Posted on Mon, Oct. 26, 2009
When a documentary camera crew came to Philadelphia this year to follow James Smallwood around, he took it to a bench at a Market Street bus stop near City Hall.
About 25 years ago, that bench was where Smallwood would collapse at night, exhausted after the trek from days-long crack binges near Broad Street and Erie Avenue, he said.
A few blocks away, he would listen for rumbling arrivals at the PATCO station. Having spent all his money to get high, he would hop the turnstile for the train home to Lindenwold, hoping the doors closed on his car before guards caught him.
"You start thinking about what took you there, to those depths," he said.
This weekend, Smallwood will be a long way from that Center City bus stop. He will travel to Stanford University in California to receive a $50,000 Purpose Prize for his work training and finding jobs for hundreds of homeless people, recovering drug addicts, and former convicts in South Jersey and Philadelphia.
As one of 10 recipients this year, Smallwood joins former Philadelphia Mayor W. Wilson Goode as the second local winner of the four-year-old prize, organized by Civic Ventures, a think tank that studies the baby-boomer generation.
By 1974, Smallwood's resumé included managing a Bonwit Teller branch in Wynnewood and a Lincoln-Mercury dealership in Chestnut Hill. But after leaving his dealership job and dealing cocaine and crack, he said, he started doing drugs and got hooked.
While his life was in free fall, however, Smallwood managed to complete a four-year apprenticeship with the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners in Philadelphia. In 1984, he became a licensed union carpenter. After four drug-treatment programs, he got sober.
Last week, Smallwood, now 62 and living in Williamstown, looked out from a window near the headquarters of his nonprofit, The Choice Is Yours Inc., on the second-floor of a Camden office building, proudly pointing to the Liberty Towers he helped construct in the mid-1980s.
It's that pride, and a sense of purpose, that Smallwood has spent the second half of his life trying to instill in others through free training in carpentry, plumbing, and electrical work. Applicants are culled from such places as local parole offices, Salvation Army locations, and halfway houses.
Purpose Prize winners were chosen from more than 1,000 nominees, all 60 or older, who have worked toward social change through so-called encore careers. Goode, for example, started a ministry after leaving office and won $100,000 for a nationwide mentoring program that linked the children of incarcerated parents with mostly African American churchgoers.
"We're trying to change the conversation on aging," said Alexandra Céspedes Kent, director of the Purpose Prize contest.
As a large and well-educated generation leads longer and healthier lives, the organization hopes to steer people's talents toward socially conscious endeavors.
"It's the first time in history that there is this stage of life and work," Kent said. "We want to redefine traditional notions of retirement."
Smallwood was selected because his story shows that "if you use your life and work experience, you can really solve some of the big issues of our day," Kent said.
Inside his office last week, Smallwood pulled out a videotape he had found just days earlier.
"I've got to preserve this, man," he said. "This is Numero Uno."
Grainy footage showed Smallwood in the early '90s on a local television profile of the first training program he ever devised, a home-repair class for 25 single mothers from Camden. He financed the class by borrowing $5,000, he said, and paid $10 to borrow a friend's office as a backdrop for the interview.
In the video, current Camden City Council President Angel Fuentes speaks to the women in the class.
Smallwood's "attitude has always been one of trying to empower, especially those that people have given up on," Fuentes said last week. "He understands people and their struggles and complexities."
Now Smallwood raises as much as $450,000 in annual funding from local banks and nonprofits, and graduates between 200 and 260 trainees a year through 14-week programs on both sides of the river. Trainees are groomed with mock interviews as the course nears completion, and staff members attempt to track graduates for at least a year.
Plaques honoring his efforts from the Camden mayor's office, county freeholders, and the U.S. Senate adorn his office walls. He talks excitedly about the possibility of opening an office in Baltimore.
"We are looking for people that have big ideas and that are experienced and passionate," Kent said. "James Smallwood definitely fits the bill."
Though he is suddenly in the limelight, Smallwood's line of work is still not a glamorous one. He didn't answer the phone the first time Purpose Prize organizers called because he feared it might be a bill collector.
Smallwood and his two employees share a one-room office. They once were nearly evicted because, he said, the landlord worried about his nightly training sessions, for which he hires his own security.
"I deal with people that nobody wants to deal with," he said.
Last year, a trainee pulled a gun on him while rehabbing a house. Seeing a confusion and disillusionment he once felt, Smallwood said, he took the gun from the trainee's hand and hugged him, and the two men cried together. The trainee graduated in December.
"Where there's bad, there's also some good," Smallwood said. "I believe that."
Contact staff writer Matthew Spolar at 856-779-3829 or mspolar@phillynews.com.
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