Social Justice and the First Lady

With Congress on recess and many of the city's swells attending the Aspen Ideas Festival, it's a good time to check in on the Washington that is mostly invisible to the lawmakers, lobbyists and assorted elites that define the nation's capital. It's the Washington that Michelle Obama is determined to make part of her White House neighborhood. Her husband has declined to put a "Taxation Without Representation" license plate on the presidential limousine, but Michelle has become DC's Florence Nightingale, reaching out to the city's poor and neglected in a way few previous First Lady have done.

Her willingness to highlight her adopted city's problems and publicize promising solutions offers a road map for social justice advocates. Those who toil in this field are for the most part selfless do-gooders who normally labor in obscurity, unaccustomed to having the wife of the president stop by. But since she's been in Washington, Michelle Obama has made it a practice to almost every week visit some worthy non-profit, sparking a game of guessing where she'll turn up next. "She'll come here eventually, her days are numbered," says a confident Kate Clinton of N Street Village, which serves homeless and low-income women.

Clinton had just gotten word that Obama was up the street at Unity Health Care, a clinic that cares for indigent people, where she was touting money in the stimulus bill to build twenty additional exam rooms. A contingent of female reporters following Obama were left to cool their heels as the First Lady talked privately with the clinic's practitioners about childhood obesity and teen pregnancy. There's a fine line between paying attention and exploitation, and Obama is careful not to cross it as she enters a world of stresses that she has worked hard all her life to avoid. The economic downturn has taken its toll everywhere, but for social service agencies, it's a double whammy with reduced revenues socked by increased demand. The First Lady's seal of approval is priceless in terms of cachet and fundraising.

I was getting a tour of N Street Village at the time of this latest sighting of Michelle Obama in what's known as the 14th Street corridor. Not far from the White House, the area was damaged during the 1968 riots and then for years was a popular strip for prostitution. Luther Place Memorial Church ministered to the broken community and fifteen years ago bought the building that is dedicated to the care of homeless and low-income women, the most under-served and often the least cared-for among the city's unfortunate. N Street serves 800 women a year, but doesn't serve children or women who are the victims of domestic abuse because there are other resources for them. That leaves a population of mostly older women with significant mental-health issues often complicated by drug and alcohol addiction.   

They are the legacy of a failed social policy that began in the 1980's with the de-institutionalization of people with mental illness on the assumption that communities with the help of pharmaceuticals would absorb their care. "And that didn't happen," says Schroeder Stribling, a licensed clinical social worker and deputy executive director at N Street. As she takes me through the facility, she introduces me to someone she proudly calls "the anchor," a cheerful African-American woman who is eager to tell me all the classes she has taken from yoga to anger management. She's been coming to N Street for nine years and Stribling counts her as a success story by the four measurements she uses: health, housing, income and employment. Tanya has been substance free for two years, she's in subsidized housing, she gets disability, and during the day, she does classes. N Street does try to place people in jobs if possible, and they've started a pilot program with "supportive senior services," what we used to call nursing homes, where they pay half the salary for the first year for people they place to encourage their hiring.

Three clients who volunteered for N Street's Speakers Bureau assemble around a table to tell me their stories. "Being heard is such an important element of healing," says Stribling, especially for women who have been disregarded and marginalized. Melissa, 31, had just celebrated a year of being clean and sober. Asked what she wanted help with when she first came to N Street, she said, "Everything." Pat had spent twelve years caring for a mother with Alzheimers, and now was homeless. Claudette sported a blue ribbon for first place in attending activities in the Wellness Center. She came to America as a student and has a bachelors and graduate degree. Dressed in the colorful garb of Congo in her native Africa, Claudette urged me to tell people, "We have mental illness, yes, but please don't fear us."

There was opposition initially to N Street, based on fear that the homeless would destroy the neighborhood and depress property values. Instead, the facility is seen as contributing to the process of gentrification. Among those who recognize its work is the Dalai Lama, who stopped by two years ago and left a check for $10,000. It was another First Lady, Hillary Clinton, who said it takes a village to raise a child, a concept Michelle Obama has embraced and broadened in her new home.        

© 2009