The Doe Fund

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The Doe Fund is a non-profit organization that provides job-training and work opportunies, housing assistance, advocacy, and support for homeless and unemployed people in New York City.

[edit] History

George McDonald, a successful businessman, founded The Doe Fund in 1985. Homelessness in New York City had reached unprecedented proportions during the mid-1980s, and McDonald set out to help these people obtain employment and housing. This recurring mantra informed The Doe Fund’s guiding principle: most homeless men and women want to change their lives. If given the opportunity to work, they will seize it. Together with his wife, Harriet Karr-McDonald, developed projects based on belief that helping homeless individuals maintain sobriety and employment would also help them develop self-respect and embrace personal responsibility.

In 1990, the McDonalds won two separate contracts from the city: one, a work contract to renovate low-income housing, and the second, a contract to purchase and renovate an abandoned building on Gates Avenue in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, where program participants would live. To attract participants, the McDonalds canvased Grand Central Station, telling the most destitute of men: “If you are willing to stop using drugs and go to work every day, come to The Church of St. Agnes next Saturday morning.” Hundreds of homeless men showed up to take advantage of this opportunity, ready to abandon drugs and alcohol and work toward better lives.

This work project was called Ready, Willing & Able (RWA). RWA outperformed the requirements of the city contract from the start. By 1994, RWA was thriving, having helped 90 men leave the streets behind, get full-time private-sector jobs, and move into their own apartments. However, that same year, a change in city housing policy slashed their work contract by more than 60%.

Another problem the city was facing was one of litter: overflowing trash cans and filthy streets were a common sight throughout Manhattan. RWA redirected the efforts of its workforce of trainees to address this problem. The men would help themselves towards social and economic recovery while helping solve the mounting sanitation problem. They were given uniforms with American flags sewn on the sleeves in order to make the men recognizeable and to make them feel that they were part of something greater than themselves. The RWA cleanup project started off working on East 86th Street. In response to letters to neighborhood residents explaining who the men were and asking for financial support, donations poured in, enabling RWA to expand its operation to cover 25 miles of streets.

Today, ten years later, RWA trainees have become a recognizable part of the fabric of New York City, cleaning more than 150 miles of streets and sidewalks every day. The “men in blue” are greatly appreciated and respected, and considered by many to be part of a New York institution. Today’s RWA trainees are literally sweeping their way to self-sufficiency on the very streets they used to waste away upon. They will soon join the more than 2,000 men who came before them—people whom society had given up on. The Doe Fund gave these men a chance to rejoin the socioeconomic mainstream—and they took it.

The Doe Fund has won awards for its successful work and innovative approaches.^[1] In addition to its projects in New York, the Doe Fund has inspired or partnered with similar work projects in other places.^[2]