Breaking News!

1 .1

15 Month Certificate of Deposit Special!

Mentoring girls in Alternatives for Girls' elementary after-school program
are Javonda Davenport, an AmeriCorp member working in AFG's prevention
department, and Shannica Joseph, an AFG board member.

BANK

Finding Alternatives

of MICHIGAN

Detroit agency offers shelter, caring,
mentoring and empowerment for
girls and young women.

Here To Help

30095 Northwestern Hwy.
Farmington Hills, MI 48334
(248) 865-1300
www.bankofmi.com

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months from date of account opening. Terms and rates are subject to
change at any time without notice. Offer expires 8/31/15.

Vivian Henoch
Special to the Jewish News

Member _

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20 July 9 • 2015

1968150

F

ollow the money awarded
to organizations serving the
community through grants
from the local Jewish Fund and you
meet the most caring, empowering peo-
ple — like Amy Good, CEO and founder
of Alternative For Girls.
A safe home, a support system and
a family, Alternatives For Girls (AFG)
is a Detroit-based nonprofit serving
homeless and high-risk girls and young
women. There's no agency in town like it
— and few models in the country come
close to AFG's range of services, which
include safe shelter, street outreach,
prevention and educational support,
vocational guidance, tutoring, mentor-
ing, counseling and recreational activi-
ties, as a way to break the cycle of abuse,
violence and poverty and to empower
girls and young women to make positive
choices in life.
Sometimes, Good says, all a girl needs
is an alternative.
Born out of necessity 27 years ago,
Alternatives For Girls started with a
knock on the door at the Parish Hall at
St. Peter's Episcopal Church on Trumbull
Street in Downtown Detroit.
"In 1985, we were living Downtown in
the neighborhood around Tiger Stadium
and started noticing an increase in the
number of girls and young women out
on the street, appearing to be out of
school, homeless or involved in street-
based prostitution:' Good says. As
neighbors, we started to gather and take
notice. One conversation led to another
as we started talking about the needs of
the girls:'

The neighbors started organiz-
ing meetings at St. Peter's, discussing
the number of girls on the street with
nowhere to go. They started a project
and named it Alternatives For Girls. The
goal was to get a handle on the needs of
young girls and women in the neighbor-
hood.
"We wanted to find out what services
were available and to link up the needs
with resources:' Good says. "We had no
intention of becoming an agency. We
raised a little money, hired two part-time
social workers and started to provide
services on a small scale to a few neigh-
borhood girls and families. We also did a
community survey, asking [people] what
they could see going on with girls:'
Good did some research and found
just eight street-based programs in the
country, but none focused on girls. They
held a community forum in 1987 to find
out what needed to be done.
They came to three conclusions: to
focus on children lost in the foster sys-
tem, to do outreach to girls and women
in prostitution on the street and to do
prevention.
"We set out to find agencies to step
up and provide the needed services,"
Good says. "We soon learned what every
nonprofit knows: The needs always are
greater than the resources. As was the
case then and to this day, there are gaps
in our social safety net for teenage girls
who are not in the foster care system and
are too young for the adult shelter sys-
tem. There is no steady stream of fund-
ing for girls on the street:'
That fall, the parish house at St. Peter's
became available and the group wrote a
grant proposal to HUD to open a shelter.
"We didrit get the grant on the first