Partnerships for Better Programs

Charity spreads its innovative approach via mentor system

As societal problems ravaged their city’s neighborhoods, pastors and members of the Greater Milwaukee Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America were frustrated. When the problems reached fever pitch four years ago, “the group felt called to deal with drug addiction and homelessness, but pastors aren’t trained as drug counselors,” says Joy True, then the group’s city ministry coordinator. So its leaders began to look around the country for solutions.

Help arrived several months later, when one of the group’s pastors heard a speech by David M. Erickson, president of Samaritan Inns, a Washington charity that provides long-term treatment and shelter for homeless drug addicts. Mr. Erickson seemed to describe the insidious problems in Milwaukee — and, furthermore, appeared to have some answers, Ms. True says.

Fortunately for the Milwaukee group, Samaritan Inns had just started a program called Shared Hope, to help the charity pass on its approach by pairing some of its 49 employees with workers at organizations with similar missions, forming a mentor relationship.

Sharing Knowledge

The program’s goal, Mr. Erickson says, is not only to show other organizations how to serve the needy, but also to train those organizations to show other groups how to do the same thing. So far, it has trained the Lutheran group in Milwaukee, along with organizations in Washington and Baltimore, and plans to sign a new agreement this month with an organization in Evansville, Ind. Within a decade, Mr. Erickson says, the group hopes to train charities in as many as 25 cities.

But for now, Shared Hope is carefully nurturing its handful of training efforts. Last April, after two years in the partnership, Milwaukee’s Serenity Inns — a transitional housing program for formerly homeless drug addicts — opened its doors as an offshoot of the Lutheran synod, with Ms. True as program director. The inn has five residents. One client, says Ms. True proudly, “was able to save $2,500, has gotten a promotion at his full-time job, and has been able to find independent housing.”

Shared Hope represents an innovative approach for small charities that seek to share effective programs with other groups, says Albert Ruesga, vice president for programs and communications at the Meyer Foundation, a grant maker in Washington that supports Samaritan Inns. “Any kind of information-sharing program is pretty rare in the sector,” says Mr. Ruesga. “But any nonprofit engaged in thoughtful sharing of what they learn is very rare, and it is certainly unusual in an organization that is community-based.”

Samaritan Inns was founded in 1985 by Mr. Erickson and K. Killian Noe, who later went on to create the Recovery Cafe, a refuge for formerly homeless addicted men and women in Seattle.

The Washington charity, which was founded as a response to a sermon at the Church of the Savior, where both Mr. Erickson and Ms. Noe were members, raises its funds entirely from private sources. Its goal is to help its clients kick their addictions and find housing and jobs. Its efforts, which rely on the principles of 12-step recovery programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous, include a residential treatment program, transitional housing, and longer-term, single-room occupancy housing.

Lasting Results

The charity has won several local and national awards for its work, and has seen evidence that it is accomplishing its mission.

A 2003 Samaritan Inns survey of the group’s former single-room housing occupants found that their recovery is lasting: Seventy-seven percent of the respondents, who “graduated” from the program in the years 1991 to 2002, reported that they had had uninterrupted sobriety since leaving the program, and 73 percent said they were employed 20 hours or more per week. Thirty-one percent even reported that they had purchased their own home.

But success didn’t come right away. Mr. Erickson says that when the group’s first clients in the mid-1980s got clean and rejoined the work force, they would relapse into drug addiction because the only housing affordable to them was drug-infested, isolating, and dilapidated. So, in contrast to other organizations, Samaritan Inns’ leaders decided to create longer-term housing that was affordable, drug- and alcohol-free, community-oriented, and attractive.

“We want our environment to say the same things we say to people verbally: Your life matters, your life is precious, you are somebody,” says Mr. Erickson.

Today, Samaritan Inns’ nine facilities serve approximately 250 men and women.

Since the late 1980s, Samaritan Inns has attracted the attention of a variety of community organizations wanting to copy its programs. However, the charity’s staff members found that brief visits or a few phone calls weren’t enough to successfully spread their efforts to other organizations.

“We had been helping people for years in a very casual way, giving out our handbook, which is very well-organized,” says Beth Smith, an addiction counselor at Samaritan Inns’ Women’s Transitional Living Program.

“We would pretty much just hand it to people and say ‘God bless’ as they left,” she adds. But what other charities needed was personalized guidance over a long period of time.

To provide that guidance, Samaritan Inns created Shared Hope in 2002. The program chooses only two or three organizations to train each year, says Mr. Erickson, seeking groups that can provide the support that clients need to transform their lives, rather than simply providing short-term solutions to their problems. Although Samaritan Inns maintains a strong spiritual orientation, Mr. Erickson says his group does not disqualify secular charities from participating.

Shared Hope picks the organizations it wants to train carefully, looking for other executive directors who share the group’s mission, vision, and ideas, says Mike Little, Shared Hope’s coordinator. Shared Hope’s selection committee, he says, is so serious about looking for the right organizations to work with that “we almost talk people out of partnering with us.”

To apply, charities must answer questions about their community needs, organizational goals, and local resources. Then the groups meet with a selection committee made up of Samaritan Inns staff members, and they discuss what each side expects of the other.

The pool of charities that could benefit from Samaritan’s help is large, notes Mr. Erickson: “The issues we’re seeking to address effectively here are prominently unmet in 200 to 300 communities across the country — maybe more.”

The Cost of Teamwork

During the training process, members of the two staffs travel between their locations. The training is broken down into three phases: organizational and property development, program development and implementation, and evaluation.

The mentor relationship is tailored to each partner, says Mr. Little. “We deliberately set ourselves up not to be a franchise,” he says. “We want the local groups to have what they need, instead of replicating ourselves.” In addition, he says, Samaritan Inns is concerned that its mission not shift from providing social services to running Shared Hope: “As you get bigger, you can lose your essence.”

The cost of the training falls entirely on the charities that receive the help, not to Samaritan Inns; the charities pay for all travel, including that of Samaritan Inns’ staff members.

Mr. Erickson says that his organization does not want to ask its donors to pay for its work in distant cities. Also, he adds, “if the mentee is serious about carrying the work forward, it’s a wonderful launching platform for them to go to people in their community and say, ‘This is what we are committed to doing. Walk with us on this journey, so we can do this effectively and correctly from start.’”

Costs vary according to the goals of the charity that is being trained and the number of Samaritan Inns personnel and trips that are required, says Mr. Erickson. For example, he says, “One of our earlier partnerships was in Baltimore, so that made it much easier in time and costs, which were around $20,000″ for the whole process. “Milwaukee,” he adds, “was substantially more, because of the travel involved.” Samaritan evaluates the progress of the organization it trains at the one-month, six-month, and one-year marks. “What we are trying to do is see how effectively they’re able to do what we taught them,” he says, “and how well we did with them.”

Few nonprofit groups share their approaches with other organizations, but even fewer succeed in doing so, says Spence Limbocker, executive director of Neighborhood Funders Group, an association of grant makers that specialize in housing and community development.

Although Mr. Limbocker says he is unfamiliar with Shared Hope’s efforts, he is skeptical that such programs can work long-term. Of the training efforts he has seen, he says, “none of them have worked. Either the staff at the nonprofit sharing its ideas burned out and their own programs suffered, or the replication [of a program] didn’t take place because the executive director of the mentee organization didn’t share the same vision as the mentor organization.”

According to Shared Hope’s Mr. Little, the group has anticipated these obstacles and designed its program with an eye toward long-term sustainability.

To avoid burnout, the group breaks up the workload among its employees.

“Because replication is done in three phases, staffers are usually only involved in one of the three stages and don’t get overwhelmed,” he says. At most, he says, a staff member might make only one or two visits per year to a partner in another city.

Samaritan Inns staff members say that sharing their knowledge helps them clarify their own work experiences, and that they continue to learn new things themselves as they pass on their approach.

Says Ms. Smith of Samaritan Inns: “‘I learned how much I know, and realized I have a wealth of information. But you give it in a way that’s best for the mentoring partners.”

Ms. Smith says she helps other charities attain a more realistic view of what they can do. “They start out with very broad plans to fix everything for everybody,” she says. “I encourage them to bring it down to a doable level.”

Shared Hope’s mentors do not force their way of doing things onto their partners, says Amelia Harris, executive director of Martha’s Place, a shelter in Baltimore that participated in the program in 2001-2. She appreciated, she says, how Samaritan Inns staff members cautioned her that not everything she learned would work for Martha’s Place.

“If something didn’t feel right, I was under no obligation to do it that way,” she says.

The partnership, she notes, continues on an informal basis, with her mentors encouraging her to call whenever she needs advice: “They are not selfish.”

Brian Higgins, a former Samaritan Inns counselor, worked with Shared Hope mentors in his new job as program director at Bethany, a Washington charity. His group worked with Shared Hope to design a new board of directors, raise money, develop programs, and train staff members. When it was time to appear before Bethany’s board to get new programs approved, he says, his mentors went with him — and the programs were successfully created. He credits the board’s approval of the plans to the programs’ emphasis on “common-sense approaches to recovery, and not on neat, exotic activities, like acupuncture.”

Ms. True, of the Milwaukee Lutheran group, appreciated the volume and thoroughness of information and the ready help from her Shared Hope mentors.

“Once we decided we’d do transitional housing, they shared floor plans, policy procedures, and information on how to work with a board,” says Ms. True. “They were very instrumental in helping us look at resources we could utilize right here in Milwaukee, such as working with foundations and building relationships with other donors. They had those things at the ready.”

However, the long-distance arrangement has its limits, she says, as her group learned when it was trying to navigate Milwaukee’s red tape and zoning policies to open its housing facility. “It was much more than we had ever anticipated,” she says. “Samaritan Inns’ staff was wonderfully supportive emotionally, but with their being in D.C. and not knowing local laws, they couldn’t be here on the front lines for us.”

Based on its early experiences, Samaritan Inns has revised its training approach to get better results.

At first, says Mr. Erickson, the charity started off by talking about philosophical underpinnings for Samaritan Inns’ work. But, he says, it has since learned that “the beginning is not the time for sharing those. Now, we lead with some activities people can do to see the practical, demonstrable results, which they can claim. That way, people who are supporting the initiative — such as funders — can also see the results.”

Shared Hope continues to learn, Mr. Erickson says. “We don’t see this as a one-way street. We’re not appointed by God to give out great wisdom. We’ve a learned a lot through grace and mistakes. If you stop learning, you can stagnate, and become a closed system.”