#1398 1971 · Delancey Street Foundation · residential rehabilitation / social enterprise
The Rehab That Funds Itself With Resident-Run Businesses
问题
Prison release leads back to prison; rehab programs with professional staff cost money their residents don't have.
背景
Delancey Street began in 1971 when John Maher, a former addict, rented a San Francisco apartment for friends getting sober; the criminologist Mimi Silbert joined as co-founder and led the community for decades. Residents, ex-offenders and people in recovery, live there on average around two years, roughly 1,000 at a time across six locations.
There are no professional staff, and residents are unpaid: they teach and manage each other ('each one teach one'), rising from mover to crew boss or line cook to restaurant manager. The foundation runs real businesses, a moving and trucking company, a restaurant, catering, construction (residents built the 400,000-square-foot headquarters themselves) and Christmas tree lots that sold 50,000 trees for nearly $3 million net in one season.
换别人会怎么做
Fundraise for professional counselors and staff; charge sliding-scale fees.
他们看到了什么
Programs pay staff to rehabilitate clients; Delancey made the residents the staff and the businesses the therapy. Costs vanish into revenue, and authority in the house belongs to people who lived the problem.
那一手
The businesses are the curriculum and the budget at once. Every moving job or dinner service is vocational training delivered by senior residents to junior ones, and every dollar of profit funds the house. The program needs neither fees nor government money, so its independence is structural rather than rhetorical, and authority inside the community belongs to people who have lived the problem.
为什么管用
Peer authority lands where professional authority bounces off; real customers demand real performance, so training standards are set by the market; two-year residence lets juniors become the seniors who teach; and taking no outside funding removes the incentive to perform for funders.
值了多少
About 1,000 residents at a time across six locations; 23,000+ graduates over nearly five decades, at no cost to client or taxpayer (Mother.
什么时候会失灵
The same structure carries real weaknesses: no professional mental-health care (psychiatric medications were forbidden, per Mother Jones), four in ten new residents quit before graduating, independent recidivism data are thin, and methods inherited from Synanon drew cult comparisons. Closed self-governance cuts costs and thins oversight at the same time.
后来呢
The most-cited demonstration that a mutual-help residence can be economically self-sustaining at scale; studied, and argued about, in criminal-justice reform circles.
资料来源
- [1]The Toughest LoveMother Jones, 2020motherjones.com
- [2]Mimi Silbert (The California Model profile)California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, 2026cdcr.ca.gov
流传很广，但只有部分可考。按传闻收录。