Our Mission:  

Ready, Willing & Working is a non-profit organization that empowers individuals to break the cycles of homelessness, welfare dependency and criminal recidivism through a residential, paid-work rehabilitation program offering a holistic approach and supportive services that allow participants to achieve permanent self-sufficiency. 

Who we will serve:

• Homeless, formerly incarcerated and/or men with histories of substance abuse

• 9-12 month program where the trainees are taught work and life skills through a residential paid-work rehabilitation program
• Trainees get steady work experience through various BID/CID and City maintenance projects
• Each trainee earns $6.50-7.50/hour to provide much needed street cleaning and maintenance services throughout the District
• Trainees are required to be substance-free when they enter the program and submit to regular, random drug testing
• While living at the RWW facility, trainees will learn important life skills, receive case management, job search and development training and have the option for GED-education classes and multiple vocational training tracks

• Emulating the Ready, Willing & Able (RWA) model from New York City
• 62% of those who enter the RWA program in NYC graduate
• 67% of those who graduate are still sober, employed and independently housed a year after graduation
• Highly lauded by NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the Commissioner of NYC Department of Homeless Services, Robert Hess
• Received recognition from Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development for being a “best practice” in solving homelessness

• It costs approximately $25,000 to keep a single adult in the District Shelter system with no work opportunities and minimal social services
• An inmate costs the city upwards of $50,000 per year
• For $18,000 a year you can house, feed, train, counsel and educate a RWW trainee – most of whom will never see a shelter or be incarcerated again  
  

• RWW is a solution to ending homelessness in DC—this means fewer individuals on the streets or in the shelter system or returning to prison.
• Over 2,000 offenders returned from prison back to the District in 2002—these individuals need programs that will keep them off the streets and engaged in positive activities to break the cycle of recidivism and keep them out of the District’s legal system—RWW is that program.
• Graduates from the RWW program will be drug-free, employed by the private sector and living in independent housing—they will be paying for their own lives!
• Homeless and incarcerated men have arrears for unpaid child support—as trainees working in the RWW program, they will be required to begin paying support for their children.
• For less than the cost of a City Maintenance Worker, the District will have 50 men cleaning up parts of the city that need extra attention on a daily basis and on stand-by to assist with special projects.
• Ready, Willing & Working is the holistic approach the City needs to provide the Continuum of Care for those who are currently living on the streets, in DC shelters and returning to their neighborhoods after years of incarceration.