A Hand Up In a D.C. System Full of Letdowns
Michael Sims is a rare success in a city where unemployment remains high and job training programs often fall short of their promises.

By Neil Irwin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 12, 2006

Michael Sims's knees ached from hours of standing at an industrial stove, making hundreds of servings of a watery stew. So he ducked down a hallway, sat down and puffed his Newport cigarette. He was about done when a burly older man with a white crew cut and a red face charged toward him.

"You know you're not supposed to smoke back here," growled Ron Swanson, who heads job training at D.C. Central Kitchen. "Why aren't you at your station?"

Sims, a 46-year-old man whose past includes alcohol and drug abuse, homelessness, and occasional crime, was there to learn how to work in a commercial kitchen. Swanson knew no restaurant would let an employee take an unauthorized break, so he sent Sims home for the day to learn the lesson.

Sims walked out, bitter that Swanson was hounding him. After a lifetime of mistakes, he was finally doing things right -- showing up every morning, working hard, not drinking or doing drugs. What was the point if he was still going to get yelled at? He sat down at a restaurant and brooded.

For three hours, Sims, who had quit college, the Army and nearly every job he ever had, picked at a plate of shrimp fried rice. Then he walked back to the kitchen and promised not to break the rules again.

Sims would face other setbacks in the months ahead, including time in prison and an ongoing fight with alcoholism. A 12-week program ended up taking nine months. But one day last October, he joined members of the D.C. Central Kitchen's 61st culinary job training class as they danced their way into their graduation ceremonies and new lives as cooks.

Sims is a relatively rare success story in the District's elaborate and expensive efforts to get unemployed residents to work. The government and private organizations spend millions of dollars on hundreds of job training programs that have little oversight or coordination. Those programs fail to get many District residents into jobs, according to a year-long examination by The Washington Post. City Administrator Robert C. Bobb grades the city's job training efforts with a "D at best."

Those failures help explain why the District remains a pocket of joblessness in a booming regional economy, with an unemployment rate more than double that of surrounding suburbs. Fixing that is anything but easy. Programs trying to help the hard-core unemployed cannot merely teach a skill; they also must address the broader problems that keep the city's jobless out of the workplace.

"Every person here is dependent in one way or another," Swanson said. "For some, it's drugs and alcohol; for others, it's a dysfunctional family situation, whatever. To help them become independent, we can't just teach them how to do a job. We have to help them overcome whatever got them to this point."

'I Quit Just About Everything'

When Sims was a baby, his mother gave him away to a family of sharecroppers in North Carolina. They raised him without ever legally adopting him. Sims did well in school and went to college, hoping to emerge from the deep poverty he knew as a child.

Then he discovered beer.

He would drink one, and before he knew it, he had consumed a dozen or made his way to Bacardi rum. It helped overcome the shyness of an insecure country boy but also brought out an ugly bitterness over the challenges he had faced in life. Sims got into bar fights and grappled with depression. He left college and joined the Army, and, a year later, left that too.

"I quit just about everything I ever tried to do," he said.

He eventually moved to New York, where he worked as a nurse's assistant at a hospital. He still remembers an evening in 1983, when he was at a bar where someone offered him cocaine. Sims tried it. "It was a kind of pleasure I had never experienced," he said. "It was so intense, such an upper."

Before long, he was stealing urine out of patients' bedpans in order to pass drug screenings. He was fired, then moved to crack cocaine as his illicit substance of choice and began drifting around the East Coast. Drug use led to homelessness and desperation, then to jail time, after which he would sober up for a while -- but only for a while.

His Virginia rap sheet is a study in petty, and sometimes not-so-petty, crime. April 1997: drunk in public. May 1997: drunk in public. October 1997: urinating in public. January 1998: cocaine possession. December 2000: shoplifting.

"I was a terrible shoplifter," he said recently. "I got caught every time I tried it."

December 2000: breaking and entering. It was a TV store, where he was looking for electronics he could pawn for drug money. That's the one that put him in Hampton Roads Regional Jail.

His brother died in 2002. The family didn't know where Michael was. His niece Tracie Bass found him by searching a Virginia Department of Corrections Web page. The warden told him that night after dinner, and Sims mourned in his cell, never having felt so alone.

After being released later that year, Sims was clean for a while, but he soon started using drugs again. He was caught by the periodic urine test that was a requirement of his probation. To avoid having to go back to jail, he entered Safe Haven Outreach Ministry, a drug treatment facility in the District. After several intense weeks of detox, the staff, noticing that he liked to hang around with the cooks at the facility, told him to look into D.C. Central Kitchen to get on the path to a job.

So on a frigid morning in January 2005, two months removed from his last hit of crack cocaine, Sims sat down in a dank basement of a homeless shelter, squeezed among shelves of dried pasta, canned tomatoes and every other type of bulk, nonperishable food that D.C. Central Kitchen could wrangle from its corporate donors. In a short quiz on the application, Sims correctly indicated that the statement "Improperly washed hands can cause a food-borne illness" was true, offering evidence that he could read well enough to hold down a cooking job.

On the first day of class, Jan. 24, Swanson stood in front of the 35 new trainees. There was scattered coughing. A few people stared down at the table in front of them. Sims stared Swanson dead in the eyes.

"Not all of you will be here 12 weeks from now," said Swanson, his voice full of gravel. "But I promise you that if you do all that we ask, you will be able to get a job. You will have to work hard. But great things await you. Great, wonderful things."

In his cluttered office a few hours later, Swanson discussed the outlook for the class privately. "I used to think I could tell which ones will succeed and which ones won't. Now I realize that's just not true. We'll do everything we can for them, but in the end, they're the ones who have to show up and do their work and act right. I can't predict who will be able to do that and who won't."

A Record of Success

On that first day, chef Karen Lewis, a no-nonsense boss, ordered everyone to put on plastic aprons and hairnets. She put Sims on an assembly line that was making a stew. He pulled one softball-size onion after another out of a 50-pound bag, chopped off each end and pulled off the papery outer skin. Three other students fumbled around, peeling and chopping carrots the size of a chair leg and chattering. Sims, who had worked in a restaurant before, methodically made his way through the onions, not saying anything.

"That's right, Mr. Sims, keep doin' what you're doin,' " Lewis said. Sims just nodded.

The kitchen was founded by Robert Egger, a loquacious former nightclub manager who figured that all the extra food commercial kitchens in Washington end up throwing away could be put to use feeding the city's hungry. His other idea: You could have people training to get jobs do the preparation. In 2004, 78 people entered the program and 56 graduated.

Over the past seven years, 91 percent of its graduates have gotten a job on graduation, and 74 percent of graduates held a job six months later. Some 98 percent pass an exam to be a certified food handler, a crucial certification in the industry. The group, funded mostly by private donations, spends $7,000 for every trainee who gets a job, less than half the rate of spending per successful trainee of organizations under contract with the city's Department of Employment Services.

The average age of the trainees in Class No. 59 was in the forties, and some of them once had the stable lives that came with steady work. Remona Jackson used to have a comfortable apartment in Prince George's County and a job screening bags at Reagan National Airport. Then the company she worked for lost the contract following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and Jackson struggled to find a job, eventually running through her savings and ending up living in the homeless shelter upstairs from the kitchen. "It took me two months to get used to eating dinner at 4:30," she said.

Sylvia Brown, a talkative former secretary at the University of Maryland, was laid off after state budget cuts and then fell on hard times.

Others had more troubled pasts: the former skilled laborer who was in drug treatment, the ex-gang member in a halfway house, and the former high school football player who had five children and had only recently finished a jail sentence for selling heroin in a school zone.

They showed up at 8:30 a.m., Monday through Friday. After roll call, the trainees joined paid staff and volunteers in making 4,000 meals to be delivered to homeless shelters and halfway houses, including some of the very places where the trainees lived.

The trainees ate lunch together each day in their cramped classroom next to the kitchen. For the first few weeks, they ate in near silence. That changed soon enough.

"Oh, man, I'm hungry," said one of the trainees one Wednesday in February, three weeks into the class, as he sat down with a plate of a noodle casserole his fellow trainees had made. "Man, Sylvia, y'all did good with this."

"It's all about the seasoning," said Brown, beaming with pride. "Some thyme. A little parsley."

"Mmm-hmm," grunted Sims, between mouthfuls.

"You just watch me, I'll show you how to do it," Brown continued.

"Mmm-hmmm, that's right," Sims grunted again.

"See, he likes it so much he can't even stop chewing for a minute to say anything," Brown said.

Sims started laughing so hard that he struggled to keep the noodle casserole in his mouth.

A Step Forward, a Step Back

In class, Sims learned the difference between poaching and braising, and listened quietly as Swanson and the students shared thoughts on how to avoid the temptation of that first drink. At night, he studied his textbook, to make sure he could remember that hot food on a buffet must be kept at least 135 degrees to avoid bacterial contamination.

"All my life, I haven't really fit in," Sims said later. "At the kitchen, I started to feel like I belonged, that the people around had my back."

One day, the owner of Zed's Ethiopian Cuisine in Georgetown was giving a guest demonstration to the class. She showed how to make chicken infillay, breast sauteed with onions and a red pepper paste.

"Did you wash your hands after you chopped the chicken to avoid cross-contamination?" Sims asked.

"I didn't," Zed Wondemu said. "Good catch."

Not everybody was so successful. One morning six weeks into the training, two men got in a fistfight in the middle of the kitchen. They were tossed out. One came back a few hours later and unsuccessfully begged to be readmitted, smelling of alcohol. Four people either refused to take a periodic urine test for drugs or failed it. They were expelled.

When a person showed up late for class or otherwise misbehaved, he or she put 50 cents in a jar, called "the pig," the contents of which were to be awarded to the person with the fewest transgressions at the end of the 12 weeks.

"We have to be tough," Swanson explained. "The entire focus of the program is to get a job, and if you can't stay sober and show up on time and act respectfully to your colleagues, you aren't going to be able to do that. If we graduate people who fail to do those things, we'll lose any credibility with the employers who take on our students."

Sims didn't have to pay the pig once during those first few weeks. The staff noticed that he was coming along. "Michael really wants to be here," Swanson said. "That shows."

For all his progress, though, the same flashes of anger, the insecurity, the bitterness that had gotten Sims in trouble before were still there. One dismal, snowy day in February, Sims was fighting off a wicked cough, and the arthritis in his knee was flaring up. John Fenner, the kitchen staff member who supervised the dishwashing station, called across the room: "Sims, go unload the truck."

"Man," Sims yelled back, in no mood to carry the big pallets of canned vegetables and other foods. "I did it yesterday. That isn't fair. I'm not unloading. No way."

The two men stared each other down.

"You're gonna do it."

"No."

Fenner sent Sims to see training director Tammy Williams, who sat him down in her tiny, windowless office just behind the dishwashing machines. She looked him sternly in the eye. When a supervisor says to do something, you need to do it, she said.

It isn't fair, Sims explained, I just unloaded the food yesterday. Why are you guys always being so tough on me?

"Michael," she said. "The reason he asks you to do so much is because he knows you can handle it. He knows he can depend on you."

Locked Up Again

In March, it was time to start looking for a job. Swanson showed them how to prepare a résumé and to go through newspaper classified ads and pointed out fliers on the bulletin board.

"We can't just hand them a job," he explained. "They have to work for it, understand that getting a job is their responsibility, not someone else's."

Several trainees landed work selling hot dogs and peanuts at Washington Nationals games; others interviewed with catering firms. Sims had lined up a couple of interviews. Then one day he went to his regular appointment to check in with his probation officer. As they were talking, Sims described later, two D.C. police officers entered the office.

There has been a paperwork problem, the probation officer explained. Virginia authorities never got word that he was in a drug treatment program, so as far as they were concerned, he was in violation of his probation. A bench warrant had been issued for his arrest.

Sims was incredulous. He stared at his probation officer and cried. As the police officers cuffed him, he begged his probation officer to tell his family and the staff at D.C. Central Kitchen what had happened.

"Please," he recalled telling her, "Tell them that I didn't screw up this time."

He was depressed and angry. He wondered if it had all been for nothing -- getting off drugs, memorizing his lessons, getting to class on time. Sims said that in the D.C. holding cell, as he waited to be picked up by Virginia corrections officers, a guy told him he had some heroin; would Michael like some?

"It was tempting," he said later. "Awfully tempting."

But he thought it through -- Swanson and the counselors who had helped him, the family members he had let down all those times. "I told him, 'Nah, I don't use anymore.' "

It was dark most of the day in Sims's tiny cell at the Hampton Roads Regional Jail, and many of the guards remembered him from two years earlier. He passed the hours reading paperbacks by Dean Koontz and Michael Crichton. He wrote letters to anyone who would listen, as his public defender tried to straighten out the mix-up. Expecting to be released at any time, he didn't try to get any prison jobs.

"I'm lonely," he said one day in early summer, slouching in a chair in the jail's visitors area. He wore a plastic ID bracelet and a prison-issue uniform that looked like dark green pajamas. He moved more slowly and spoke more softly than he had at the kitchen. "I was working so hard. I felt like I had finally put my past behind me. I just don't know why God is doing this to me."

A few weeks earlier, his class had graduated from the Central Kitchen. Not being there is what hurt the most, Sims said.

After four months, a judge agreed to release him. Sims moved back to the Safe Haven treatment center in Washington, where he was assigned a small apartment on North Capitol Street with a roommate. He had $42, a bag containing his clothing and old papers, and half a pack of cigarettes.

The next morning, he was back cooking.

Swanson gave his blessing for Sims to rejoin the latest training class, which was already underway. Soon he was joking around with the staff, with the ease of someone reunited with old friends.

Swanson gradually became uneasy when he saw Sims relaxing on the job. It brought back two-decade-old memories, when he was addicted to alcohol and painkillers. He worried that Sims's sobriety, like his own, was less guaranteed than it might appear.

"You're slipping, Michael," Swanson told Sims one day in October when he saw him outside, relaxing. "Get back to work."

"I can't afford to take my ease," Swanson said later. "All the weaknesses that made me who I was 22 years ago are still there. It could come back at any time if I'm not vigilant. Michael is the same way. He has to stay focused. If he goes back to his old ways, it won't start with having a drink. It will start with him becoming lazy and taking all the things he's achieved so far for granted.

"That's why I'm so hard on him. And the truth is, he gave me permission to ride him this way. He never said it explicitly, but by the way he interacts, the way he responded, he made clear that he wants me to push him to keep on the path he is on."

"I don't know," Sims said one day during the lunch break, staring down at his plate. "Sometimes it just feels like they ride me so hard. I know they're trying to help me, but I just wish they would leave me alone sometimes."

A Link to the Past

In the fall, Sims again started looking for work. Most of the graduates were planning to work at catering firms, restaurants and cafeterias at government office buildings. But Sims had other ideas.

"I want to work with people like me," he said. "I want be around people who are struggling with the things I've been struggling with. I mean, one day I'd really like to be a substance abuse counselor. They've helped me so much, I'd like to help people too."

He prepared a new résumé and landed two jobs. One was for 20 hours a week with First Helping, an arm of the Central Kitchen that delivers food to places in the District where homeless people gather. Sims handles the food while a counselor chats with the homeless people, hoping to coax some into shelters or drug treatment programs.

The second job, cooking at a halfway house for recently released prisoners, also offered reminders of his past. The evening before his first day cooking at the halfway house, he went onto the balcony of his tiny apartment.

"I'm nervous," he said, as he took a few puffs on a cigarette, then saved the rest for later.

At 7 p.m., he went to his Alcoholics Anonymous meeting at a nearby community center. On the way home, he stopped at a takeout restaurant where the cashier took his order from behind a bulletproof plexiglass barrier: Fried croaker, fries, grape soda.

Sims tossed all night. When his alarm went off at 5:30 a.m., he slid on the black pants he wore most days and a black D.C. Central Kitchen T-shirt. He went onto the balcony to smoke the other half of last night's cigarette and made a cup of coffee. Then he made his bed, sat in his chair for a bit to collect his thoughts, and walked out the door.

There was a slight chill in the fall air that morning, making Sims's knee stiff. He limped slightly during the 10-minute walk to work. "I know I can do this," he said during the walk, as if trying to convince himself. "I have to be able to do this."

He showed up for work under a pale blue sky. Twenty minutes early.

Tired but Smiling

He was supposed to get off at 3 p.m. Instead he limped out of the halfway house at 5:15. His knee ached. But he was beaming.

Why so late?

"If I leave at 3, then I leave the food in the refrigerator and they microwave it later for dinner. But if I stayed longer, I could serve the food hot. And there were french fries for dinner, and fries are just no good when you reheat them. The guys really like it when they get their dinner hot, so I stayed late," he said, the words tumbling out.

"Also, that's two hours more pay," he said, grinning.

As he walked along New York Avenue, stopping every few minutes to rest his knee, Sims rehashed the successes and failures of the day. He put too much pepper in the scrambled eggs; one of the guys complained. Lunch -- hot dogs, which he served up with a salad -- went fine, though he decided he was going to ask his bosses to get better lettuce. "They want the guys to have some vegetables with every meal, but then they only have iceberg lettuce, which doesn't have any nutrients in it." They should get something greener, like romaine, he argued.

"I feel pretty good about -- oh, shoot." He scratched his head. "I left the snacks locked up in the cupboard." He thought about a minute. "It's OK. The staff have keys to it, and the guys won't let them forget about their snack."

Sims was bone tired but walked four blocks to the New York Avenue Metro stop. He took the train to Fort Totten, transferred to another train and hopped on a bus at the Greenbelt Metro stop, all to go to the mall.

"My little nephew, it's his birthday. Well actually, it was his birthday a couple of days ago, but I promised him I'd send him something."

Sims walked to one of the booths in the middle of the mall. He found some rhinestone-encrusted dog tags. He asked some nearby kids which one would excite his nephew the most. They excitedly recommended a variety that lit up with scrolling blue text. He paid $40 for them, about half his day's pay.

"My family stuck with me through me making a lot of mistakes. I want to be there for them now," he said.

Graduation: 'I Belong'

At the end of October, Sims put on his late brother's khaki suit and headed to his graduation. An hour before the ceremony, Swanson announced that Sims would be the class speaker, surprising even Michael.

The prospect of facing a roomful of 100 people made him clam up and pace nervously. Then the class started rehearsing for the dance they would do as the entered the auditorium at Georgetown Law Center. As the Usher song built to a strong baseline, Sims, the pear-shaped guy with a bum knee, started dancing more enthusiastically than any of them, raising his arms, dipping his knees and flashing a broad smile.

"I'm not as nervous anymore," he said.

His niece Tracie Bass was there. So were Remona Jackson and Sylvia Brown, friends from his original class at the kitchen.

Sims took the stage.

"I felt at home in the kitchen. I felt I belong," he said. "My whole thing is no matter what is put in your way, you have to keep going forward. There's people in the kitchen you can talk to."

When the ceremony was over, Sims went home. His shift began at 7 the next morning, and there was a lot of work ahead.