Woman gets ‘genius’ grant for work with troubled girls
When Lateefah Simon took her first nonprofit job nine years ago, she says, it hardly
felt like a life-changing event.
“I was a 17-year-old girl with no money in her pocket,” she recalls. “The dollars and cents called to me more than anything else,” she says of her decision to quit a fast-food job at Taco Bell and join the Center for Young Women’s Development, a nonprofit group here. The center hired Ms. Simon because she had known poverty firsthand, having grown up in the Western Addition neighborhood where the charity operates, and would therefore be able to reach out to troubled young women to persuade them to get help. After receiving training from the center, Ms. Simon would seek out prostitutes and female drug users to warn them about the dangers of AIDS and other diseases.
Two years later, she was running the charity, a job she has held ever since.
While Ms. Simon plays down her entry into the nonprofit world, at least one foundation sees it as the first step in the career of a genius. This month, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation awarded Ms. Simon one of its 24 MacArthur Fellowships, commonly known as “genius awards.” Like the other fellows, Ms. Simon will receive $500,000 over a five-year period with no strings attached.
The Chicago grant maker chose Ms. Simon because of her success at transforming the center from a fledgling nonprofit group into a nationally recognized model for helping poor, minority young women.
The Peer Philosophy
Ms. Simon’s and the center’s road to recognition has not been easy or conventional. When she took the charity’s helm, Ms. Simon was still a teenager with no college degree. And the group’s philosophy -- that troubled girls are best served by receiving services from peers -- was considered quite controversial among other San Francisco charities when the organization started, says James R. Bell, executive director of the W. Haywood Burns Institute, a criminal-justice advocacy group in San Francisco. “Other service providers were trashing the center,” says Mr. Bell. “They were saying, ‘These girls aren’t counselors. They’re just ho’s and drug addicts off the streets.’”
But Mr. Bell says Ms. Simon’s personality has since helped her attract allies. “She has all this talent, but she knows what she doesn’t know,” he says. “She’s not this know-it-all, I’m-from-the-streets, I-know-more-than-you kind of person.”
Today, at 26, Ms. Simon remains dedicated to the center’s mission. She insists the best mentor for struggling young women is someone who comes from the same neighborhood as they do and who has faced many of the same obstacles of drug addiction, prostitution, and the gray walls of the city’s juvenile-detention center.
Inspired by the words of Billie Holiday and the passion of Malcolm X, whose pictures hang in the center’s front office, Ms. Simon speaks with a lyricism about the civil rights of minority women. “We have to turn their pain into power,” she says, because “hurt people hurt other people.”
Her admirers praise her ability to remain true to herself, no matter what the situation.
“I don’t want to be a chameleon,” Ms. Simon says, pointing to the tan Adidas sneakers she says she wears whether she is meeting with San Francisco’s chief probation officer or the city’s street-hardened women.
Internship Program
The Center for Young Women’s Development, located on the edge of the city’s famous Mission District, was started in 1993 by the Come Into the Sun Coalition, a group of San Francisco women who wanted to show the city that its delinquent girls and young women could help themselves by coming together to discuss their problems.
The center’s main effort to help troubled young women is its Sisters Rising program.
As part of it, the center hires 11 women, many of whom are just out of juvenile detention, to serve as interns who call on people in the city’s poorest neighborhoods to conduct research on the problems young people are facing. During 36 weeks, the interns are paid $10 an hour, receive 200 hours of job training and health education, and also get health insurance -- including acupuncture treatments and massages, which Ms. Simon mentions to emphasize the comprehensiveness of the coverage. At the end of the internship, Ms. Simon and the center’s staff help the women find jobs, usually in nonprofit work, or return to school.
While Ms. Simon and her nine staff members are helping these women land jobs, they also help them bond with one another.
In one session, for example, the interns sit in a circle, holding pieces of toilet paper; for each square of paper, they must tell a secret about themselves. Other exercises include teaching the interns writing, good public-speaking skills, and ways to resolve conflicts.
The center is gathering data on the number of girls who get in trouble with the law even after participating in the program, but Ms. Simon says all 11 in the last group of interns, who graduated July 1, are still in school or working. She admits, however, that some of the program’s 150 graduates have returned to detention or gone back to using drugs. The center’s program isn’t perfect, she says, but it is helping the toughest cases, the ones no other charity will help.
“We’re not talking about girls from the Boys and Girls Club. These girls are straight out of juvenile hall,” she says. With a rueful smile, she adds that she cannot count how many times the organization’s electronic postal scale has been stolen by interns who probably sell the device for quick cash.
‘Walking Testimony’
Ms. Simon says a key element to the charity’s success is that it hires as managers young women who have graduated from its programs or who have backgrounds similar to the people it serves. “You can have youth on your board, but it means nothing if they’re not president of the organization,” she says. “Every single person in our organization is a walking testimony to what is possible.”
Ms. Simon herself is one of those testimonies. While growing up, she continually faced eviction as she and her mother struggled to make ends meet. “Home was just a lonely, lonely place,” she says.
When she was on probation for shoplifting but before she could get into “serious trouble,” Ms. Simon says she applied to the center’s Street Survival program -- a precursor to Sisters Rising -- to get out of the low-wage job at Taco Bell. While the money drove her decision, Ms. Simon says once she joined the center she realized she had found a place where she could let her guard down.
“Everything I ever had to lie about I didn’t have to lie about here,” she says, such as skipping school, past drug use, and family problems. “Here I was able to say, ‘Me and Mom aren’t cool, and I haven’t been home for four days.’”
Two years after joining the group, at age 19, Ms. Simon became executive director, a move she describes as the “hardest thing in my life.”
In the seven years as leader of the organization, Ms. Simon says she has learned many lessons about nonprofit management, including how to delegate authority and how to manage employees who are peers and even friends. She says her approach has softened during her tenure, and she has learned the value of involving staff members in decision making: “My motto is to ask for help three times a day.”
‘Very New Thinking’
During her tenure, Ms. Simon has raised the organization’s annual budget from $230,000 to $425,000, mostly by appealing to foundations. “I remember crying to funders, ‘Please, just give us a chance,’” says Ms. Simon.
To win the support of grant makers, Ms. Simon would walk into their offices full of passion about her cause, but not arrogance. She knew she was ignorant of certain aspects about how to run a nonprofit group and told foundations upfront that she was learning.
“What made her successful was her optimism and her passion, but also her very practical way of saying, I need to learn how to do this,” says Diane E. Aranda, a program officer with the San Francisco Foundation, which awarded the center $70,000 after Ms. Simon met with the grant maker when she became executive director. “She’d be the first to say, I don’t know how to write a strategic plan, but I want to learn.”
The center also was fortunate to be located in San Francisco, home to a large number of grant makers dedicated to supporting social-justice issues, says Ms. Aranda.
Outside the city, Ms. Simon had to sell national foundations on a charity run by young people with no nonprofit experience that would help troubled youngsters.
While today, the center’s approach may not seem radical, it was “very new thinking” 10 years ago, explains Marisha R. Wignaraja, a program officer at the Ms. Foundation, in New York. “Lateefah and the center have taught the field about that type of work,” she says.
The center has received $300,000 from the Ms. Foundation and received support from other large grant makers, such as the Public Welfare Foundation and the Tides Foundation, among others.
Despite the growing support from the foundation world, when Daniel J. Socolow, director of the MacArthur Fellows program, called to tell her she would be named a fellow, Ms. Simon was shocked.
“I started bawling like somebody beat up my mother,” she says. Her first thought: “Oh my God, I can’t be poor anymore.” (Ms. Simon earns $42,000 a year as the center’s executive director.)
Ms. Simon, who was in New York when she heard the news, says she walked around Greenwich Village and smoked cigarettes to collect her thoughts. Her first inclination was to donate the full gift to the center. But after talking with other MacArthur winners and other “elders,” as she calls them, she says she realized the award is hers.
“This money is for me to grow,” she says. “I’m not going to blow it.”
Ms. Simon mentions several ideas she has for the money -- move her and her 7-year-old daughter into a new apartment and buy a new suit -- but her main plan is to attend college, hopefully Stanford University, to study nonprofit management or law.
The $500,000 award has given her an opportunity to dream, she says, while also acknowledging it requires her to make some large decisions.
“In January I’ll be getting a check for $25,000. It’s an amazing thing, but it brings up pain within me,” she says. “There’s a lot of pressure here to do what’s right.”
Ms. Simon says one consequence of the award money may be that it moves up the inevitable day when she must step down as head of the center. Even before winning the award, she says, she recognized that day was starting to approach.
“My slang is played out,” she says, talking about the differences she has noticed between the way she speaks and the conversations of the girls in the center’s programs. “They tell me, ‘You sound so old school.’”
For now, though, Ms. Simon plans to stay with the center. And she says that while the $500,000 is gratifying, the best reward brought by the MacArthur money is the recognition from the philanthropy world that the center has fought for for 10 years.
“We’ve been saying this all along,” says Ms. Simon, but this award “provides us with an opportunity to validate the fact that young women of color who have been marginalized in the juvenile-justice system have what it takes to develop their own solutions.”
THE CENTER FOR YOUNG WOMEN’S DEVELOPMENT
Purpose: The Center for Young Women’s Development, in San Francisco, seeks to help girls make the transition from delinquency and poverty to productive adulthood. Through its Girls’ Detention Advocacy Project, the center presses for changes in the California juvenile-justice system and provides services, such as legal education and “life skills” training, to incarcerated women. The group’s Sisters Rising program provides a paid internship, as well as employment training and counseling, to 11 women, many of whom have recently been released from detention.
History: The Come Into the Sun Coalition, a group of San Francisco social-service providers and social-justice activists, founded the Center for Young Women’s Development in 1993 to help minority young women living in poverty.
Finances: The organization’s annual budget is around $425,000. About 70 percent of its income is donated by foundations, including the Ms. Foundation, the Public Welfare Foundation, and the Tides Foundation; 20 percent comes from government sources; and 10 percent from individuals. The center recently won a $55,000 grant from the city to help young women avoid joining the welfare rolls.
Key officials: Lateefah Simon, executive director; Lenore Anderson, board president.
Address: 1550 Bryant Street, Suite 700, San Francisco, Calif., 94103; (415) 703-8800.
World Wide Web site: http://www.cywd.org