The last thing I remember Eleanor Josaitis saying to me, a few months before she died seven years ago, was “we’re not going away.” She was talking about Focus Hope, of course.
And they haven’t disappeared, though they’ve been sorely tried on occasion. The world has gone through vast changes since that bleak winter after the 1967 riots, that winter when Josaitis and her kindred spirit, Father William Cunningham, began stockpiling food in the basement of St. Alfred’s Catholic Church in Taylor.
They didn’t have any cosmic answers to the problems of anything, or any long-term solutions. They just knew people were hungry, and they should feed them. And they thought that was also the best way to avoid a new civil disturbance. We forget now that there was a great fear of another explosion in the years following the summer of 1967.
Thankfully, another riot never happened, perhaps in part because of their efforts. After that first year, Summer Hope became Focus Hope, and Cunningham and Josaitis had concluded that while they needed to go on feeding people, that wasn’t enough.
People needed jobs and skills and many were struggling with basic literacy. So they threw themselves into the work of building an organization that could do that. Father Cunningham was the visionary. Eleanor Josaitis was the practical one, the born organizer who could get things done and make the trains and the people run on time.
They twisted arms, got companies to contribute, got retired executives to come out of retirement and design and run programs. They built a Machinist Training Institute and eventually put together a 40-acre campus that sprawls along Oakland Boulevard.
They had hundreds of workers and trainees in the late 1990s, before they were hit by not one but several calamities. Father Bill, as everyone called him, died of cancer in May 1997. A few weeks later, Focus Hope’s campus was struck by a freak summer tornado.
Nobody was killed, but there was tremendous damage. Nevertheless, General Eleanor led her troops to pull things together, clean up the damage and carry on. But a more serious problem was lurking. The automotive industry was shrinking. Machinist jobs were disappearing.
Focus Hope began to try to diversify, to shift focus. They came up with weatherization and information technology programs. Eleanor Josaitis at that point had to wear both hats, to be the internal chief organizing force and the outer public face of Focus Hope.
Somehow she did both superbly well. The last time I saw her was eight years ago, less than a year before she died. Focus Hope was still feeding almost 46,000 hungry people a month then, as Detroit was lurching toward bankruptcy in the aftermath of the Great Recession.
Timothy Duperron, then the chief operating officer, told me “Nobody knows everything we do, really.” I was sure that was true. What amazed me most that they were still doing it, and doing it well. A priest trained in the seminary and a blue-collar housewife with five kids had built a huge industrial and charitable enterprise and kept it going.
Today, Focus Hope is still there, adjusting their sails to suit changing winds and changing times, but staying true to their core mission, which Cunningham and Josaitis hammered out back when they started: “Recognizing the dignity and beauty of every person, we pledge intelligent and practical action to overcome racism, poverty, and injustice.”
Hard to be cynical when you know that’s exactly what they’ve done.
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