Greiff's activism isn't just a good act

by Thomas Keane Jr.
Friday, July 4, 2003

Sometime in the mid-1960s, a struggling scriptwriter and piano bar singer named Ira Greiff had an epiphany of sorts. Work, it occurred to him, does more than provide a paycheck: It gives us self-confidence, it builds character, it helps give lives a purpose.

These insights didn't come to Greiff some late evening after he had sung himself hoarse. They came instead during his day job: as a vocational counselor in East Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant and the psychiatric division of New York's Bellevue Hospital.

Up until then, most people who worked with the mentally ill or the addicted thought of work as the end point of treatment. Fix someone up was the belief, and then he or she might be able to hold a job.

Greiff approached it from a different angle. Perhaps, he thought, work could actually be a form of therapy itself.

Greiff never made it as a scriptwriter or a singer. (``They called me the `abominable showman,' '' he now says.) But he did go on to change the ways we think about and treat the homeless. It started at Bellevue, where he founded the hospital's department of rehabilitation. It ended in Boston, where for the last 19 years he has been executive director of St. Francis House. It's a stint that officially ended last week when Greiff retired, pulling back a bit from five decades of nearly constant work on behalf of people that most of us, quite frankly, try to avoid.

He grew up in the solidly middle class beach town of Far Rockaway, just 20 miles from Manhattan. With his mother at home and his father commuting every day into the city, he had a close-to-idyllic childhood.

Not, however, the kind of childhood that would necessarily cause a person to throw himself into a lifetime of service to the unfortunate. Still, whether it was the teachings of the synagogue or the influence of his professors at Columbia University (where he got his BA and two Masters degrees), ``I had a strong social concern about poor people,'' Greiff says.

By 1981, having been at Bellevue in increasingly senior positions for 14 years (while also teaching at the NYU Medical School), he figured it was time to move on. ``I felt like a bureaucrat,'' Greiff says - he had lost the personal connection of working directly with those in need.

A man prone to impulsiveness (in 1968, he married Shirley McIntosh, a divorcee from Denver, after a three-month courtship; this November marks their 35th anniversary), he went to Israel for a year, where he taught at Haifa University. The same impulsiveness also led him - without a job - to Boston in 1982. ``It was an adventure,'' he says.

In those days, homelessness was just becoming a serious political issue, and then-Gov. Michael Dukakis appointed Greiff to his statewide commission on homelessness. There Greiff met up with a Franciscan friar, Rev. Louis Canino. The priest from St. Anthony's Shrine and the Jew from Long Island hit it off, working for the next 20 years as a team.

They conceived of the idea of a homeless shelter that would do more than offer meals and a bed for the night. Drawing on Greiff's past work, its mission would be ``to get our clients to develop their own values, interests and skills,'' tools that would allow them to pull themselves out of homelessness.

The Franciscans of St. Anthony's - the same order to which Boston's newly appointed archbishop belongs - were firmly behind the effort. St. Francis House opened in October 1984 in an old Boston Edison building near Boylston and Tremont streets. Along with Canino, Greiff was co-director, running a small operation with a staff of just 11.

Over the years, St. Francis House grew dramatically, a testament to Greiff's and Canino's industriousness as well as, sadly, a testament to an ever-growing need. Today, with a budget of $3.9 million and a staff in excess of 70, St. Francis feeds upward of 600 a day and offers a range of services that include job training, drug rehab and a remarkable residential program that stresses transition from dependence to independence. Greiff's influence statewide and nationally has been profound as well. He founded the Massachusetts Housing and Shelter Alliance. And St. Francis House is now regarded as one of the most innovative and effective homeless programs in the United States, so much so that it provides technical assistance to cities around the country seeking to emulate its model.

One can understand why Greiff, at age 75, might want to retire. He talks about spending some time relaxing, perhaps traveling with Shirley, but in virtually the same breath speaks excitedly about new programs involving prison populations. His passion is unflagging. At his retirement party last week, one admirer said that a commitment to the poor was the measure of the soul of a city. It is also the measure of Ira Greiff. Few expect him to remain far from the place he built or the people for whom he cares.

Talk back to Tom Keane at tomkeane@tomkeane.com.