Origins
The Doe Fund was founded in 1985 by George McDonald during a sharp rise in homelessness in New York City. McDonald, an executive in the private sector at that time, began by distributing food to homeless people on the floor of Grand Central Terminal for 700 consecutive nights. McDonald later recalled people telling him "'…this is a great sandwich, but I really wish I had a room to stay in and a job to pay for it.' People wanted to work, and I wanted to help." George McDonald's conviction that paid work and personal responsibility could turn lives around became the foundation for The Doe Fund's "work first" philosophy. He and his wife, Harriet Karr-McDonald, developed The Doe Fund’s key programs based on their belief that most homeless individuals will seize the opportunity to change their lives if given the opportunity.
Read more about this topic: The Doe Fund
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“Lucretius
Sings his great theory of natural origins and of wise conduct; Plato
smiling carves dreams, bright cells
Of incorruptible wax to hive the Greek honey.”
—Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“Grown onto every inch of plate, except
Where the hinges let it move, were living things,
Barnacles, mussels, water weeds—and one
Blue bit of polished glass, glued there by time:
The origins of art.”
—Howard Moss (b. 1922)