End is Near for Project That Offered New Start

Project New Start specialized in raising women from the dead.

It took in crack addicts, street prostitutes and prison inmates and transformed them into working professionals and responsible mothers.

Such miracles earned the small, nonprofit organization a reputation as one of the more effective programs ever devised to rehabilitate female prisoners. Nevertheless, six years after its founding, Project New Start is about to face a death of its own, of the budgetary variety.

“Every year it got harder and harder,” said director Lisa Schmitt. “The county was getting less from the state, and the state was getting less from the federal government.”

Project New Start’s demise illustrates the vagaries of the system that channels funding to thousands of nonprofit organizations serving the poor. It is a system that favors larger nonprofits over street-level “mom-and-pop” operations and, all other things being equal, good fund-raisers over good counselors.

As federal funding tightens, observers say, small but effective programs such as New Start become increasingly vulnerable.

The county officials who funded New Start agree that it was a model program. Experts call its approach groundbreaking. But it will close this month, after its hodgepodge of $200,000 in annual government grants shrank by more than a third. Schmitt, a 49-year-old former bank vice president, already had grown weary of the paperwork demanded of her by government funders, another requirement that puts small programs at a disadvantage.

Almost forgotten is the simple but powerful idea that was at the heart of New Start’s success: Treat the “whole woman,” give her drug counseling and parenting classes in a residential setting, teach her a trade.

“My life was a series of going back to jail,” said Janice, a convicted prostitute and car thief who now works as a secretary in a Midwestern school district. “I was dying, I was practically already dead, I wasn’t living flesh. Project New Start game me a reason to live and a new way of living.”

Another New Start graduate remembered how program counselors taught her to be, for the first time, a fit mother to her two children. To see New Start preparing to close “breaks my heart,” she said. “What baffles me is that there are so many women out there who need a recovery program.”

Dan Flaming, former executive director of the Los Angeles County Private Industry Council, which disperses federal job training funds, witnessed New Start’s birth and its coming demise. The demands outpaced the organization’s resources, he said.

“Lisa was writing the programs, managing the office, doing the case management. For a small organization, there was not the resources to go out and do the level of lobbying and fund-raising that larger organizations are able to do,” Flaming said.

Florence Green, executive of the California Assn. of Nonprofits, said the fate of Project New Start is shared by an untold number of small organizations serving the poor.

“These agencies are operating on a shoestring,” Green said. “Any shift in their funding can make it impossible for them to survive.”

Green sees in small organizations like New Start the epitome of the nonprofit ideal: a group of people coming together to address one community need.

*

“The really large, multi-service nonprofits with multimillion-dollar budgets will survive,” she said. “It’s these small programs that come up around a specific problem that are going to fold.”

Hoping to create an intimate, family-like setting for its clients, New Start never accepted more than a dozen women at a time.

The program was shaped by the vision and faith of its founder. Once a self-described “arrogant agnostic,” Lisa Schmitt had converted to Catholicism.

At one point, she considered work as an overseas missionary. It turned out that the streets and prisons of Los Angeles County contained an equally high proportion of needy and desperate souls. A chance encounter with one of them--a homeless woman who slept outside her church--sparked Schmitt to open her program in Silver Lake. Her first funding came from the county Board of Supervisors. She paid herself $23,000 a year, a fraction of her six-figure banker’s salary.

New Start targeted hard-core inmates, chronic offenders who kept cycling through the jail system. Between stays, most ended up on the streets, shadow figures trolling for clients on thoroughfares in Hollywood and elsewhere.

Schmitt recruited clients from among the inmates at the Sybil Brand Institute for Women, trying to look beyond the “deadness in their eyes” and the “callousness in their attitudes.”

One early client was Vicki, whose name, like those of all the New Start clients in this story, has been changed. She was a Sunset Boulevard prostitute with a rap sheet that included five arrests.

“She was a person who didn’t take a bath,” Vicki said, describing her former self. “She had bags under her eyes.” At 5-foot-8, she weighed an anemic 95 pounds. Vicki looked so bad, even her drug dealer told her she needed help.

*

Recruited to New Start with a week left on her jail sentence, Vicki figured she would stay a few days and then leave. Yet she remained, and four months later, she said, “something started to click.”

New Start’s clients lived at the facility for nine months, cut off from the temptations of the outside world. Clients like Vicki were instructed not even to speak to outsiders.

Vicki went to classes every day and sat through almost daily counseling sessions. She took vocational classes and picked up some computer training. And she learned other, much simpler life skills she had neglected during 10 years on the streets. “They taught me how to wake up in the morning and take a shower,” Vicki said.

After leaving the program, Vicki took her newfound skills and landed a job with a large entertainment firm. Sober for five years, she has gained 50 pounds to reach her “normal” weight. She takes great pride in being “like any ordinary woman,” an upstanding citizen who pays her bills on time.

More than a few New Start clients were parents, although most had been separated from their children for years. The wayward mothers were required to take parenting classes at which they learned, among other things, that it wasn’t OK to leave an infant unattended or to call a little boy “stupid.”

Such seemingly simple advice was an eye-opening revelation to many, said social worker Loretta Coha. In parenting classes many New Start clients realized, for the first time, how bleak and abused their own childhoods had been. “It would bring up their own sense of loss and abandonment,” Coha said.

Among those to benefit from such instruction was Lucy, a crack addict whose second son was born while she was in prison.

Like other New Start clients, Lucy had lost custody of her two sons while working as a street prostitute. At one point, she traveled to Seattle, where she had a harrowing encounter with a customer who stabbed her, the knife penetrating close to her heart.

“I knew if I went out there any more, I was going to die,” Lucy said. “I didn’t want to die not knowing what else I could have done with my life.”

Since graduating from New Start, Lucy has been reunited with her two children.

Janice, a former Long Beach street prostitute, underwent a similar transformation. “I went from a back-alley animal to being a mother and a wife, a Christian and a professional. I work for the school district today. Who would have thought anybody that lived the life that I lived would be working right next to the superintendent?”

There were some women who were so far gone that no amount of counseling and care could save them. Schmitt remembers a client who stayed with the program briefly before dropping out. Not long afterward, Schmitt received a call from the coroner’s office: The woman had been found shot in the back of the head. The only document she carried was a card with New Start’s phone number.

Such cases were the exception, however. Overall, New Start claimed a 60% success rate.

Helen Brandon, an official with the county Department of Community and Senior Services, which funded New Start, gave the program glowing reviews.

“At the point that the women have graduated from the program, their lives are pretty much like the program name--they have a ‘new start,’ ” Brandon said. “They have pretty much reached the level of self-sufficiency.”

New Start did not have similar success in the increasingly stiff competition for government funding. By its second year, county officials briefly mulled cuts that would have eliminated the program. As 1995 began, they reduced funding from several federal “community development” grants. Forty-five thousand dollars disappeared when New Start moved out of the district of a county supervisor who had been a supporter. Then an additional $7,500 was cut. Then $3,500 more.

Complicating matters was the high cost of the program’s intensive approach, Schmitt said. With shelter, room and board, medical attention, vocational training and counseling, the total bill came to $15,000 per woman per year.

Nor was the program’s target audience an easy one to sell to funders. Some potential supporters argued against New Start because the women it served were “just addicts” and ex-convicts.

Paperwork requirements, meanwhile, increased. The requirements for funds under the federal Job Training Partnership Act, a key to work-related rehabilitation programs, became especially onerous. Schmitt said she sometimes lost entire days responding to questions from government auditors.

*

“Managing JTPA is a huge, time-consuming process,” she said. “For the money they give us, it’s not even cost-effective for a small organization like ours.”

In October, Schmitt began sending her remaining clients to other programs. She is considering going back to school to study social work and plan her next move.

She and other New Start veterans say they will never forget the strength and perseverance of the program’s graduates.

“What I’ll always take away with me is my admiration of the human spirit in these women, my complete and total admiration of them,” said counselor Coha. “I can’t think of anything more rewarding than having worked with them.”

Schmitt is giving away the equipment and property New Start accumulated during its six-year existence.

“I’ve got an 11-passenger van, a fax machine and a copier, some furniture and a computer,” she said. “My joy will be playing Santa Claus to [other] organizations.”

One of the last items Schmitt will pack away is a group portrait of a dozen or so women and children standing outside New Start’s Los Angeles facility. The women are well dressed, some in business suits, and it could be a photograph of a company potluck, but it isn’t.

The women in the photograph are New Start graduates. Vicki is there, and so is Janice, wearing a bowler hat decorated with flowers. One of the women stands with her son, a smart looking boy of about 6 in a stiff blue suit. Everyone is smiling.