In Germantown, a nonprofit helps formerly incarcerated women rebuild lives shattered by addiction and homelessness | Philly Gives

So many lost years.

Addiction stole 23 years from Jacqueline Hoeflich, who also lost her children in the time she spent behind bars. In November, on her 63rd birthday, her son, 43, called her. It was the first time they had spoken in a decade. “That made my birthday,” she said through tears.

Adele Williams, 59, lost three children and 28 years — nearly three decades of addiction, homelessness, prostitution, and prison.

“You can’t get none of them back,” she said.

But what you can get, through Why Not Prosper, a Germantown nonprofit, is a chance to live again, to find peace, to be clean and safe, to have a bed and clothes, food and friends, and most importantly, to rebuild shattered relationships, as Williams is, slowly, after 14 years of sobriety.

Led by the Rev. Michelle Anne Simmons, who also lost children and many years to addiction and prison, Why Not Prosper helps pick up the pieces and mend the broken hearts and spirits of women — mostly mothers — released from prison.

“People need a vision of hope, something tangible to believe in,” said Faith Bartley, 60, the group’s operations director, who experienced it all — 27 years of homelessness, addiction, prostitution, and prison — until 2017, when she encountered the whirling dervish who is Simmons.

“Why Not Prosper exudes love for humanity,” Bartley said. “I wasn’t used to love. I didn’t know what love was until this lady loved me back to life.”

The people who work with Simmons — or who have been helped by her — marvel at what she has done. There are 25 beds for people who come out of prison in several buildings near Chelten Avenue and Chew Street. The Josanne Ford Workforce Academy (named after its director) offers training in basic and computer literacy, ServSafe food handling, home caregiving, construction flagging, and on tap next year, phlebotomy.

Weekly, Why Not Prosper women travel to visit their sisters, as they call them, in the Philadelphia Industrial Correctional Center, a jail for people sentenced to fewer than 24 months. In November, they served a Thanksgiving meal at the jail, and during most trips, they distribute care packages with bras, underpants, socks, shampoo, menstrual products, and other personal hygiene items.

Founded in 2001, Why Not Prosper’s latest effort — its REV, or Rolling Engagement Van — expands its reach beyond its cluster of Germantown buildings. The van shows up at community events ready to provide vaccines, wound-care kits, bus passes, clothing, food, mental health referrals, and help obtaining birth certificates and identification.

Also new is FIRM, the Formerly Incarcerated Renaissance Museum, dedicated to art inspired by or produced by people who have been incarcerated. On one wall? Weavings incorporating shredded criminal records.

Underlying all of it, the women say, is an attitude of love and nonjudgment, coupled with strict rules for daily living.

At breakfast every morning, they recite an affirmation printed in prominent places everywhere, from the kitchen to the classroom: “We are women committed to bettering ourselves by divorcing our fears, ending our affair with doubt, getting engaged to trust, marrying the truth while striving for excellence and discovering a new way to live.”

Beds made. Dishes, pots, and pans washed, dried, and put away. Clean the sink, clean the stove after every meal, and on Saturdays, double clean the whole house. Celebrate the good days, roll with the bad ones, and keep on going step by step to a new way to live.

“All the things she does has a meaning and purpose, to bring you to a better place,” Williams said. “When you are out in addiction, you don’t understand how to do daily livable things, how to be a structured person.

“When I was addicted, I wasn’t trying to do anything, but get more drugs, more drugs, more drugs. That structure is the structure of a chaos life.”

But it can change.

“It’s the quality of life that these ladies are getting, a fresh start, they are getting to catch their breath,” Simmons said. “They are so bogged down with trauma, abuse, and neglect. They are ridden with guilt and shame. And they just feel worse because they have missed so many opportunities.

“They have already been to hell and back,” she said. “We don’t have to add to it.

“Eight out of 10 have been victims of domestic violence — physical, emotional, sexual, or financial. They are uneducated. They are vulnerable,” she said. Many lose contact with their children and are desperate to reunite.

Donors, Simmons said, “are investing in a woman’s transformation. It changes the whole trajectory. When you lock up the mom, you lock up the family, you lock up the community. Nothing can come forth in this world without coming through a woman. When you lock up that power, you lock up a whole bunch of things. When you get moms strong and you get moms’ self-esteem built, it gives the children a home,” even adult children.

The “No. 1 thing the mom wants is the child; the No. 1 thing the child wants is the mom. The attachment stage, the intimacy stage — if Mom has been abused and beaten down, they can’t do it,” Simmons said. Through Why Not Prosper, “for once, Mom is emotionally available.”

Simmons speaks from experience.

“My father started touching me when I was 12,” she says, speaking almost matter-of-factly about the abuse she suffered as a child. Crack deadened the pain, but soon it took over. She left Philadelphia to flee the law, leaving her children with her aunt, promising to return after she made some money selling magazines door-to-door around the country.

Two weeks turned into six years, six years that included worsening addiction, losing custody of her two children, and finally, arrests, convictions, and prison in California. But in prison, something shifted.

“When I was in jail, I started to get close with God and myself. When I got home, I decided I was going to do something different,” she said. “The first thing I did, I was going to find a church. I ain’t stopped going to church in 23 years.”

One Sunday in March 2000, listening to the pastor at Norristown’s Theist Temple Church of God in Christ talk about vision, Simmons had her own. God told her, she said, to open a program for women in prison on drugs.

“I didn’t have any money at that time, didn’t know what steps to take. I went to the library and got a book on how to start a nonprofit organization, and that book gave me a checklist,” she said. Her church and Liberty Ministries, a Montgomery County men’s prison ministry, helped her through the technicalities — becoming an IRS-recognized charity, developing a board, writing bylaws.

An East Norriton church gave her a three-year lease on its unoccupied parsonage. Situated between the church and a graveyard, the home was a geographic metaphor more than apt for the first women who came to stay in January 2003.

In March 2003, Simmons regained custody of her children.

Although Bartley doesn’t have children, her story is not uncommon. She graduated from Northeast High School and served in the U.S. Army for six years until 1989. Her military telecommunications experience didn’t lead to a civilian job in her field. She took any job she could get.

Alcohol and addiction took hold. By 2016, “I was in the abyss of my addiction. I was already out of control.”

She slept in abandoned buildings. To earn her drugs, she walked the streets as a prostitute, willing to do anything for as little as $5 — the price of a bag of crack.

Arrested for shoplifting, Bartley went to jail, and when she came out in 2017, she found Simmons. Simmons pushed her to get an associate degree at Harcum College, and then, in August, a bachelor’s degree from Chestnut Hill College.

“I was tired of being a prostitute, tired of going in and out of the penitentiary,” Bartley said. “A lot of people don’t get the opportunity to dig themselves out a dark abyss.”

Nijah Lucas, who dreams of starting her own nonprofit to help children facing homelessness and mental health issues and is gradually reuniting with her four children, agrees. “This is the longest program I’ve stayed clean in,” she said. “I love my life. I’m so happy that I cry from being happy. I want everyone to feel like this.”

Jane M. Von Bergen spent more than 25 years as a reporter and editor at The Inquirer. janevonbtheater@gmail.com

This article is part of a series about Philly Gives — a community fund to support nonprofits through end-of-year giving. To learn more about Philly Gives, including how to donate, visit phillygives.org.