Weingart Center’s Head Applies Corporate Cures to Skid Row Ills

When the head of Los Angeles’ largest homeless center talks, she compares her operation to large companies such as the Hilton hotels, and herself to executives such as Chrysler’s Lee Iacocca.

Although she works with the poorest of the poor on Skid Row, Maxene Johnston considers herself “a peer” in the corporate world, taps its resources and assumes its style. She drives a Mercedes-Benz to her job at Weingart Center, is partial to designer clothes and belongs to a downtown club.

And borrowing that world’s vocabulary, Johnston says the Weingart Center under her leadership has created a “competitive niche” with its “customer”--the homeless.

“It’s a growth industry,” Johnston says. “That’s exciting.”

This unusual attitude and approach to one of society’s most frustrating problems sets Johnston apart from other providers of services to the homeless, just as Weingart Center’s gleaming white 11-story complex at 6th and San Pedro streets stands out among the neighboring gray-brown buildings of downtown Los Angeles.

The 7-year-old center is widely known for its efforts to bring coordinated services to the homeless. Like a big social-service landlord, Weingart houses more than half a dozen private and publicly funded programs that lease space in the building. Each day, an estimated 2,000 people receive food, shelter and medical treatment as well as mental health, alcohol-rehabilitation and counseling services under Weingart’s roof. The center provides 600 beds.

Weingart has thrived over the years, Johnston said, by borrowing hard-nosed management techniques from the business world.

But Weingart Center has not been immune to financial and administrative problems. Like many other facilities serving the homeless, the center has difficulty patching together the public and private funds needed to keep its current $3.5-million-a-year operation afloat.

And its 50-member staff has undergone high turnover in the last two years, with more than a dozen changes in top management and many more changes in the support staff.

Several former employees said Johnston’s management style and spending priorities are partly to blame for Weingart’s problems. For example, they questioned whether Johnston should have spent almost $5,O00 on planters and plants, $200 a month on fresh flowers, $110 a month for her City Club dues, or $400 to $500 a month for her car phone.

Johnston, 46, who earns $85,000 a year plus a bonus of up to $8,500, said she pays attention to detail and style because it sets Weingart apart from other places on Skid Row.

While the flowers cost money, she said, “It’s a little touch, a way you communicate (that) you care.”

She needs the car phone to keep in touch with the center, she said, adding, “I had no beeper.”

Her private club membership, Johnston said, is important for “networking” with business people who can help the center.

Johnston’s entrepreneurial approach to the homeless problem wins high marks from business people. Geoffrey Dunbar, executive director of the downtown executive-search firm Russell Reynolds Associates, said he favors supporting someone who is willing to be innovative.

Weingart Center board Chairman Albert Greenstein, media relations manager for Arco, said: “Maxene has been effective in presenting Weingart Center to the public. It’s hard to imagine our being in the position we’re in without Maxene.”

Other service providers also praise Johnston’s performance. Martha Brown Hicks, head of the Skid Row Development Corp., a large shelter and job development project, said she has similar problems “pounding the pavement to raise money” and believes Johnston does an “excellent job.”

Born in Pennsylvania, Johnston grew up in Los Angeles and attended the University of San Francisco. She then worked to set up various outpatient services for Los Angeles-area hospitals and a county nursing recruitment program before joining the medical services staff of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee. She lives in Glendale with her daughter and husband, an associate professor of business at USC. She joined Weingart in 1984.

The Volunteers of America started Weingart as a multiservice center in 1983. But it foundered financially, despite millions in support from the Weingart Foundation and the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency.

Greenstein and a small group of businessmen reorganized its board of directors as Weingart Center Assn. in 1984. Integrated services already were in place, with alcohol-rehabilitation, mental health and medical clinics on site. But, Greenstein said, “We picked that up and fleshed it out.”

The new board also hired Johnston, who says she faced “a turnaround” similar to what Iacocca faced with Chrysler.

“Iacocca was good but he had all the winds in his sail,” she said. “Nobody could let Chrysler go down. He got concessions from unions. People pulled together in a major crisis. My intuition was Weingart Center was a little bit like that. It was too big to crash and burn. Too much invested, too much publicity and too much need.”

Johnston, Greenstein and those familiar with or running other Skid Row services said staff turnover occurs because Skid Row is a difficult, sometimes threatening environment where burnout is common. But more than a dozen former employees said they found Johnston disorganized, unwilling to delegate authority and excessively critical of her staff. None would talk publicly, saying they were concerned that it could hurt their careers.

“It is hard to work on Skid Row, and it is hard to work for Maxene,” one said. “It’s like fighting a battle on two fronts. It was exhausting.”

Johnston acknowledges she can be a difficult boss and impishly points out a sign that someone had scratched on the door that leads to her offices: “Hall of Terror.”

“Communication is both my strength and my weakness,” she said, explaining that she tended to forget to hand out praise. “I look at what needs to be done. I never stop to look at how much we did. I’m working on that.”

Some of the employees who left were consultants who were not expected to stay, Johnston said. She expects the staff situation will stabilize, she adds, because she has just hired a new operating officer and a fund-raiser.

Although former staff members say they left very concerned about the center’s finances, Johnston insisted it is “in a better position than ever” financially.

The center receives $1.4 million from the county, $1.2 million from the city, about $350,000 from state and federal agencies, $180,000 from Volunteers of America, and almost $400,000 from the private sector and other sources.

Johnston acknowledged, however, that the center is still not in a position to make payments on outstanding loans of $3.1 million from the city’s CRA.

CRA project manager Barbara Kaiser said the agency is planning to defer those loans until 1993, “until they’re more stable in cash flow.”

There are other concerns. The Weingart Foundation, which has been a source of more than $7 million in support, will not be making future contributions to the homeless center. “Eventually, they have to be on their own,” foundation President Charles Jacobson said. “Our big push now is youth and children.”

Johnston said the Weingart Center board has raised about $200,000 this fiscal year from private sources, and she has raised a similar amount in grants and donations.

About $15,000 has been raised through an innovative food-coupon program started last fall. Weingart sells coupons that members of the public can give, instead of money, to panhandlers. The street people can trade the coupons for free meals at the center.

Volunteers of America, which rents one floor of Weingart for a county-funded alcohol recovery program, wants to move that service out this year to a “drug and alcohol-free environment,” a move that could have a negative impact on the center’s income, hotel and cafeteria operations if a replacement program is not found.

The center also faces a funding threat within two years if CRA, now an annual source of $1.1 million in operating funds, reaches the ceiling set on funds the agency can spend in its downtown redevelopment area and cuts off aid.

Greenstein said he would like to see the amount of funds raised from the private sector raised to 50% from its current 8%.