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A sign at Our Place D.C.

Women behind bars have rights, too.

That’s the premise behind Our Place D.C., a non-profit that helps and advocates for  currently and formerly incarcerated women.

“While I know the goal is to protect society from offenders, I’d like you to ask yourselves how long should this punishment endure after the offender has served her sentence and at what cost?” reads one of the large signs posted at its office on K Street Northwest.

Ashley McSwain, executive director of Our Place, said the group helps reduce how many former prisoners commit new crimes and go back to jail – something that benefits everyone.

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HIV 101

She’s especially proud that Our Place hires back 60 percent of its former clients: “The women we serve are running our company. I love that; it’s the neatest part of this team.” Often, women who are released from prison take a bus straight to K street, arriving with nothing more than the clothes on their back. McSwan described what happens after that bus ride:

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The first thing clients see, when they enter Our Place.

“A woman will come in and meet our drop-in center manager, and they determine what her needs are. They prioritize: does she have a warrant? Does she need to see an attorney? Our client’s needs dictate the order of services. If she needs a job, we help her find employment. If she needs housing, a case manager helps with housing assistance. As long as she has a need, she can continue to come to us, until she gets all of those needs addressed. We want her to be successful.”

Our Place, which served 1,500 women in 2010, provides a 15-minute training on preventing the transmission of Human Immunodefiency Virus and Sexually Transmitted Diseases.

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Shirts, blouses and sweaters, size Medium, in the boutique. Clients can receive a week's worth of clothing or specific outfits, like interview attire.

It also provides a support system “A lot of women that we see inherited poverty. Their parents were addicts. They didn’t have a fighting chance. They have been sexually abused and violently beaten by loved ones. We facilitate a transformation through learning and knowledge. These women need a catalyst to make different choices.”

But the services come at a cost, as the group makes abundantly clear by large signs on its walls. One reads: “It takes $9,737 to provide birth certificates, ID and police clearance to 1,324 women over the course of one year.”
For more information or to donate SmarTrip cards, children’s books, socks, new under garments, food and other items, visit the group’s website, www.ourplacedc.org

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Our Place D.C.

When a man is sentenced to serve time in prison, he often has a support system; if visits are allowed, his partner dutifully shows up, dressed to impress, exclaiming to children about how they’re “going to see Daddy!” When a woman is sentenced, whatever support she has is usually marshaled in service to her kids, to keep them out of the foster care system; there are few visitors making the drive to women’s facilities, eagerly anticipating a glimpse of Mommy.

That disparity is also reflected in the dearth of organizations dedicated to helping women who were formerly incarcerated transition to life on the outside. In fact, there is only one group in the country that focuses solely on helping such women– Our Place D.C. Our Place is on K street NW, just down the street from Pedro and Vinny’s renowned burrito stand. There, on “burrito block”, in an understated building, in a cozy suite of offices one floor up from the traffic on Route 29, lives are being changed.

It’s easy to forget about such women; they are imperfect, guilty of poor judgment or more, and all of them are ex-cons. Most of us reserve our support for the “innocent”, or more accurately, for sympathetic victims. It doesn’t occur to us to consider those who have served their time, only to be dropped off in this city with nothing but a prison-issued sweatsuit on their backs. “It used to be worse”, Ashley McSwain tells me. She’s the Executive Director of Our Place. Before, newly-released women would arrive in that orange jumpsuit associated with inmates. “We convinced them to change that. The effort was called ‘Justice, not Jumpsuits’.”

McSwain is the kind of warm, unpretentious lady you’d want to sit next to at a beauty salon; the non-profit she runs reflects that vibe, all brightly painted rooms, uplifting art and comfy chairs. When I walked in to Our Place last week, I didn’t think “prisoners”. It actually reminded me of a college counseling department. I kept expecting to see internship offers or posters for graduate school on the walls.

Our Place D.C. provides services to woman who are either in or just out of prison. It’s an all-encompassing program. I found myself using the term “360 degrees” when describing it to others.

“We have a Legal Clinic with two full-time attorneys, plus a clothing boutique full of donated items. We help with case management, job placement and we hold employment workshops. We also work on HIV-prevention– including counseling, testing, referrals and more.”

Indeed, there are “goody bags” filled with condoms and information about safe sex nestled in a basket a few feet from the entrance to Our Place– just like college.

“Usually, people are pleased that we’re actually helping this population, but when we are looking for funding? People are appalled. They don’t want to give money to people who’ve been in jail. It’s an odd mix of reactions. There’s real appreciation for the work that we do, but when it comes to giving money, people have several other charities they would rather give to.”

McSwain has been in D.C. for two years; she moved here from Philadelphia in 2008 and has the Eagles gear in her office to prove it. Before moving south, she spent six years of her career as a probation officer. For ten years, she worked with the homeless. She knows the challenges her clients are struggling with inside and out, which makes a difference when she’s trying to help them meet the conditions of their release, some of which “don’t allow for success for these women.”

McSwain says it’s fairly common for Our Place’s clients to get their allowance from prison and come directly to 1518 K Street because of the relationships that were forged before release; the group accepts 500 collect calls a month from women who are incarcerated.

“If you go into prisons, you can create a plan so that when a woman is released, she can begin our program. This approach could reduce the recidivism rate.

“Every month, we go and do an orientation with these women. Those who are interested volunteer for case management before release, and that continues after they get out. When they show up, they have no identification, no clothing, and no way to get anywhere– so they come to us.

“We can help them decide what their next move will be. We help them with transitional housing, metro cards, money to get birth certificates and police clearances.”

So who are the women who seek help from Our Place? According to McSwain, the average client is 38-46, so she’s middle-aged. She has generally been arrested once or twice. She has one or two kids. She has often been the victim of sexual or domestic violence. She might have a very thin work history– 41% do not have a high school diploma or G.E.D. A whopping 96% are African-American. Our Place’s clients are self-selected.

“These women volunteer to come, so they are eager to make changes in their lives. They are open to our services and support. Our clients are very respectful. There is no arguing or fighting. We have created a healthy, warm space here and our clients are very appreciative of that.”

TOMORROW: The “stigma” attached to serving this population. Plus, how you can help.

Flickr: crazysanman.history

Historical marker for the UNCF in Virginia.

Look who’s moving to D.C., and when I say D.C., I mean it and not a suburb:

Seeking to expand its support of education for Americans of color, UNCF (the United Negro College Fund) will move its national headquarters from Fairfax, Virginia into Washington, D.C. in 2012. UNCF, the nation’s largest and most effective minority education organization has begun construction on a 50,000 square-foot office at Progression Place, located at 1805 7th Street, NW, in D.C.’s surging Shaw neighborhood…

“UNCF has become one of the country’s most prominent advocates for the importance of students getting the preschool-through-high school education they need to succeed in college, and Washington is the hub of the national conversation about how to make sure they get that preparation for college,” said Michael L. Lomax, Ph.D., UNCF president and CEO. “UNCF also wants to be able to provide college-focused information and services directly to DC-area students and the hundreds of thousands of students who visit DC each year. To be an effective advocate for education reform, and to help children of color prepare for college UNCF has to be in D.C.

Nonsensical but potentially entertaining aside, because it’s after 5pm: many, many years before Glee would waste their coveted, post-Super Bowl slot on Zombies, my high school friends would amuse each other by ominously murmuring the United Negro College Fund’s famous slogan, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste”®…and then saying, “Mmmm, brains.”

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Yesterday, I published a slideshow from Bread for the City’s January 7 grand opening. I also posted the first part of an interview with the non-profit’s Executive Director, George A. Jones. More of my conversation with Jones is below; in it, he discusses how the expansion of the group’s Shaw location will facilitate an expansion in their services–as well as how you can help.

What if people want to get involved?

There are two major ways: volunteer or give. We accept cash contributions and in-kind contributions of donated food and clothing. When it comes to people’s cash donations 90% of every dollar goes to our five core services.

A lot of people like to have tangible connections to our programs so we encourage them to do food drives. We have 5-10 volunteers on a given day; there are scores of people looking to do community service, including kids or teens for school. They can develop food drives right at their schools or boys club, girl scouts…I encourage parents to have their children do these food drives remotely and bring the food to us. We give kids a menu to try and generate certain foods, including items that are low in sodium, vegetables or non-perishable stuff, because we provide supplemental groceries designed to last three days to families whose incomes are very low–less than $7,000. They may not be on food stamps, even if they run a great risk of running out of food.

These are families who are food insecure, who are at the risk of running out before the end of the month. Our food pantry was designed to support such people.

Are more people receiving assistance?

We just finished our holiday drive, where our goal was to feed 8,000 people. We actually served 10,000 a turkey and traditional holiday trimmings like cranberries, stuffing and vegetables. Most of our contributions came as cash but some people did food drives and came in with boxes of food. People ask me, do you want cash or should we host a food drive…there is efficiency with cash because we have systems set up so we can buy food at wholesale prices, but when people want to do something, we welcome that– coat drives, food drives…when you bring those things in, we get them in the hands of the low-income families we serve.

Our big challenge right now is paying for food…our ability to get contributions to our food pantry is always a challenge. We just finished the holiday season when people give generously, but we’ll have 4,000 families every month for the other ten months of the year to provide groceries to. A third of the people in those families are children. We are serving a lot of children. There are 35,000 children at risk for hunger during the course of a year, and at Bread for the City, over a 1,000 kids benefit from food in our pantry. And 400 kids are in our pediatric practice.

Tell me more about your clients.

The typical Bread for the City client is usually distressed in one of the areas we cover…for example, they may be at risk of losing housing, so they see an attorney to get assistance. People walk through our door and tell the receptionist, “I heard Bread for the City can help me see a doctor”. We have two means tests: they need to be a D.C. resident, and they need to be low-income. We take them in to a counseling room and do an intake…it’s never the case that people have only one issue, it’s never isolated like that. During our intake assessment, we ask potential clients to talk more about what’s going on with them in a private setting. The average person we see makes less than $7,000 a year, so the income question is usually not an issue at all.

We ask a battery of questions, starting with housing, medical, jobs…we try to find out what their status is, what’s happening mentally/socially/medically on their end. If a person asks about a doctor, we may also find out that they’ve run out of food so we might have them work with a social worker for a food stamp application.

What new services will you be offering in your expanded facility?

Two medical services we have not provided historically are dental care and a vision clinic. There are so many people who come in with chronic illnesses like diabetes, which is often coupled with vision problems. One of the challenges with a non-profit clinic like ours is that our salaries are fairly modest, so finding qualified and competent providers like Primary care providers or Optometrists is harder. It can take a while to find someone for whom working in a non-profit clinic is consistent with what their career goals are, who can afford to take a modest salary…they may have families of their own, student loans.

Anything else?

One of the things we really think is important is that it isn’t just a matter of providing these services…Bread for the City has figured out that an important part of our formula is to serve our clients with dignity and respect. That is one of the critical ways we form relationships with the people we serve. We don’t just provide free groceries or free legal services or medical care; We do it in an atmosphere of dignity and respect that is the hallmark of the last 30 years. That atmosphere is part of the magic formula; it makes all the difference with the services we provide.

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Earlier, I posted a slideshow filled with pictures taken on Friday, when local nonprofit Bread for the City celebrated the grand opening of their new building in Shaw. The expansion doesn’t just mean more room– it means more services for the city’s most vulnerable citizens. Last week, I spoke to Bread for the City’s Executive Director, George A. Jones about the expansion, the work his agency does and more. Part of the interview is below; look for the rest, tomorrow morning.

First, some history for those of you who may not be familiar with this group:

Started in 1974, Bread for the City is a front line agency serving Washington’s poor. The agency began as two organizations; Zacchaeus Free Clinic began in 1974 as a volunteer-run free medical clinic, and Bread for the City was created in 1976 by a coalition of downtown churches to feed and clothe the poor. The two entities merged in 1995. Today, we operate two Centers in the District of Columbia and provide direct services to low-income residents of Washington, DC. All of our services are free. Our mission is to provide comprehensive services, including food, clothing, medical care, legal and social services to low-income Washington, DC residents in an atmosphere of dignity and respect.

I asked Jones about the expansion:

We’ve been around for 36 years; this expansion represents our commitment to providing even more services to folks living in poverty in D.C. It’s the culmination of a dream.

We knew we needed to expand our center in Northwest way back in 1995, but it took a lot of planning and the right timing for us to tackle it. We started this project during one of the worst recessions…but there was a sense in the organization that the community would rally around this project because this community gets that when times are tough, our services are especially in need. There’s something just about an organization whose mission is to help those who are less fortunate.

How did you pull this off?

It was a community effort, a combination of public and private support that really made this possible. The D.C. government was the first partner in this project. The city used tobacco funding a decade or so ago to expand health care…they decided our project did just that. The health clinic is the centerpiece of our expansion. We had a $5 million grant; we leveraged it to attract just under $2 million from Federal tax credits and then the last $1.5 million came from private sources. It was completely a community effort: public sector, local government, federal government and a lot of individuals and foundations. It’s consistent with how we fund our mission day in and day out. We went to our partners to try and realize our dream of expanding.

One of the reasons the expansion was so important is because we had maxed out on our ability…now we will be able to address more of the needs that have surfaced in this tough economy. Just a year ago, we reduced our schedule to four days a week because of our own economic challenges; we were seeing fewer people because we had to limit our service hours to make sure we could meet our own budget. An important element of the expansion is that it allows us to address the growing need for the services Bread for the City offers.

We are making an investment in long-term strategy while dealing with the short-term pressures of this recession. We know the economy will eventually rebound, but when it rebounds, it’s likely that low-income people will benefit from that the least. During this recession, I thought it was more important to set the stage to do more work. I think there are going to be more people coming through our door. There are roughly 2500 people a year in our health care practice; once we grow in to our expanded facility, that number could jump to 6,000 patients. That’s what this building has set the stage for– we will be able to double the number of medically under-served people who can come to our clinic. This expansion means we can do a lot more in the coming years.

Tomorrow: more about the expansion, specifically how it will impact the many services Bread for the City offers.

Flickr: BBC World Service

A food chart for clients of Bread for the City. Next week, DCentric will take a closer look at the triumphant expansion of both their facilities and services.

I’m leaving the blog for a few hours to go visit Bread for the City–a front line agency serving Washington’s poor– for a very happy reason:

As we approach the end of this year, it already feels like the start of something new. Our expanded Northwest Center is partially up and running, and the excitement of what’s to come is in the air…

I hope you’ll join us to celebrate this new chapter: all are invited to attend the Grand Opening on Friday January 7th, from 4-7pm at 1525 7th street NW. We’ll be joined by Councilmembers and other city leaders to cut the ribbon and raise a cheer for the growth to come.

At the beginning of this week, I spoke to Bread for the City’s Executive Director, George Jones, about how his organization was able to expand during a recession and what such an expansion meant for the D.C. residents who depend on his agency’s services. Look for a two-part interview with Jones next week, right here. Now if you’ll kindly excuse me, I’m off to take pictures of the expanded facilities; if you’ll be so helpful as to tweet something amusing, I’ll make sure it gets enshrined as today’s Tweet of the Day, which will be up later tonight. Happy Friday!

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A Salvation Army Red Kettle at "Social Safeway", in Georgetown.

WaPo has an update on Giant’s move to limit the Salvation Army’s Red Kettle campaign outside of its grocery stores, via this article: “Limited collection time at Giant fueled drop in donations, Salvation Army says“. The charity collected 60% less money than it did last year:

Giant’s policy change irked some advocates for the needy.

“It’s hard times like these when we need our corporate partners to step up and do more rather than less,” said Terry Lynch, executive director of the Downtown Cluster of Congregations. “A lot less people are going to get a lot less help when they most need it. And that’s tragic.”…

Terri Lee Freeman, president of the Community Foundation, which makes grants to local groups, said nonprofits have been further hurt because local governments facing declining tax revenue are less able to hire the organizations as contractors.

“Contributions are down,” Freeman said. “We saw a lot of year-end appeals that in the past we had not seen, and it’s just a very difficult environment right now for giving.”

The Salvation Army’s National Capital Area Command serves the Washington region, helping 83,000 people in 2009, the group reported…The campaign also raises money to help desperate families pay their rent and utility bills, and buy clothing and groceries. In the past year, Forsythe said, the Salvation Army provided rental subsidies that prevented 1,172 evictions.

Flickr: lucianvenutian

This haunting piece by Carl Foster– who runs Ward 1′s Little Blue House, which works with vulnerable families to achieve stability and self-sufficiency– was published in the “All Opinions are Local” section of the Sunday Post:

Recently, one of my kids came to the LBH instead of going to school, saying that his mother told him she didn’t want him anymore and that he should get out. He is only 10 years old. The argument apparently stemmed from a seemingly innocuous question:

“Can I have clean clothes to wear to school?”

“Get out. I don’t want you.”

Now that’s reportable.

I’ve been concerned about this family for some time. Other moms had told me this mother was beaten up by drug dealers. I had no firsthand knowledge of this, so I could not report it to protective services. I witnessed this mom handing a wad of cash to some guy while her kids were asking us for food. There is a blanket hanging just inside the front door of her home that prevents anyone from seeing what’s inside. Suspicious but not reportable.

Foster does report it, and while a social worker gets involved, he doesn’t go to the child’s home (despite calling LBH for that address!)– nor does he communicate effectively with a vulnerable kid OR come prepared with an interpreter to help understand the child’s Mother. Worse than all that…

In the end, the investigator told us he thought everything was just fine with this family. I asked him four times if he planned to visit the home. Each time he said, “It’s part of our investigation,” but I noticed he never said yes. I am confident he did not go. Why do I think this? The next day the boy was waiting when our staff arrived at the LBH at 9 a.m. He was wearing shorts on a very cold morning. I asked if the investigator came to his house; he said no. He had walked to the LBH in the cold even though he knew we were planning to pick him up. He was upset, but this time he volunteered no information about what happened at home.

A ten-year old. In shorts. Waiting outside in the bitter, December cold. A vulnerable child in a precarious situation, turning to the only shelter he knows…because everything is “just fine with his family”, of course.

Flickr: vpickering

D.C. has so much Christmas spirit!

Jenny Rogers, who writes “The List” for TBD, discovered something interesting when she looked in to volunteering for the holiday (and since we highlighted so many non-profits and ways you could help a few weeks ago, I thought this would be extra relevant for DCentric readers):

Having just eaten a pile of Christmas cookies and feeling full of holiday goodness, The List decided to look into some volunteer opportunities —‘tis the season, etc. To her dismay, local non-profit directors told her that, well, they just didn’t really need the help. In fact, all the organizations The List spoke to were turning away volunteers because so many people had already offered their time. In a region known for its wealth and often painted as dysfunctional, it’s a testament to the goodwill of the people who actually live here that they’re fighting over the chance to serve.

That’s surprising and impressive. Good for D.C., that so many of its residents are so interested in doing good for D.C.