PIPELINE

BY BARBARA SOLOW
“’M A SURVIVOR. I ALWAYS

‘have been,” declared 25-year-old

Gina Holder as she gathered up her
notebooks and made ready for her
next class. “I really feel good about
this Nf a because it gives us a
chance, for once.”

Holder and 25 other women living
in welfare hotels in Queens, Manhat-

tan and the Bronx are part of a special.

pilot training program sponsored by
the Division of Continuing Education
at LaGuardia Community College.

The 10-week program designed to
address the causes of homelessness,
helps women on public assistance get
the skills and confidence they need
to find jobs. And unlike many private
training programs, this one takes the
women’s personal needs into ac-
count. The college offers free trans-
portation and childcare services,
paying for babysitters in the hotels
and providing space at LaGuardia for
women to bring their children to
classes. Sessions in typing, business
English and career education are of-
fered twice a weck.

A class at the LaGuardia special pilot program for homeless women:
The key is to provide people with options and a chance to meet people who care about them.

Breaking Ground

“This is the first program of its kind
in the city,” explained Fern Khan, di-
rector of the Community Service
Programs at LaGuardia. “The key
here is to provide people with op-
tions and a chance to meet people
who care about them and welcome
their input into the program.”

The idea for a project involving
homeless women grew out of a con-
ference on homeless families held at
the college last January. Queens
houses the largest number of home-
less families in the city. with half of
the families placed in hotels by city
agencies located in the borough.
“People were amazed at the number
of homeless families in the area,” said
Khan. “We knew we couldn’t do any-
thing to solve that problem right
away but we wanted to do something
to ease conditions for people.”

The proposal for a training prog-
ram offering homeless women job
skills and counseling won the sup-
port of funders at the New York Com-
munity Trust and classes began at the
college last November. The majority

A ch 1986 @ CITYLIMITS e 13

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of students are young, single
mothers. Some of them have skills
from previous jobs while others are
eager to finish schooling they never
got a chance to complete.

Suretta Glover came to the program
with experience as a registered nurse
and switchboard operator as well as
two years of college. She had been
living in an apartment in St. Albans,
Queens before a fire claimed it. Now,
Glover comes to class with a group
of women from the Traveller’s Inn
near LaGuardia Airport.

“The atmosphere at the hotels is
very depressing,” Glover said. “We
need to get the women out of there.
If more women could get out and
come to a program like this, they'd
be more able to work.”

“It’s hard to move around and do
things when you have young chil-
dren,” said Trissena Radcliffe, who
has a young son. “When! was in high
school, I didn’t want to go to class
ever. Now I feel I can do it. I want te
be able to reach out to my son. With
both of us learning in school we can
relate to each other better.”

Zo

BARBARA SOLOW



Marion Rutledge leads a class in care:
Showing women that they can change the concept of who they are.

14 @ CITYLIMITS @ March 1986

education:

The trials of being on public assist-
ance coupled with the demands of
caring for families make regular at-

' tendance difficult for many of the

women—even with transportation
and childcare paid for. “I’ve realized
a lot more fully what it’s like bein;

out there as a mother, with the hote

manager on my back, my kids run-
ning around with no place to play
and no time to spend on finding a
job.” said Program Coordinator Joan
Wilson. “We expect these women to
be well-directed but yet our services
for them are not coordinated. We
have one young woman here who had
to give up a good job at a bank because
she just couldn’t find a babysitter.”

Reaching Out

To publicize the program, Wilson
and Khan visited hotels in Queens
and Manhattan and worked with
crisis intervention agencies to get the
word out to homeless women. Tris-
sena Radcliffe learned about the
program through an ad in Newsday.
At first, women in only two hotels
signed up. But in the final weeks of
the program, calls flooded in from
hotels in all boroughs, from men and
women, homeless and housed alike.

So far, the program only teaches

office-related skills but Khan hopes
that being in a college environment
will encourage women to branch out.
“I want people to see they have
choices,” she declared. “They don’t
have to be just typists. LaGuardia has
a lot of programs: physical therapy,
nursing, human services. We want to
train women to get good jobs.”

In Marguerite Green’s career edu-
cation class, the women use vid-
eotape to look at themselves and
analyze their self image. “Because
they are women, they’ve been told to
stay in their place; that they can only
go so far,” stated Green. “We want to
show them they can change the con-
cept of who they are.”

The program also helps ease the
sense of isolation many women feel
living in strange neighborhoods.
Milagros Davila has lived at the Aller-
ton Hotel on West 22nd St. for two
years. She left her Coney Island apart-
ment when she could no longer af-
ford the soaring rent there. “But even
if I do get into my own apartment
again, I want to stay here and get into
more classes,” she said. “People here
have the same problems as you do.
We bring our kids here together. It’s
nice to see people who want to do
something for themselves.”

BARBARA SOLOW

More Classes

More funding is needed if the prog-
ram is to continue but both direciors
are hopeful they will be able to ex-
pand the training sessions. “Origi-
nally this was designed for mothers
but now we even have a single father
who is interested,” commented Wiil-
son. “If we got a core group in every
hotel, we could offer group sessions
on parenting — not to criticize. bui as
a way of sharing experiences and
problems in common.”

The way the city offers services to
the homeless should be changed Wil-
son believes. “I don’t see why we
can’t use the Henry Street Settlement
model as a way of organizity scr-
vices. Everything should be in une
place.”

Khan is now negotiating with com-
panies like Brooklyn Union Gas, ask-
ing them to sponsor a job fair for the
women. “We need to bridge the gap
between training and job placement,”
she explained. The college is also
planning to work more closely with
groups such as Catholic Charities and
the Coalition for the Homeless is de-
signing and publicizing future prog-
rams.

Meanwhile, in the business i‘n-

lish class, Trissena Radcliffe anu a
tiend from another hotel bent
closely over their exercises, debating
which was the right answer. Upstairs
in one of the offices, a group of small
children made a circle and began to
run around in a ring. One litile boy
named Solomon was already asleep
on a nearby couch while his mother
attended class downstairs.

“A lot of people have the wrong
impressions about us,” argued
Suretta Glover. “They see women in
the hotels as different someluw.
They feel we’re not trying to do any-
thing for ourselves. But a lot of the
women are just ordinary women.
They got burned out or their rent is
too hi h. We're not bad women.”

oe don't want to take just any-
thing—any old apartment, any old
job,” added Gina Holder. “I have my

ids to think about. I have their future
to think about. And I want to be able
to hold out for something good.” [1

Barbara Solow is a freelance jour-
nalist and co-host of Econonews on
WBAI.