[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 5] [Senate] [Pages 7192-7193] [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]FOCUS: HOPE Mr. LEVIN. Mr. President, I ask to have printed in the Congressional Record an article which appears in the April 19, 1999, edition of Forbes magazine regarding Focus: HOPE, an extraordinary organization in Detroit, Michigan which is dedicated to human development. The article follows. [From Forbes, Apr. 19, 1999] Teach A Man To Fish (By Srikumar S. Rao) Eleanor Josaitis can remember the moment in March 1965 her life changed. She was in her comfortable home in a Detroit suburb watching a television program on the Nuremberg trials. A news flash cut in: Selma, Ala. Mounted troopers, wielding electric cattle prods, charged peaceful protesters. Minutes earlier she was pondering what she would have done if she had been in Nazi Germany. A new question intruded: ``What will I do now?'' Two years later Detroit exploded in flames. Touring the decimated area with Father William Cunningham, her weekend parish priest, they swore to alleviate the suffering. But what could be accomplished by a housewife with two young children and a radical priest trained as an English professor? Quite a bit, actually. Focus: Hope, the nonprofit organization they birthed in Detroit's rubble, today occupies well over a million square feet on 40 acres of that once- devastated area. It started with urgent but limited goals-- feeding poor mothers and their infants. Now it has grown into a powerful and world-recognized job-training machine. An education boot camp has lifted nearly 5,000 city residents to high school equivalence and placed them in real jobs. A machinist institute has trained 1,800 urban youngsters in reading blueprints and operating numerically controlled machine tools, and put them in high-paying positions with outfits like GM, Ford and Chrysler. A Center for Advanced Technologies has just started to churn out engineers with bachelor's degrees. Next up: an information technology center, funded by the likes of Microsoft and Cisco Systems, to teach computer skills. Josaitis, age 67, built Focus: Hope on the simple proposition that many of the chronically underemployed yearn for an opportunity to haul themselves into the middle class. She says: ``We are failing our poorest citizens when we don't provide them the means to break out of their poverty.'' What welfare official has not echoed precisely that thought? The Focus: Hope difference is one of execution. Josaitis runs the centers with businesslike efficiency and sets demanding standards for the students. She coddles no one: Use profane language after two warnings and you're out. Steal something and you're out immediately. She believes that discipline and responsibilitly are keys to improvement. Rewards must be earned. That philosophy has made Focus: Hope a landmark in Detroit. It has attracted more than 50,000 Detroit-area volunteers, including big names at the car companies, like Ford Chief Executive Jacques Nasser. A sizable business itself, Focus: Hope employs more than 800 people and has a budget of $68 million, half from government, a third from contracts with for-profit companies and the rest from private contributions. That's eons away from the rather inauspicious beginnings. To get closer to the problem, Eleanor and her husband, the owner of a chain of hobby shops, sold their house and moved into an integrated neighborhood in 1968. Her mother, alarmed for their safety, even hired a lawyer to try to wrest custody of her children away. Eleanor retained custody and bears no animosity toward her mother. She and Father Cunningham, who died of cancer in 1997, began with food. Tapping federal funding, they launched a tiny program to distribute food to pregnant women and small children. It still does that, at last count for 46,000 people a month (half the peak in 1991). The program succeeded so well that it became a model for similar efforts in other states. A food program for senior citizens followed. But Josaitis and Father Cunningham wanted to turn the recipients into productive jobholders. They browbeat and cajoled federal agencies and private foundations to raise $250,000 to start a job-training program. In 1981 they opened the Machinist Training Institute to train Detroit's youths in machining and metalworking, especially for the automobile industry. It's an intensive program that can last for 57 weeks if students choose the entire curriculum. Students spend the first 5 weeks, [[Page 7193]] eight hours a day, learning blueprint reading and some math and working the lathe. On the shop floor they later learn to work with mills, grinders and computer-controlled machine tools. In the classroom they learn more about manufacturing theory and quite a bit about computer-aided design and manufacturing. In a more advanced program they work on commercial production contracts for about $7 an hour in between doses of classroom instruction. Among the students who start the machinist school, 70% stay to the end. For those that do, the job placement rate is 100%. ``We have placed our graduates in all sorts of machine shops,'' says Josaitis. ``Some had never previously hired a minority or a female.'' Josaitis has structured tuition to reflect her philosophy: a helping hand--with strings attached. Tuition for mti is $14,500. Government grants pay about half that, depending on income. The balance is paid through a 5% loan from Focus: Hope. Repayment begins 90 days after graduation--by which time most students have jobs. A further incentive to land and keep a job is that many employers, like General Motors, will pick up half of the student's loan payments. William Motts is one of the success stories. He dropped out of high school in the 11th grade and got his girlfriend pregnant at 18. He pulled in $6 an hour as a maintenance worker at a hotel, struggling to help support his daughter. But he caught a break. He was steered to mti by his father's friend who knew Father Cunningham. He entered the program in 1992 and never looked back. In 1998, he got a bachelor's degree in manufacturing engineering from the University of Detroit, Mercy. Today Motts, 25, is an engineer at General Motors earning around $45,000, and married to a dental hygienist. ``Focus: Hope challenged me to push my boundaries,'' Motts says. ``It forced me to be disciplined. It gave me very marketable skills.'' Focus: Hope helps students surmount practical problems. For examples, it runs a day care center and before- and after- school programs, so parents can attend classes without worry. Josaitis also doesn't want to discard potential candidates who don't have the math, reading or social skills to succeed in a program for machinists. So for the past ten years an educational boot camp called Fast Track has taken students-- average age 26--with 8th grade math and reading skills and brought them up two grade levels. And two years ago, realizing some students needed even more help, she started First Step, to offer more remedial works. More than 80% of those who enter Fast Track finish the program and go on the Machinist Training Institute. Thomas Murphy, a former sergeant major for American troops in Europe who runs Fast Track, can take some credit for that. He is bluff, tough and good-natured. The seven-week Fast Track program runs all day Monday through Friday, and Saturday mornings. ``Saturday classes serve clear notice that we expect real hard work and commitment from them in return for the opportunity we provide,'' Murphy says. Clock in at 8:01 and you get a demerit. Enough demerits and you get booted out. Murphy was initially shocked when a candidate asked him if there was a place where he could nap during breaks. Turned out that he left the institute at 4 p.m., worked an eight- hour shift at a job to support his family and was back at 8 a.m. the next day. Murphy found him a place to nap and overlooked occasional tardiness. ``One of our graduates called me up the other day to announce that he was missing his first day of work in years,'' says Murphy. ``He was closing on a brand new home. His home. The first home anyone in his family had ever owned.'' Josaitis also understands that getting and holding a job requires certain social skills. Thus trainees are taught how to shake hands, make eye contact and absolutely, positively get to jobs on time. Every month Josaitis brings a group of students to a formally laid out dining room where she teaches table manners, from which fork to use to how to make small talk. ``I want you to feel comfortable when you are invited to the White House,'' she tells them. She also takes trainees to formal affairs, such as the opening of the Michigan Opera hosted by Ford's Nasser. In 1993 Focus: Hope decided to offer its best and brightest students a further step up the ladder. It opened the Center for Advanced Technologies, which, in collaboration with local colleges, offers bachelor and associate degrees in manufacturing engineering and technology. The executive dean is Lloyd Reuss, who took the nonpaying job after he was ousted as president of General Motors in 1993. CAT students get classroom instruction plus work in a for- profit manufacturing company located on Focus: Hope grounds. Using next-generation equipment from Cincinnati Milacron, says Reuss, students produce machined parts for outfits including GM, Ford and the Department of Defense. Students accept a below-market $8 an hour on these contracts. In return, they get free tuition. The hands-on part of this apprenticeship is as important as the classroom instruction. Denise Ankofski, candidate for an associate degree and single mother of a 6-year-old son, was milling brake shoes for 5-ton trucks on a defense contract and figured she could do it better by splitting operations and performing them on different machines. She was encouraged to give a technical presentation and her suggestion reduced cycle time on some operations by 80%. When they graduate, CAT students do extremely well. Last year the six CAT bachelor graduates were paid an average of $47,200, compared with the $45,300 earned by Massachusetts Institute of Technology mechanical engineering graduates. ``Graduates are not hired for diversity reasons or charity,'' says Reuss. ``They are hired because they are skilled workers with an excellent ethic.'' ____________________