Linked with our two Humanitarian Texts Statement of US Rep. Nancy Pelosi, and Making Rehabilitation Into a Serious Business.
Not many people choose to spend their lives working with convicted felons and drug addicts. But Mimi Silbert, founder of San Francisco’s Delancey Street rehabilitation project, has committed her every waking hour to helping ex-cons become productive, welcome members of society. (Read more on Giraffe Heroes).
Mimi Silbert – USA
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. (Read more on New Heroes).
Her Recipe for success:
· Take four drug addicts.
· Gently blend one cup of Compassion with two cups of Strict Discipline.
· Fold in six tablespoons of Vision.
Add a generous dash of Responsibility.
· Mix with three Valuable Skills and three tightly packed cups of Personal Accountability.
· Stir all ingredients vigorously, slowly adding Milk of Human Kindness, until the mixture is thoroughly blended.
· Bake at 300 degrees for four years, or until done to the touch.
· Generously ice with one « Red Hot » Mimi Silbert.
· Share this delicious Delancy Street Staff of Life with several thousand hungry people and watch them grow strong.
The Delancy Street Foundation, founded and directed by Master Chef Mimi Silbert, is the world’s most successful rehabilitation program for drug addicts and criminals.
Delancy Street is based on the principles of complete accountability, mastery of life and career skill, empowering everyone to learn, earn and lead. The rules are simple and strict. (Read more on wic.org).
The Delancey Street Foundation serves as a residential education center that has helped more than 14,000 drug addicts, criminals and the homeless learn to lead productive, crime-free and drug-free lives. They are taught to acquire skills, attend college and become part of the workforce. The foundation offers opportunities to people who cannot normally get jobs in the mainstream workforce. People want to get themselves out of the vicious cycle of crime to
The Foundations is a social enterprise that has its own income stream. It does not receive any funds from the government. It earns its revenue by running more than 20 businesses, including the Delancey Street Restaurant and Café and the Delancey Street Moving Company. These businesses which serve as « training schools » not only generate income but they teach people practical skills and help them apply good habits such as self-control and self-discipline. (Read more on futureSHIFTERS.net).
Just let them rot there in prison. They broke the law and they must pay for their crimes. Keep them there. We don’t want them back on our streets. Nobody can ever do anything with them, anyway. Once a criminal, always a criminal. An ex-con is a loser. Hey, I didn’t force them to take the drugs, rob a bank, become a prostitute, or shoot someone. These are all some of the things that are said throughout America regarding today’s criminal. And, just maybe, these are some of the things that have rolled off the tips of our own tongues recently. Why bother, no one is going to change those losers anyway! No one cares. They’re beyond help. Well, someone does care, and someone does help, and that someone is Dr. Mimi Silbert, founder and President of The Delancey Street Foundation headquartered in San Francisco, California. (Read more on USdreams.com).
You begin with a nightmare . . . with outrage . . . and then with a dream . . . You wake each day to the plagues besetting America. AIDS. Drugs. Crime. Racism. Unemployment. Poverty. Homelessness. Child neglect. Inner city blight. High school dropouts. Elderly people expelled from their homes. Millions of people trapped by physical or mental disabilities . . . or gripped by the horrors of mental illness. Physical, sexual and emotional abuse. You don’t know what to do. But something must be done — and you are driven by a passion you don’t really understand, because you are still young and still finding your way . . . You wonder what you can do . . . So . . . you begin . . . (Read more on Social Entrepreneurs).
links:
The Mimi Silbert story;