Miami Herald - November 10, 2006
Jacob Goldstein, jgoldstein@MiamiHerald.com

She had just seen an officer approach a man who had bought a vial of crack from her moments before, and she ducked into the Health Initiative's small Grand Avenue office to blend into the crowd gathered for a free lunch.

"I had all intention to go out the back door and come across the street to finish smoking my crack cocaine," she says. But on her way out the door, her crack pipe -- which she says was stowed in a fanny pack -- somehow landed on the floor. "The pipe, I don't know how, it just fell out my pouch."

She was 44 and had been taking drugs for more than 20 years. "Basically I got real tired," she says. So she took the pipe's fall as a sign.

"It was a spiritual awakening. I crushed [the pipe] with my feet. I turned to Cherry Smart and told her I was ready."

Smart is a social worker who, along with Merline Barton, had launched the health initiative a few months before.

Both had been working for years in the West Grove -- a poor neighborhood largely skipped over by the gentrification that transformed the rest of Coconut Grove.

"We were doing economic development, but we were not doing human development," Barton says. "The residents wanted to have nice houses, but they needed to get their bodies and their minds together."

So they approached Thelma Gibson, a West Grove community leader who worked for decades as a nurse. Gibson gave them a space to work.

They began an outreach program that consisted, in part, of walking around the neighborhood, visiting the parks and street corners where people congregated, offering to help them get off drugs, and educating them about HIV/AIDS and other health issues. When they found people who wanted help, they shepherded them through the system.

They named the initiative after Gibson, whom Barton describes as her professional "godmother."

In the years since Wallace showed up, the group has grown to include four full-time and three part-time staffers and a branch office in South Miami. Nursing and social work students rotate through the program for training. In addition to street-level outreach, the initiative provides HIV testing, home visits for AIDS patients, and outreach to senior citizens and church groups.

"Anywhere we can find people who need help, we try to give them the opportunity to come in for service," Gibson says.

"A lot of homeless [and] indigent people have difficulty making it to clinics," says Michael Hutton of The Blue Foundation for a Healthy Florida, which recently gave the group a $50,000 grant. 'By doing outreach on the street you've got people who say, 'We're concerned about you, we care about your health.'"

The same day Wallace told Smart she was ready, Smart arranged for someone to drive Wallace to the intake center for people who want to be admitted to a public drug treatment program.

By the time Wallace had made it through the intake process, it was too late in the day to admit her to the center, so she had to return home for the night. To avoid temptation, she slept with a pillow over her head and didn't answer the door.

Smart drove Wallace to the treatment center early next day. Wallace made it through three months of rehab, and came back to volunteer with the Health Initiative.

Five years later, Wallace works full time as one of the program's outreach workers.

"I came back to the place I used drugs and sold drugs to say there's a better life," she says. "One day, they're going to look up and see me and know that it's time."

061110
MH061102

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