Delancey street drug program los angeles

Many have been gang members; most have been trapped in poverty for several generations. Rather than hire experts to help the people with problems, we decided to run Delancey Street with no staff and no funding.

Like a large family, our residents must learn to develop their strengths and help each other. We said we were going to take ex-convicts and ex-addicts and teach them to be teachers, general contractors, and truck drivers. We said we were going to take people who had never worked and had no skills and teach them to build a , square foot complex as our new home on the waterfront.

We said we were going to partner with colleges and get people who started out functionally illiterate to achieve bachelor of arts degrees. We said we were going to do all this with no staff, no government funding, and no professionals. If you need help, or want to help, please contact us. In the future we plan to develop a program for residents talented in the arts to live and study in the new home we are just restoring in Stockbridge, MA in which Norman Rockwell lived and painted for many years.

After that there will be a home in a location yet unknown where we will bring 15 residents from the other 5 locations, then select someone who can cook to become the Head of Food Service, and someone who can hold a hammer to be Head of Construction… Along the way, we started business training schools like a moving school and a restaurant that would teach our folks marketable skills, encourage positive interactions between our residents and people in the communities where we lived, and provide funding for Delancey Street by pooling all monies we earned.

In we were awarded a federal charter with the National Credit Union Administration as the first credit union run by and for ex-convicts. We became active in community issues. Mimi Silbert developed police training programs where Delancey Street residents enacted simulated crime scenes and took the cases all the way through to moot courts to help train police recruits. We spoke at schools to do drug and crime and violence prevention, and took seniors on day trips. We were helping our community and our community was helping us.

Doctors and dentists and hair stylists started volunteering services. Corporations starting donating products; friends donated money. People started using our moving school and buying trees from the lots we set up every Christmas. Our little moving school grew from one rented truck to some purchased big rigs and we began setting up Christmas tree lots up at every facility around the country as we garnered community support. Some of our first graduates were back in the community driving trucks and programming computers.

Our academic classes started expanding from just high school equivalency to liberal arts college classes. We were struggling but we were slowly helping one another turn our lives around to become productive members of the mainstream of society. There is no way to thank all the people who have made Delancey Street succeed. While our residents work hard and run the organization themselves, learning self-reliance and earning self-respect, we could never survive without the belief and support of all our friends.

The littlest dab of yeast makes the whole loaf of bread rise. Charleston, SC Tel Fax. We function as an extended family, rather than a more typical program. Our daily operations are not funded and we charge no fees.

We pool all our resources. There is no staff. The whole place is run by the residents themselves. All money is funneled into the community, and each resident receives food, housing, clothing, education, entertainment and all other services at no cost.

We take applications from people who have hit bottom, from prison, jail or walk-ins. Residents who have been at Delancey Street awhile interview all applicants. The minimum stay is 2 years; the average stay is 4 years. We have 3 rules: no drugs or alcohol, no physical violence, and no threats of violence. Residents, who are asked to make a minimum two-year commitment to the program, are immediately thrown out if they commit or threaten physical violence or use drugs or alcohol.

They are required to get at least a high school equivalency degree and learn three marketable job skills. Aside from learning how to work, they are hammered with middle-class values.

The men must wear a coat and tie to dinner, the women must wear dresses. Silbert helped start Delancey Street with its founder and leader for many years, the late John Maher, and a few others in A 5-foot dynamo, Silbert, who holds doctoral degrees in criminology and psychology from UC Berkeley, has been running Delancey Street since He died of a heart attack in The foundation for years has played a role in San Francisco politics, providing volunteer support for various candidates.

Local politicians, including U. Dianne Feinstein D-Calif.