Learn about our beginnings in Grand Central

Having gained political experience by running the New York City volunteer office for Ted Kennedy's presidential campaign, George decided to run for Congress on a platform of ending homelessness. A testament to growing public concern about homelessness and his keen political sense, he achieved 40 percent of the popular vote in the democratic primary and the endorsement of three major New York City newspapers, all with a campaign fund of only $7,000. So immersed did he eventually become in the plight of the homeless that he decided to leave his lucrative career and devote himself full-time to drawing public attention to the homeless problem. He raised his voice at government hearings and press conferences. He brought reporters to Grand Central to meet his homeless acquaintances and continually pressed them to cover the issue. He raised money to provide direct cash assistance to homeless individuals he had come to know for medicine, clothing, a room for a night, and other emergency needs.

George set out to prove that a formerly homeless person could create a viable existence if he were able to obtain even a minimum wage low skill job, rent an affordable room and stay off drugs. He already saw the fallacy that minimum wage work was a "dead end." He believed that a job, any job, builds dignity and confidence and leads to better opportunities. He began to live his life as a kind of social experiment by getting a job as a law firm mailroom clerk at minimum wage and renting a room in a single room occupancy (SRO) building. George also fought to stop the conversion of SRO buildings to luxury housing, aware that 100,000 of these units had already been lost. SROs had historically served as "first rung" housing for low-income people. He succeeded in having one such building turned over to a non-profit for use as permanent housing for homeless and low-income adults. Later, as President of The Doe Fund, he would personally oversee the development of a supportive SRO for homeless persons with AIDS and the first newly constructed SRO in New York City specifically for formerly homeless working adults.

In 1985 a homeless woman George had known and fed in Grand Central froze to death on Christmas Eve after being forcibly ejected from the terminal. George and her fellow homeless inhabitants of the terminal had known her only as "Mama." The tragic event prompted George to form and incorporate an organization that would, through innovative and holistic programs, "empower homeless men and women to achieve lives of self-sufficiency." It would be named The Doe Fund in honor of Mama and the countless other anonymous homeless people who live and die on the streets of our city needlessly every year. He fashioned the new organization based on the lessons he had learned from his many years of direct personal contact with the homeless. During his time in Grand Central, he would hand homeless men and women a sandwich and over and over again they would tell him that, while they appreciated the sandwich, what they really wanted was their own room and a job to pay for it. From this, The Doe Fund derived its guiding principle: that the homeless are motivated to work, and they must be given the support and opportunity to do so if they are to rebuild their lives and become self-sufficient.

A California screenwriter, Harriet Karr had taken personal interest in a young drug-addicted homeless woman named April while doing research for a film and had made many trips to New York City to try to rescue her from the streets. George had also known and tried many times to save April. The two met at April's funeral after her suicide at age 19. Six months later they were married and channeled their shared commitment into addressing the homeless problem by building The Doe Fund. Harriet brought her writing skills, compassion, poise and, despite her vastly different background, a remarkable ability to relate to the homeless and their problems. Together, George and Harriet developed and set out to implement Ready, Willing & Able, the first residential paid work and training program for homeless people.

They had secured from the City's Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) both the funding to purchase and renovate an abandoned building on Gates Avenue in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, and a work contract to hire and train people to renovate city-owned apartments for occupancy by homeless families. Their idea was to forge a workforce from single homeless men and to house them at Gates Avenue. George and Harriet went to the streets, to Grand Central, and to every men's shelter in the city to recruit participants. "If you're willing to stop using drugs and go to work everyday," they said, "come to the Church of St. Agnes next Saturday morning." Hundreds of homeless men showed up to take advantage of this rare opportunity. The first 45 "trainees" began working for The Doe Fund on January 2, 1990. The question now was: could they and would they do the job?

The odds were against them. Averaging 32 years of age, most of the men had never held a job outside the drug trade in their lives. They were short on education and long on legal problems, debts, and criminal records. They had incredibly convoluted relationships and psyches scarred and stunted by lifetimes of neglect and abuse. They were raised in blighted neighborhoods and in families without fathers, resources, opportunities, stability or dreams. Worst of all, they had vicious drug addictions. Many could not remember a time when they were not getting high. And yet, from day one, the men outperformed the expectations of the city contract. Ready, Willing & Able worked.

The program mirrored what society would ultimately expect of those who graduated. Trainees relinquished welfare benefits in favor of $5.50 per hour in wages, paid $65 per week toward their room and board, and put $30 per week in savings accounts. In return, they slept in comfortable beds in semi-private rooms, and ate healthy, hearty meals prepared by trainees who expressed interest in food preparation as a possible career. As the program developed, there were caseworkers on staff, nightly 12-step meetings, life skills classes, and certified teachers to help those who needed them earn high school equivalency diplomas or, in some cases, to learn to read and write. What George McDonald had known all along proved powerfully true: "Work works." By 1994, 90 formerly homeless and drug-addicted men had entered the legitimate workforce. They were staying clean, doing their jobs diligently and well, paying rent, saving money, repairing old relationships and forging new ones and looking to the future.

The success of the program highlighted everything that had gone awry in the City's sprawling, drug-ridden public shelter system and disproved the perspective, frequently trumpeted by housing advocates, that homelessness is solely an issue of a housing shortage. In 1991, Mayor David N. Dinkins invited George to participate in a Commission on Homelessness headed by future Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Andrew Cuomo. Together the members of the Commission created The Way Home, a model for addressing homelessness that has since served as a blueprint for homeless policy both locally and nationally. The Way Home pointed to the multiple and interrelated underlying causes of homelessness -- the severe and persistent barriers to employment faced by the homeless and the pervasiveness of substance abuse among the population. It called for a holistic approach that would systematically address these barriers to reduce homelessness permanently. Ready, Willing & Able was the model for and embodiment of this theory later called the "continuum of care."

He and Harriet live on East 84th Street, not far from East 86th, which used to be one of the filthiest stretches on the Upper East Side. "This is what we're going to do," he said. "We're going to take the money we have left and we're going to buy really nice uniforms and we're going to put the guys on 86th Street and they're going to clean it up every day and the community is going to want to support us." And that's exactly what happened. At a time when most had developed "compassion fatigue" regarding the homeless, The Doe Fund was able to tap into both the industriousness and potential of its formerly homeless trainees, as well as the concern and generosity of the City's business community and private citizens.