Fought and lost

Worcester Fights Back, a non-profit agency dedicated to fighting crime

and drugs, signs off

by Monica McKenna

Worcester Fights Back, a non-profit agency established eight years ago to fight drug and alcohol abuse in the city, has been taken over by Spectrum Health Systems.

The few remaining staffers at WFB spent first half of 1998 seeking another agency to adopt its programs. Of the 10 agencies considered, Spectrum, a statewide multi-service agency located at 531 Main Street, won out. Since July 1, Spectrum handles the varied drug-fighting efforts under way in the city and trains more advocates and neighborhood leaders to carry on those programs.

The takeover was "a really good fit. The merger was a natural blending," says Douglas Oberreit, WFB's former co-executive director who assisted in that search. Some of WFB's "neighborhood initiatives," as some programs were called, lasted until April, he says, even though the funding was gone and most of the staff had quit.

Oberreit "thoroughly enjoyed" his total four years on the WFB staff, but that memory is not shared by other staffers. The dissent started almost as soon as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in Princeton, New Jersey, sent the $3 million grant to create the agency in 1990. Gladys Rodriguez-Parker, silent now, served on the WFB board and saw WFB from the inside out. She had dubbed WFB's first efforts as "Worcester Fights Itself." Howard Jacobson, an activist who hunted for funds from local corporations, saw long ago the difficulties in uniting all the separate forces that made up WFB. By its last year, Jacobson withdrew and was no longer active on WFB's Citizens Governing Board.

In fact, the Worcester Phoenix reported ("War wounds, October 4, 1996) that by 1996, after five years and $5 million, WFB had failed to effectively combat the city's drug, crime, and alcohol problems.

Much of the criticism voiced by community activists centered on the expectations that programs, such as the Worcester District Court Substance Abuse Treatment Program and the Juvenile Court Substance Abuse Initiative existed, without any corresponding dip in neighborhood crime statistics or a jump in rehabilitation rates.

A few WFB leaders joined in that criticism, revealing some of the internal turmoil. Yet, years later, most former staffers reveal nothing and still offer "no comment."

WFB's most touted attribute -- its diversity -- may have proven its downfall. Getting the leaders of organizations -- like the city's Office of Planning and Community Development, Worcester Area Systems for Affordable Health Care, and the United Way, among others, set up for the same juvenile and adult addicts who kept meeting the same judges in the Worcester court systems, the HIV Consortium, Safe Streets Now!, a 10-week after-school youth program called SPARTACUS, and the Worcester County Ecumenical Council -- on the same page was not always accomplished.

What had started out as good intentions to provide addicts with treatment and to alleviate crime is over. Back in 1990, the RWJ Foundation, as a private philanthropy, had selected Worcester as one of 14 communities nationwide to deal with substance abuse as a community health problem. In 1998, Worcester is one of six sites no longer funded. The health problem remained, but the funding is gone.

The only measure of WFB's success may come from a study undertaken by Brandeis University expected out shortly. Leonard Saxe, a professor Brandeis's Heller Graduate School, conducted the study, underwritten by the RWJ Foundation. Started more than 18 months ago on the effectiveness of Worcester Fights Back, the study was still collecting information this past spring when funding was exhausted.

Kirsten Nicholas, who led the merger effort with Spectrum, is now in charge of Spectrum's Prevention Division and separates herself from any mention of WFB. She also served as WFB's co-director with Oberreit those last few months.

Oberreit, once on the staff and then the head of an agency that failed, still regards it as his idea of "what true collaboration" means.

Until the Brandeis report comes out, what drove WFB and what split it will be unknown.