Wesley Community Services/Survival Skills
Kim Grant, DeeEllen Davis and Rhonda Shipley, co-chairs
Rev. Mary Ann Moman, Pastor
Wesley United Methodist Church
3125 W. 30th St.
Indianapolis, Ind. 46222
(317) 926-4414
(317) 927-5391 fax

It has been more than 20 years since this pleasant, shady neighborhood of single-family homes not far from the "brickyard" of the Indianapolis Speedway started to change. Once suburban and relatively affluent, the neighborhood became more diverse and more poor as the expanding city grew out and surrounded the gray-stone sanctuary of Wesley United Methodist Church and turned what had been a typical suburban area into a more urban one.

The people of the church responded, as church people often do, by seeking charitable responses to a growing need. They established a food pantry and clothing closet to serve the area's poor people and regularly provided emergency assistance and Christmas assistance. They operate a preschool program to part-time to give neighborhood parents at least some respite from the endless demands of child care. More recently the group added an evening tutoring program to help neighborhood children with their homework. These services, managed by church volunteers and supported by membership donations, are identified in the community as Wesley Community Services.

Then, receiving a $10,000 bequest, Wesley Community Services began looking for a way to use it for something more than just emergency services. First, they started a unique "Bucket Project," providing a wash bucket filled with home-cleaning supplies to homeless individuals and families returning to independent housing. A happy thing happened, though, when the idea developed so much support and voluntary donations that the group didn't need to touch the $10,000 kitty to keep the buckets coming.

Instead, they discovered, and replicated, a Kansas City model called Survival Skills for Women, a simple and relatively modest program that works with poor women to strengthen the self-esteem and assertiveness skills that are all but prerequisite to getting back on one's feet. This program, which resembles Pennsylvania's Supercupboards but is less directly tied to food pantries and hunger initiatives, involves assembling small groups of 8 to 15 women (or, for that matter, youth or men with Survival Skills Youth and Survival Skills men workshops) for ten three and a half hour sessions, where they work with a facilitator, mentor and role model to cover such topics as assertiveness, personal health, nutrition, money management, child management, self-advocacy, legal rights, coping with crisis, community resources and reentry/employment.

It is not a job-training program, DeeEllen Davis explained; it's a program aimed at letting women learn how to make critical decisions that will shape their lives -- to get an education, to deal with family issues, to move on to training for an appropriate job. "We love success stories when people get jobs," Davis said, "but we don't dictate that they HAVE to get a job."

Wesley Community Services has received numerous small grants to continue SSW and begin SSY. Each program costs about $3,000, which covers not only the salary of a facilitator and participants' workbooks but meals, transportation and child care for every participant, services that are critical to surmount the everyday barriers that might otherwise keep a poor woman from taking part. The group has run six sessions for women since Survival Skills began a little more than a year ago. Working in partnership with a community-development corporation in Southeast Indianapolis and another job preparedness program for youth, it has also conducted two Survival Skills for Youth Classes. In the summer of 1996 they will offer a 12 day residential camp setting for up to 30 at risk teens. A session for men is also in the works, subject to funding and staff.

Success stories at this point are anecdotal, though some of the stories are happy ones indeed, such as the woman who gained so much self-confidence through the course that she marched into the downtown headquarters of Eli Lilly Inc., to thank the corporation for helping to fund a computer class she enrolled in after SSW, and walked out with the promise of an apprenticeship leading to a job. Meanwhile, Wesley Community Services has taken on as interns two Indiana University School of Social Work graduate students (Ellen Szwed and Annette Stemen) to construct an objective system of evaluation to monitor and track the program's effectiveness.

Now they've hired a staff member, Carol Wright, herself a graduate of Survival Skills for Women, to recruit more women for future courses, and so the program grows. Working with mostly volunteers and an underpaid staff of three, and an annual budget of just $24,000, Wesley Community Services is changing things for the better on the city's west side.

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

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