General Information: Overview: Press Clips: PathMaker Partnership

Needy getting a hand
by MIKE PLAISANCE
Sunday, January 14, 2007
Republican Newspaper, Springfield MA

SPRINGFIELD - Two entrepreneurs and a sheriff are joining forces to help homeless people.

Their project will include more than $10 million, 40 units of housing, training and jobs, they said on Thursday.

The plan is a partnership of Hampden County Sheriff Michael J. Ashe Jr., Bernie T. Glassman of the Zen Peacemakers in Montague, and E. Joseph Sibilia Jr. of the Gasoline Alley Foundation on Albany Street.

Glassman is a spiritual teacher with his feet on the ground.

Ashe, a Glassman representative and Sibilia all said they have been talking regularly and that their project - which Ashe said is called Pathmakers Partnership - will happen.

"This isn't something that we 'hope' is going to happen. This is going to happen," said Ashe, sheriff since 1974.

"All I can say is these are organizations that have a history of making a difference," said James Daikan Bastien, chief operating officer of the Zen Peacemakers at the Maezumi Institute that Glassman founded in Montague.

Glassman founded Greyston Mandala in Yonkers, N.Y., which was shown on the CBS News show "60 Minutes" and features a bakery that employs formerly destitute people. The bakery makes brownies for Ben and Jerry's ice cream and has generated millions of dollars that Greyston uses to help people find jobs, training, affordable housing, child care and health care.

Sibilia's foundation works to help low-income and minority entrepreneurs build businesses that are socially responsible and sustainable.

"I talked with Mike Ashe (Thursday) morning. We're doing it. This isn't like some political thing," Sibilia said.

The partnership to help the homeless comes as Mayor Charles V. Ryan on Wednesday announced his 10-year plan to deal with homelessness.

Ryan, who is aware of and supports the project of Ashe, Glassman and Sibilia, discussed a plan that will make 140 apartments available to the city's most chronic homeless residents. The plan includes construction of a 24-hour assistance center on Worthington Street.

Ashe, Glassman and Sibilia began talking after Ashe read about Glassman in The Republican last year.

They are scheduled to unveil their plan at a homelessness symposium on Jan. 22 at Holyoke Community College, said Ashe spokesman Richard J. McCarthy.

Such action by Ashe, Glassman and Sibilia is the type of innovation the city needs to address problems, City Councilor Domenic J. Sarno said. Sarno had Glassman and Bastien address a committee meeting on homelessness in November.

"Particularly with Sheriff Ashe, he's always been doing cutting-edge stuff, too ... I think it's great," Sarno said.

Ashe gained national attention in 1990 when he seized the National Guard Armory on Roosevelt Avenue to house the overflow of inmates from the overcrowded York Street Jail.

The move led to the state providing the $73.5 million for the current jail that opened in 1992, the Hampden County Correctional Center at Stony Brook in Ludlow.

Ashe will designate inmates that Sibilia will train to make furniture, clothing and other items.

The plan is to create businesses that will employ the inmates on their release from prison, officials said. Inmates already work in programs in which they make office furniture and prison uniforms.

Sibilia said he will train them to make high-end metal furniture that can be sold to ABC Carpet & Home, a Manhattan store that caters to the rich and famous.

He will train inmates to make clothing out of cotton and hemp supplied by a women's cooperative from South America.

He will further train inmates to make Dumpsters custom-equipped with motors and valves in which fast-food restaurants can deposit vegetable oil that can be pumped out for use in fueling vehicles, he said.

"I was on a tour with a bus (fueled with vegetable oil), so I know it works. I drove the bus from New York to Cape Cod," Sibilia said.

Glassman's group will work on the housing. Ashe said 30 percent to 40 percent of the inmates who go through the jail annually are homeless, though the partners' housing component will be available to all homeless people, not just former inmates.

Funding for that could come from the Enterprise Foundation. Glassman has a working relationship with the foundation, whose Web site says it has raised and invested $7 billion to improve low-income communities since 1982, officials said.

Bastien said several sites here are being considered for the housing and the funding will total "$10 million-plus."