Florida Advocate for the Homeless Tells How Business Skills Led Her Into Nonprofit Work

ENTRY LEVEL

Frances M. Esposito

Age: 49

First job: Director, Community Homeless Assistance Project, Miami

Current job: Executive director, Broward Partnership for the Homeless, Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

My experience in the nonprofit world really started in the volunteer world. In the early 1990s, I was in legal administration at what was then called Fine Jacobson Schwartz and Nash, a law firm here in Florida. Part of my responsibility was to find a way in which the law firm could have an impact on the community in a positive way, over and above providing legal services.

Homelessness was very evident then. The homeless population numbered over 10,000 in Miami-Dade County at the time. So I gathered together a group of lawyers and support staff, and twice a month, we’d visit the Camillus House, which was the largest provider of homeless services in the area back then.

That was my first direct exposure to the homeless. At Camillus House, we’d prepare and provide a meal between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m., and I remember very clearly, there was a line literally wrapped around the block — this agency served about 1,500 to 2,000 meals a day at the time. What struck me was these individuals would be moving down the line using one hand to push the tray. They’d use one hand because everything they owned was in the other hand. And if they had two hands free, then they were loading their pockets and their bags and whatever they did have to take back food for an evening meal, to wherever they were staying: under a bridge, in a car, or in a shelter.

Of the 10,000 individuals who were homeless in the area, there was a very large encampment of approximately 550 people living in shanties, or cardboard houses, under a single bridge in downtown Miami. Lawton Chiles, then Florida’s governor, was long committed to resolving the homeless problem, which was a source of conflict between the city of Miami and the county of Miami-Dade. The governor established a task force, and that task force provided funding to a three-month project. Instead of expecting these homeless individuals to find services in the community — such as Social Security, veterans’ [benefits] or food stamps, whose offices were not centrally located — this project’s unique approach would be to bring the services to the homeless in the encampment, bring trailers underneath the bridge, and get [the homeless] moved out and placed into programs.

This was the Community Homeless Assistance Project, and in 1991, the project was built with “lent” staff from every facet of social services and the private sector. The Miami Herald ran an impressive story on the project, and Anita Bock, a lawyer at my firm, was involved in the project and was in the article. I called Anita to extend my good wishes, and she told me that they were about two or three weeks away from opening the project, but that they didn’t have a project leader. “Do you know anyone?” she asked me. I started to take down the list of qualifications, and then I said, “Anita, do you think I have a chance?”

This came out of nowhere. I had a very successful career in the law firm, but I just felt moved to do this. I was a legal secretary in the 1970s, but by the 1980s, I was in the position of an executive, although I hadn’t finished college yet. I went to school at night for seven years, graduated summa cum laude — but I very often felt like the square peg in the round hole. [The director’s position] just went back to my roots, back to who I am. Being the oldest of 11, I’ve been taking care of others all of my life. At one point in my life, I was a self-supporting, divorced mother of three, so I certainly understand the realities of child care, and of maintaining a living wage in order to provide rent, food, health care, and the other essentials of a decent living.

A panel of seven people, from the United Way and other community leaders, interviewed me for the homeless-assistance project, and they said to me, “All right, you have no social-service background, how are you going to go about doing this?” I took a business approach. I said, “You have a million-dollar budget that needs to properly expended, a volatile situation, and a three-month timeline.” I felt that what I brought to the project was oversight and administrative skills.

I could design a budget, supervise the public-relations aspects of the projects, and guide the staff to meet the numerous community expectations with regard to the successful placement of these individuals. I didn’t need to have a social-services background to manage staff. My job would be to set the administrative parameters in which they could work. How are we going to cross-reference couples who aren’t married? How are we going to keep track of the placements? How are we going to get everyone placed before our dollars run out?

Also, these 550 men and women that were going to have to be moved, it was a traumatic situation for them, given the years they’d lived under the bridge. We had to create a relationship of trust with those individuals, and as the media came in, we had to educate the media how to handle themselves with the population.

I was the unanimous choice of the board. In that position, and in my positions since, I always say that I’m taking the principles and practices of business and marrying them to altruism. The first day the project started, I arrived at the site at about 4:30 in the morning, and a policeman pulled me over and said, “Lady, boy, you’re in the wrong place. You need to leave,” and I said, “No, I’m in the right place. I’m in the project director.” I opened up the first trailer and started from scratch.

One of the most important things that I learned, coming out of the corporate environment and to the human-services environment, is that in order to motivate and move an organization, the stimulus is very different. In the corporate world, the stimulus is the bottom line; in the nonprofit world, it’s the mission. The type of individual attracted to this industry is very different, their hearts are always part of the equation in resolving challenges. Every day, I realized that these are people who are motivated to help other people, and that communication was one of the most important things in a nonprofit environment. In order to keep them challenged, I had to keep them informed. Over the three-month project, all 550 homeless people were placed. And I learned that nonprofit work was the work that I wanted to do. — As told to Alison Stein Wellner

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