COSTS HINDER SHELTER WORKING AGAINST DRUGS

TAMPA - A local shelter offers the homeless something more than a bed
and meal: self-sufficiency.

Three years ago, George Bramlett's crack cocaine addiction cost him
his last $1,000 and his 9-year-old son, Joey.

The high he compared to someone ``spinning you around by the arms
until you're dizzy'' had lost its newness long before. Yet he couldn't
stop chasing it.

On a steamy summer day, Bramlett wandered out of the Metropolitan
Ministries Family Care Center in central Tampa and into a rundown
motel to smoke crack.

Three days later, from a pay phone in the rain, he dialed the
shelter.

``They told me [the state] had taken Joey and put him in a foster
home,'' he recalls in a drawl still thick with his Mississippi roots.

After three decades of drugs, drink and heartache, Bramlett could only
sit on the curb and cry.

The next Monday, he was admitted to the nonprofit shelter's
rehabilitation program for men. He has been clean ever since, and
wears a Narcotics Anonymous medal around his neck to show it.

But those who run the ministry say it didn't have to happen that way -
that Bramlett's problems could have been caught when he arrived at the
shelter, and that he never should have lost his son.

Thursday, at its annual Bridge Builder's Breakfast in the Tampa
Convention Center, Ministries officials presented a new plan to help
the poor and homeless.

It's a shift in thinking for the 27-year-old organization, prompted by
realities of welfare reform, changes in public housing policy, and a
$5.15 hourly minimum wage in a booming economy.

``The safety net is gone,'' says Ministries President Morris
Hintzman.

The goal of the eight-part plan, called ``Uplift U,'' is
self-sufficiency for everyone who can handle it. That means not just
sheltering people - but helping them hold on to their families, kick
drug habits, learn to read, and acquire skills for better-paying jobs.

An intensive intake program will help identify problems such as
Bramlett's up front. Instead of the standard four-to six-week stint
at the shelter, some families may stay as long as a year while they
receive intensive help.

``It's a trend,'' says Chuck Currie, a board member of the National
Coalition for the Homeless who runs a 24-bed shelter in Portland, Ore.

``Less and less are shelters just flophouses,'' he says. ``Instead,
they're offering people a way to transition out of
homelessness.`'

The trend carries a price tag.

Ministries officials figure that implementing their program could take
three to five years and a 40 percent increase in their $5 million
annual operating budget. They hope to raise the money mostly through
donations.

The change is warranted, though, because in just the last year they
have seen more clients ``recycling,'' or returning to homelessness,
said Karleen Kos, a vice president hired for $60,000 in February 1999
who is helping to develop the plan.

``We've noticed six or seven families in the last month who were
homeless a year ago,'' Kos says. ``It's the same issues: eviction,
which follows not enough money to pay bills, which follows the
inability to get a good job.''

Bramlett, no longer homeless, now rents a bungalow in Sulphur
Springs.

He works part-time as a Ministries driver, ferrying addicts to
self-help meetings. And he's raising Joey, who's nearly 12.

``By doing the right thing and turning my life around, I got my son
back,'' he says. ``There's always hope.''

- -- Also announced Thursday was the Ministries' volunteer of the year:
Joyce Keller, a University of Tampa administrative assistant who gives
up two weeks of vacation to work at the shelter's holiday tent. She
began 12 years ago through a program at Palma Ceia Presbyterian
Church, and she now coordinates hundreds of volunteers in the busy
holiday season.