that I believe should animate the conservative heart to build a new way of helping the poor in a country that has increasingly left them behind.

  LESSON 1. PEOPLE ARE ASSETS, NOT LIABILITIES.

  When you walk by a homeless man, what do you see?

  George and Harriet have a clear answer. They genuinely do not regard a man living on the street as a liability. Instead, they have the mindset of optimistic entrepreneurs. They see an underutilized asset.

  In the business world, how do you handle a liability? First, you try to get rid of it. If you can’t, you manage it, minimizing the problems it causes and the costs it imposes. That is exactly what many cities do with homeless men and women. Though they are staffed by an army of well-meaning people, the flawed system crams people into shelters filled with plenty of drugs and vermin but precious little hope. People subsist, mostly, but they rarely have the chance to flourish.

  But when George and Harriet come across men sleeping in the park, they see precious human resources. They see what an innovative Peruvian economist named Hernando de Soto calls “dead capital”—dormant assets with deep intrinsic value that simply need to be enlivened.

  This is most definitely not a materialistic point, that people are just potential moneymaking machines. On the contrary, to see people as assets to society means that they can create value denominated however you wish—which is what it means to be made in God’s image.

  Understanding this, George and Harriet became social entrepreneurs. They aimed to bring all this human capital back to life. And they work toward this by reminding every man of his inherent capacity to work, to serve others, and to become a productive part of the community. In short, they identify the value the current system overlooks and find a way to activate it.

  This project faces mighty odds, which is why most people have given up on these men, and indeed why they have given up on themselves. Seventy percent of Doe Fund enrollees have been convicted of a crime. Most have abused drugs or alcohol.4

  Studies clearly show that people with these characteristics do very poorly, on average. According to the Justice Department, of the 700,000 people released from state and federal prisons each year, two-thirds of state prisoners and 40 percent of federal prisoners are rearrested or have their supervision revoked within three years.5 Six in ten former inmates are unemployed one year after release.6

  Doe Fund graduates demolish these statistics. Six months after moving on to full-time work, seven in ten Ready, Willing & Able graduates have retained their new positions. An evaluation commissioned by the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services and conducted by Bruce Western of Harvard University found that Doe Fund graduates are 60 percent less likely to commit a felony in the three years after completing the program than their peers released into the shelter system.7

  These remarkable data flow from one simple principle. George, Harriet, and their colleagues see the potential for real happiness in every single person they meet. They see that potential in addicts and dealers. They see it in criminals and convicts. They see it in the homeless and the hopeless. And their work is to get these men to pursue that happiness through the earned success that comes from honest, hard work.

  When pe
ople walk through the door of the Harlem Center for Opportunity, it is the first time that many of them have ever been treated like a valuable asset. And when you treat people with dignity and respect, a funny thing happens: They respond by earning that trust.

  Economics are just a small part of this, but the data are well worth looking at. Since its founding, the Doe Fund’s social enterprises have generated more than $750 million in revenue. That’s nearly a billion dollars in “dead capital” brought to life by a bunch of homeless men because one couple saw them as assets to empower and not liabilities to manage. About a third of all that revenue has gone straight into the pockets—more accurately, the brand-new savings accounts—of the Men in Blue. That is money they have used to reconstruct lives of independence and self-sufficiency. And by helping homeless men become productive citizens, the Doe Fund estimates it has saved New York an additional $3 billion in social costs.

  Think what it would mean if these results were scaled up to the rest of America. At this writing, the U.S. labor participation rate—the percentage of the population that is either working or looking for work—is the lowest it has been since the 1970s.8 Millions of Americans have simply given up trying to find jobs and have dropped out of the labor market entirely. Moreover, in June 2014, some 7.5 million Americans were stuck in part-time jobs they didn’t want because they could not find full-time work. That’s up from just 4.4 million in 2007.9

  We can debate who’s to blame for this tragedy. But put that aside for a moment. Think instead of the breathtaking opportunity at our fingertips. If 22,000 homeless men can produce $750 million in revenue through work, and find purpose in life at the same time, imagine what this whole country could accomplish.

  LESSON 2. WORK IS A BLESSING, NOT A PUNISHMENT.

  When you pass the homeless man on the street, maybe you give him a dollar or even buy him a sandwich. People debate whether these acts are good or bad. My wife—who has made our car into a rolling food pantry for people begging at intersections—once gave a homeless man a whole pie (apple I think).

  But even if you give generously, nobody seriously suggests that this is what homeless people truly want. It is crazy to imagine a homeless man who is satisfied with his lot. Every human being aspires to earn his own success.

  George McDonald learned this firsthand as he was distributing sandwiches. “They said over and over again they appreciated the sandwich—but what they really wanted was a room and a job to pay for it. And I heard that enough that I was convinced that they wanted to work.”

  But there was an obvious problem. Few homeless and formerly incarcerated men can grab the first rung of the economic ladder, and many fewer manage to climb it. They have no education and no work experience, a rap sheet that makes them even less appealing than others with equally empty résumés. They have virtually no chance of finding a job.

  That’s why the nucleus of the Doe Fund’s approach is paid, transitional work. That all begins, as we learned, with “pushing the bucket.” It’s easy to imagine some people bristling at this part of the program. Isn’t it disrespectful to take vulnerable people and pay them to make Park Avenue prettier for shoppers and commuters?

  But this perspective assumes something important. It assumes that paying work is only dignified once it reaches a certain threshold of prestige. Being a college professor or an engineer is dignified work, to be sure. But sweeping streets or flipping burgers? These are terrible punishments that capitalism unfairly inflicts on people! Somewhere in between white-collar careers and “dead-end jobs” there is an imaginary line where dignity kicks in. Beneath that line, better not to work at all.

  This assumption is widespread in America today. It also happens to be dead wrong. The real truth, which George and Harriet have found, is both simpler and more subversive: Work with reward is always and everywhere a blessing.

  Does that mean we should ignore social mobility? Turn a blind eye to the complex factors that can keep people from climbing the economic ladder? Of course not. But as we consider these challenges, our thinking must start with the truth that work is vastly better than no work for the soul. Honest, productive work per se is never a punishment. Work is a blessing.

  Of course, this doesn’t mean that much coming from me alone. Like many lower-middle-class Americans, I did my share of low-skilled work, and it taught me a lot about real life. But nobody is pretending that this compares to the struggles of millions of adults who cannot grab steady hold of meaningful jobs.

  So don’t take my word on this subject. Take it from the people who know—people like Devon Greene, another graduate of Ready, Willing & Able.

  Devon Greene had a tough start in life. His mother died of AIDS when he was six years old. His grandmother did her best to provide for him, but she did it by allowing dealers to sell drugs from inside her home. Several more moves later, Devon was arrested and confined to the Youth Block at New York City’s Rikers Island prison. It’s a place, he says, where the guards are just as dangerous as the gangs.

  But the chaos brought clarity. “It was there, in the middle of all the violence and chaos, that I knew I had to make a choice. Was this going to be my life? Or was I, Devon, going to do something about it? I chose to change.” And just like Dallas Davis, Devon soon found himself pushing the bucket.

  And like Dallas, Devon wasn’t pushing it for long. “The harder you work, the more opportunity comes your way. One success turned into another and then another. And if you take those opportunities as they come, and work as hard as you can, there’s no stopping them, no stopping you.”

  Today, there really is no stopping Devon. He is twenty-three and in his first year of college, earning his bachelor’s on full scholarship. He has a job at Mount Sinai Hospital, where he was recently named “employee of the month.” He isn’t picking up trash anymore, but he still feels like he’s pushing the bucket—away from his old life, and toward a bright future.

  Richard “Rick” Norat, another remarkable man, fought back tears as he explained how pushing the bucket transformed his life. Rick was raised by a single mother who left him with his uncles and aunts while she worked. The problem, Rick says, was that “everyone was a dope fiend or a pothead, so eventually I wound up using, myself. I started getting high at the age of eight years old.”

  He graduated to harder drugs and ended up homeless. “I used to wake up in the streets and eat from garbage cans. I used to ask for quarters, spare change. It was embarrassing. I’d get on the bus and people would look at me in disgust. And I’d want to explain, ‘Listen, this isn’t me. I’m just going through a phase right now.’ But you can’t explain something like that.” Looking back is not easy. “There have been moments in my life when I wanted to die.”

  Like Dallas and Devon, Rick’s drug habit led to arrest and imprisonment. But the way Rick remembers his time behind bars amazed me. “Prison literally saved me. When I first got arrested and I went away, I felt a sense of relief. ‘Thank you. Get me out of this world.’”

  In prison, Rick resolved to change his life. He learned to read and write and earned his GED. He saved up the sixteen cents an hour he earned in prison to buy a radio so he could listen to NPR and improve his vocabulary. And he fantasized about what his life would be like if he ever made it out again.

  Over time, those fantasies became more concrete. Rick and his best friend, Pete Martinez, wrote letters to fifty different transitional programs. Sixteen wrote them back, offering a bed when the men got out. But the Doe Fund was different. It was the only program that didn’t promise to give them anything. “They wrote back and said, ‘You show up face-to-face, we’ll talk, and we’ll decide whether or not you’re cut out for this program.’”

  Impressed, Rick and his friend made a deal. Whoever got out first would go to the Doe Fund and write back each week to update the other. Pete got out first. Sure enough, he gained acceptance into Ready, Willing & Able. He pushed the bucket, built up savings, and earned a pest control license. And Rick us
ed Pete’s letters to map out a detailed six-month plan for his life, which he presented to the parole board. They decided to give him a chance.

  I first met Rick a week after he arrived at Ready, Willing & Able. It was freezing cold—the dead of winter. He was assigned to his first route pushing the bucket. Later I asked him to look back on that first week. “I was working on the Hudson River, where, when the wind whips, it’s twenty degrees below,” he says. “I loved it! I was in the world. I was connecting with people. I’d wear the uniform and people would gravitate toward me and ask me questions. I gave directions; I shoveled walkways; I dropped salt. I helped people. I’d done so much damage to the city, terrorizing the people in the city, committing crimes. Now I found myself sweeping and shoveling and helping people. I had people come up to me and say, ‘Thank you for what you do.’”

  Pushing the bucket is precisely the kind of work progressive society tells us is worse than no work at all. Those people should sit down with Rick Norat.

  In a properly functioning free enterprise economy, very few people stay in entry-level positions for long. The same is true at the Doe Fund. Once trainees have pushed the bucket for ninety days, they transfer to one of the organization’s revenue-generating businesses. They specialize, receiving particular skills that help them turn jobs into careers. They apprentice in a specific field of their choosing, while also taking classes in financial management, interview skills, and GED preparation if they need it. In the memorable words of one graduate who chose the culinary arts program, “I went from cleaning the gutter to melting the butter.”