A Settlement House With a Difference

What comes into your mind when you think of a settlement or neighborhood house? Basketball games, museum trips, and some young Vassar graduate helping kids with their psychological problems?

Boston's South End House is different.

The House has replaced traditional activities in recreation and education with new programs focusing on the economic needs of local residents. The search for the "right" program has been mirrored in the search for a name. Five years ago the House became the South End Youth Training and Employment Center. With the help of federal money, it ran a morning school and afternoon job training program for over one thousand high school dropouts. Three years ago, the House lost most of its trainees and all of its federal funds to Action for Boston Community Development (ABCD), which became Boston's official poverty program. Now the House, privately financed, concentrates on employment counseling, job groups for teenagers, and grocery cooperatives.

While the House still has programs like nursery schools and summer camps, its big events are employment nights and recruitment for evening school. The House's atmosphere is efficient though friendly. Most of the social workers live in the surrounding neighborhood instead of middle-class suburbs, though some, including a few Harvard students, do come in.

The Businessman Social Worker

Martin Gopen, the House's Employment Counselor, personifies its style. Short, moustachioed, he covers his genuine feeling for social work with the air of a fast-talking, hard-hitting businessman. As he yells at a group leader for bothering him, Gopen carefully takes down the name of a crippled Puerto Rican who cannot find satisfactory employment. Gopen will see him tomorrow.

Many new industries, mostly concerned with electronics, computers and light machinery, have moved into sites along Route 128 on the outskirts of Boston. But the Boston school system has not been sensitive to this expansion of the job market. "While companies along Route 128 are crying out for skilled machinists and engineers," Gopen says, "Boston schools are still teaching woodworking and cabinet-making. Mel King, now head of Congress of Racial Equality, ran for the school board a few years ago on a platform of connecting Boston vocational schools with Route 128. But he was defeated."

Federal subsidies for on-the-job training programs (OJT), especially since the cutbacks due to the Vietnam War, do not fill the training gap. Gopen points out that there are now only 380 individual contracts for OJT available.

So Gopen has personally established contacts with private training programs and 128 industries. And, at the same time, he has introduced a brilliant new idea in employment counseling. Instead of sitting in his office waiting for people to ask for information, Gopen goes out into the neighborhood in a panel truck covered with signs. These signs advertise job opportunities, training programs, and night school, as well as free legal advice and marriage counseling. Gopen says, "When a strange thing like this truck comes on the street, people just come to look. They feel much more at ease here when I'm on their territory than in an office. I've met people living on this block who didn't know the South End House provided job information."

Gopen's truck has a room for consultations, a table to fill out applications, and even a phone so people can call immediately to check job openings. In seventeen months of operation, Gopen's mobile employment center has over seven hundred part-time and four hundred full-time job placements to its credit. And poverty programs in New Haven and New York have begun to copy Gopen's idea.

South End House has achieved notable success with one large Cambridge employer--Harvard University. Harvard has has hired more than twelve secretaries through the House. One social worker contrasted Harvard's response to that of "other Boston colleges closer to the House that practice a subtler form of discrimination." Several other Boston colleges rejected Gopen's approaches.

The Day the Phone Co. Came

Gopen also helps local residents find jobs by organizing employment nights at South End House. He brings large-scale employers to the House to talk to local residents. The results are dramatic. "More people got hired on the day the phone company came here," Gopen beamed, "than the telephone company got through a whole year of advertising." Since the passage of job discrimination laws, many firms have wanted to hire members of minority groups. But the South End residents are sometimes too scared or too apathetic to travel all the way to a firm's main offices, Gopen explained.

For teenagers, South End House has a special job program. The House creates jobs for the boys, like house-painting, moving families for the Boston Redevelopment Agency, and poster hanging for political candidates. Then the boys must decide themselves about time schedules, salary levels, and equipment rental, if necessary. Last summer, eighty boys, led by several Vista voluteers and work-study students, earned more than $10,000.

The Construction Cooperative

The job program is changing. Since the House wants the boys to develop more responsibility, the boys now are paid by the quality of the job, not by the hour. Second, the group is trying to organize a light construction cooperative because, as one teenager explained, "We want to be more independent and make more money." "We have about $280 in the bank," another added. "So we could buy saws, hammers, buffers, and other equipment. Then we'd be able to take on some bigger jobs."

Both social workers and the teenagers are enthusiastic about the program. Babbled Arnett Waters, a Harvard freshmen, who is a job super- visor, 'The job program is excellent. It inculcates in the boys some good working habits as well as giving them some spending money." Several of the boys felt that the program was a good supplement to their vocational training in high school. One boy said, "This program helps keep me in school. If I flunk a subject, then I can't work here. They give me a tutor."

Another program, attacking the economic needs of the South Enders, is the House's cooperative grocery. A group of mothers, dissatisfied with the abnormally high food prices in the South End, got together and began buying truckloads of groceries wholesale. Soon several other neighborhood centers and block associations were putting in orders. Now the cooperative buys over $1000 worth of food each week. According to a VISTA volunteer working in the cooperative, "Families save anywhere from five to fifteen dollars a week on their grocery bill, depending on the size of the family. For people on welfare such a saving means an awfullot."

South End House's economic orientation has been a success with the local residents. As one local teenager said, commenting on the House, "I like it."The Grocery Coop Unloading $1000 Worth of Food