South Philly caregiver is a caring success story

BRYANT GREENE hit his life's low point at a 2009 job fair when he was handing out his resume and saw human-resources reps recruiting prospects for the Philadelphia multimedia company that had laid him off.

Greene, with a master's degree in business administration and 20 years' experience in financial management, was absorbing the shock when a guy walked up to him and said, "What would you choose if you could open your own business?"

Greene laughed sarcastically and replied, "A strip club."

Thinking back on that day, Greene said: "I was depressed. I'd been on the street damn near a year. I'd just about gone through my savings and my unemployment.

"I'm damn near broke and this guy's talking about starting a business?" Greene said. "Who the hell would open a new business in the bowels of a recession?"

But, Greene said: "Nobody else was talking to me. The guy was a voice out of the darkness."

So when the stranger set Greene up with the franchise president of Always Best Care Senior Services, which provides in-home help for the homebound, Greene saw an opportunity and took it.

After a slow start in Bristol, Bucks County, his Philadelphia-centered business rose with the increase in Medicaid reimbursement.

Today, his Always Best Care Senior Services of Philadelphia, on Broad Street near Federal in South Philly, employs more than 1,000 elder-caregivers, predominantly African-American and Latino women from the city.

An elder-care franchise turned out to be just as recession-proof as a strip joint, and more in tune with Greene's upbringing.

He remains true to his family roots, channeling the work ethic instilled by his single mom, Sandra Greene Saunders, of Wynnefield, and his maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Greene, of Germantown.

"My mother and my grandmother both worked in the same hospital at 4th and Reed," Greene said.

"When I was a child, I'd go to the hospital in the morning with my grandmother, who was a nurse in the emergency room," he said. "I'd stay with her for an hour until my mother finished her late shift in the pathology lab and took me to school."

From the time he was 8, Greene worked with his maternal grandfather, Harold "Pop Pop" Greene, a painting contractor.

Greene has understood community service since childhood. Besides working at the hospital, his grandmother provided nursing care at Omni House, a Germantown homeless center.

His paternal grandmother, Marguerite Downing, fed homeless people every week at Providence Baptist Church in Germantown.

"I believe in giving back," said Greene, who contributes to dozens of Philadelphia nonprofit agencies and "adopted" the Spring Garden School, where he donated computers, sponsored a Read-a-Thon and rewarded a second-grade class that read 300 books with a trip to the Philadelphia Zoo.

"What really got me focused on helping public education was our job applicants here," Greene said.

"Nothing is more upsetting to me than when people take half a day to fill out the job application, or ask to take it home. They can't do it by themselves, because their education is marginal.

"I think about it this way," Greene said. "I'm 45. In 20 years, this person is going to be taking care of me. So I'd better do my part to sponsor education now."