Hope Is a Weapon

Eleanor Josaitis is a world-class leader in one of the toughest businesses in the world -- the business of hope. For more than 30 years, she has been working in Detroit to affect the lives of disenfranchised people -- and to demonstrate to other people that it is possible to fight hunger, bad schools, and poor job training. And she has delivered results. "Not long ago, at a nice fund-raiser," she recalls, "a woman walked over to me and took my hand. She said, 'Mrs. Josaitis, I want to thank you. I'm about to get my PhD, and I used to be on your food program.' Then she walked off."

Who knew that hope could be such a high-growth business? Back in 1968, Father William Cunningham, a professor at Sacred Heart Seminary in Detroit (and Josaitis's parish priest), joined Josaitis in founding a nonprofit organization called Focus:Hope. Early on, Focus:Hope looked like many other nonprofits. It was staffed by volunteers working out of a basement. It had an ambitious goal: to unite the city's black and white communities. And it had one primary service: feeding infants born to poor women. "The scientific community was telling us that malnourished babies were going to lose their long-term brainpower," Josaitis explains.

Thirty years later, Focus:Hope is a Detroit landmark -- a big, powerful organization that's helping to chart the future of the city. Forget basements: Its campus now occupies 40 acres along Detroit's Oakman Boulevard. It still depends on volunteers (51,000 at last count), but it also has 850 employees -- and an annual budget of $72 million. As for ambition, Focus:Hope still runs its food program, which helps feed 48,000 people. It also runs a training program for machinists, a day-care center, and several for-profit manufacturing companies, whose plant and equipment are worth $100 million.

"We knew we had the fire in our belly to make a difference," Josaitis, now 67, says of herself and Father Cunningham (who died in 1997). How did they go from having fire in the belly to achieving results in the real world? "We made a conscious decision to run this organization with the sophistication of a business," she says.

Hope Is a Business

Three principles govern Focus:Hope's businesslike approach to social change: Think big. Demand results. Invite people to help. The group's first leap forward came in 1981, when Cunningham and Josaitis launched the Machinist Training Institute (MTI), which has taught precision machining and metalworking skills to more than 1,500 students. What's the link between bending metal and feeding kids? "We wanted to get parents off food programs and into the mainstream," Josaitis explains. "We wanted to train men and women to go into the highest ranks of technology, to have the education and the skills they needed to meet the demands of industry. And we wanted them to be so well trained that the color of their skin would not make any difference."

The MTI program, which continues today, offers a 26-week course that covers manufacturing theory, blueprint reading, and technical drafting, and places graduates in jobs that pay an average of $11 an hour. Students who complete this "Core 1" class can then enroll in Core 2 -- another 26-week course -- in which they learn to work with manual and computer-controlled mills, grinders, and lathes. Talk about results: Students who have completed both Core 1 and Core 2 enjoy a job-placement rate of 100%.

And MTI keeps growing and diversifying. Its most "high-end" offering is the Center for Advanced Technologies (CAT), a demand-ing program that accepts promising MTI students and immerses them in a course of study for two to four years. CAT students, who are known as "candidates," spend three hours a day in class and another eight hours a day at TEC Machining Inc., a for-profit engineering company located on the Focus:Hope grounds. TEC Machining is serious business. The physical plant occupies more than 220,000 square feet, including a 180,000-square-foot manufacturing floor. Candidates working for TEC bid out contracts to -- and receive compensation from -- six major companies, including Chrysler, Ford, and Detroit Diesel. CAT candidates, for example, manufacture every pulley on every Detroit Diesel engine.

Josaitis insists on running TEC Machining as a real business, not as a charity case. "Nobody is going to give us anything," she declares. "We have to be as tough as, if not tougher than, our competitors. I don't want anybody to pat me on the head or to give us a contract because we're nice. We earn the business we get."

Students who need remedial help rather than advanced training get on the "Fast Track." This seven-week program, introduced in 1989, teaches communication and computer skills, as well as reading and math, and serves as a feeder program for MTI. In 1997, Focus:Hope launched another program, called First Step, for students who are not ready for Fast Track.