Mimi Silbert's Delancy Street Foundation
Today we watched the New Heroes segment on Delancy Street Foundation. The topic is rehabilitation. We then wrote a collaborative essay --Thesis, Anti-thesis, Synthesis on the topic using Delancy Street Foundation program as an illustration. See http://www.pbs.org/opb/thenewheroes/meet/silbert.html
Mimi Silbert
Project: Delancey Street Foundation
Location: San Francisco, Calif. U.S.A.
In 1971 Mimi Silbert founded Delancey Street with four residents, a thousand dollar loan and a dream. She envisioned a place where substance abusers, former felons and others who had hit bottom would, through their own efforts, be able to turn their lives around.
Silbert has since built an empire grossing 20 million dollars a year with locations in New York, New Mexico, North Carolina and Los Angeles. She has never accepted a single penny of government funds.
Since those early days in a single house, Mimi Silbert has empowered more than 14,000 people to lead crime-free, drug-free lives in mainstream society. They have acquired skills, they attend college and they are part of the workforce.
Silbert says she has spent her career cultivating a "university of the streets." She calls it a "Harvard for losers," where the students are former pimps, prostitutes, junkies, drug dealers and armed robbers.
Her program's name comes from Silbert's own past. Delancey Street is a place on Manhattan's lower east side where immigrants like her parents came to make a new life for themselves.
What Does the Delancey Street Foundation Do?
The Delancey Street Foundation is a residential education center where drug addicts, criminals and the homeless learn to lead productive, crime-free lives. It has been called the most successful rehabilitation project in the United States.
The foundation runs at no cost to the taxpayer or client. They earn revenue by operating more than 20 businesses, including the Delancey Street Restaurant and Café and the Delancey Street Moving Company. These "training schools" not only generate income, they teach residents marketable skills and inculcate in them habits of self-control and self-discipline.
Each resident spends up to four years at the facility and must pass equivalency exams to obtain a high school diploma in order to graduate. They also need to line up a job and a place to live. Silbert likes to see each of her students graduate with three marketable skills to ensure their job success.
Silbert reports that 65 percent of the organization's operating costs are paid for by revenue from its businesses. She originally rejected foundation money, fearing it would deter from the participants' feeling that their survival depended on the success of the businesses. Today, the organization receives more than ten million dollars from private donations every year.
Silbert and Delancey Street are always facing new challenges. Today, offenders are often third-generation criminals. Silbert used to tell clients that their parents wanted a better life for them. Since participants' parents are often criminals as well, the draw to go back to the streets can be strong. Fortunately, after more than 30 years, Mimi Silbert isn't about to give up.
© Copyright 2005 Oregon Public Broadcasting
Today we watched the New Heroes segment on Delancy Street Foundation. The topic is rehabilitation. We then wrote a collaborative essay --Thesis, Anti-thesis, Synthesis on the topic using Delancy Street Foundation program as an illustration. See http://www.pbs.org/opb/thenewheroes/meet/silbert.html
Mimi Silbert
Project: Delancey Street Foundation
Location: San Francisco, Calif. U.S.A.
In 1971 Mimi Silbert founded Delancey Street with four residents, a thousand dollar loan and a dream. She envisioned a place where substance abusers, former felons and others who had hit bottom would, through their own efforts, be able to turn their lives around.
Silbert has since built an empire grossing 20 million dollars a year with locations in New York, New Mexico, North Carolina and Los Angeles. She has never accepted a single penny of government funds.
Since those early days in a single house, Mimi Silbert has empowered more than 14,000 people to lead crime-free, drug-free lives in mainstream society. They have acquired skills, they attend college and they are part of the workforce.
Silbert says she has spent her career cultivating a "university of the streets." She calls it a "Harvard for losers," where the students are former pimps, prostitutes, junkies, drug dealers and armed robbers.
Her program's name comes from Silbert's own past. Delancey Street is a place on Manhattan's lower east side where immigrants like her parents came to make a new life for themselves.
What Does the Delancey Street Foundation Do?
The Delancey Street Foundation is a residential education center where drug addicts, criminals and the homeless learn to lead productive, crime-free lives. It has been called the most successful rehabilitation project in the United States.
The foundation runs at no cost to the taxpayer or client. They earn revenue by operating more than 20 businesses, including the Delancey Street Restaurant and Café and the Delancey Street Moving Company. These "training schools" not only generate income, they teach residents marketable skills and inculcate in them habits of self-control and self-discipline.
Each resident spends up to four years at the facility and must pass equivalency exams to obtain a high school diploma in order to graduate. They also need to line up a job and a place to live. Silbert likes to see each of her students graduate with three marketable skills to ensure their job success.
Silbert reports that 65 percent of the organization's operating costs are paid for by revenue from its businesses. She originally rejected foundation money, fearing it would deter from the participants' feeling that their survival depended on the success of the businesses. Today, the organization receives more than ten million dollars from private donations every year.
Silbert and Delancey Street are always facing new challenges. Today, offenders are often third-generation criminals. Silbert used to tell clients that their parents wanted a better life for them. Since participants' parents are often criminals as well, the draw to go back to the streets can be strong. Fortunately, after more than 30 years, Mimi Silbert isn't about to give up.
© Copyright 2005 Oregon Public Broadcasting
posted by Professor Wanda's Posse at 11:12 AM
4 Comments:
Patrick Schmidt
Denise Martinez
Rochelle Predovic
Professor Sabir
English 1A
2 November 2010
Mimi Silbert's Delancy Street Foundation
The Delancey Street Foundation is a San Francisco reeducation center that focuses on rehabilitating drug addicts, criminals, and the homeless to lead productive, crime-free lives. The organization’s focus is eliminating recidivism and breaking the cycle of criminality that exists in modern society. The Delancy Street Foundation is self described by their website as, “Harvard for losers where the students are pimps, prostitutes, junkies, drug dealers, and armed robbers.” After more than 30 years the organization is still thriving, turning ex-cons and junkies into productive members of society.
Giovana Zanellato
Quan Lin
Marco Gutierrez
Professor Sabir
English 1A
2 November 2010
Con Arguments
The Delancey Street program keeps them hypothetically locked up. It keeps them away from their families after they get out of jail, and also keeps them away from the real life Since rehabilitation is optional they shouldn’t be required to remain in the program for certain time. This can become a problem once they get out. After the pressure in jail, the period of pressure in rehabilitation, can cause them to relapse, putting them in a worse situation than they were before.
Rehabilitation
Rehabilitation is something one thinks about as the sole responsibility to the individual
who is as Mimi Silbert, director of Delancey Street Foundation, says, "hit rock bottom."
However, often her clients say they don't know how to change. That they would have changed
their lifestyles and habits, if they'd had the necessary tools. The idea of change is easy to suggest or demand, yet, for how many is relaspe the reality? Change is successful when an
entire community is involved and where examples of what one is working towards lives within
reach.
It is often better to throw away the societal miscreant than help the person find options and alternatives, many beyond reach or view. This assistance is what community is all about.
It is what our Constitution means when it says, its citizens are endowed with the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happienss. How can a person be happy if they are homeless, stoned out of their minds or caught in a web of futility and worthlessness enabled by habitual bad habits?
Government has not been successful in its job of rehabilitation if the huge number of prisons in California is any indicator, so programs in the public sector like Delancey Street Foundation, which not only provide jobs to the down and out inhabitants of society, it also provides a great social good.
Founded by a phychologist and three former encarcerated men, Delancey Street, 31-33 years later is a leader in the rehabilitation field with many former clients who swear without DSF they would be dead.
Using tactics one might not agree with like scare or intimidation strategies, one might ask, what deferetianted Delancey Street from Synanon, the 1960s cult or Jim Jones Peoples Temple?
Both cults used intimidation or bullying to get its memember to follow company rules.
DSF like these cults does not allow its members to have family with them, however, unlike Synanon and Peoples Temple, DSF is right in the community, assessible and therefore more transparent than the more secretative and damaging organizations labeled cults, making DSF's ends much more socially acceptable and welcomed.
I'm sorry, I'm glad that people do well after getting out but this place sounds like a dangerous cult. I'm homeless and had this place suggested to me. The minute I've heard about the blackout period, there's no way I could do that. I love my friends and my family. I would miss them and would probably kill myself if I couldn't see them. This place seems cruel. Not to mention, I'm transgendered and can't help but think they would try and "de-trans me" which wouldn't work and actually do more harm. Also, do they lock them in. I can't help but think they would.
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