The paradoxes of Covenant House

...For once, he sounded optimistic about his life...

...Several members came from backgrounds in child care, parish ministry, nursing, and even the military...

...He appealed to the city to send him homeless families with young children to live in Times Square in this decrepit building, as he could then charge the far higher rates collected by other welfare hotel operators...

...It had been proposed that the community's mission might be broadened from work with runaway and homeless children, to include other ministries...

...Most compelling for the white, middle-class, suburban donor, however, was the profile Covenant House presented of the residents themselves...

...Of all the damaging revelations about the agency, none are as difficult for supporters of Covenant House to accept or believe...

...Often, the letters were requests for prayers for ill or troubled family members...

...This institutional blindness and lack of self-awareness is at the heart of the whole sad tale...

...At their best, the newsletters created an ongoing dialogue with the donors, acknowledging their ownership of the program, their "right to know" what was happening and how their donations were being spent...

...ung people, while distracting us with lurid descriptions of the symptoms...

...Believing that Ritter and the agency could examine and correct themselves, one of us even joined with other former Covenant House volunteers in writing to the agency's board of directors...

...There would be no more discussion...

...Most church-affiliated agencies rely on government contracts for the majority of their support...

...And it is past time for Covenant House to add its forceful voice in acknowledging the effects of unmitigated poverty and child abuse...

...Nearly every not-for-profit agency in the city supported the moratorium as an emergency measure...

...The residents, as most newsletter stories read, were white and middle-class teens, running naively from some adolescent trauma into the grasp of pimps and Johns who stalked Times Square and the Port Authority Bus Terminal...

...As an assemblage, the combined properties, filling the 8th Avenue block front from 43rd to 44th Streets, now had development rights of considerable value...

...They [Ritter and the board] said, 'Hey, it's too bright in here.'" Macchiarola's statement prompted us to turn the light on our own experiences at Covenant House...

...It often astonished us to hear from donors, who knew Covenant House strictly through the mail, that they believed they were supporting a small, nontraditional charity that spent all its resources directly "on the kids...

...But when the initial charges were followed with disclosures of apparently self-interested financial dealings and further charges of sexual misconduct, what dogged faith we had for the agency was all but destroyed...

...It has been reported the Franciscans were unaware of Ritter's $98,000 salary...

...As our idealism began to dissipate, Covenant House itself became as disorienting and morally ambiguous an environment as Times Square...

...The inability of many ethical, thoughtful people to acknowledge the institution's growing disdain for basic values recalled to us Christ's admonition that those who have eyes will not see, and those who have ears will not hear...

...Covenant House joined forces with the city's real estate development interests in an effort to defeat the bill...

...We would often debate which of the views was more alarming...

...Perhaps it is not surprising that Covenant House has begun to unravel...

...But Sister Whelan convinced the Boston politicians, the social service community, and the priests' senate, that a series of small centers scattered throughout less ominous sections of the city providing longer-term care was the better answer...

...Covenant House consistently and consciously placed the sensitivities of its middle-class donor base and its conservative, politically well-connected friends above the imperative to truthfully reveal the economic and social conditions which were destroying Covenant House residents...

...Ultimately, the assistance programs that make the most enduring contributions are those that challenge the status quo...

...We should, therefore, be wary of institutions which skate on the surface of problems and which fail to challenge the conditions creating homelessness and runaway behavior in young people, while distracting us with lurid descriptions of the symptoms...

...In an astounding number of families young children and teenagers are being abused...

...We questioned the propriety of Ritter's elevating a number of young men into positions of management responsibility for which they had few qualifications, and the total absence of women or those with professional experience in child care within the agency's decision-making circle...

...It was surprising how long it took us to register this as a problem, however...

...Needless to say, these are especially painful and sobering questions for the Catholic church...

...It has been difficult for the many supporters of Covenant House to accept that there could be any truth to the serious charges leveled in recent months against the agency and its founder and president, the Rev...

...We were members of the Covenant Community from 1981 to 1983...

...Community members prayed together three times daily, went on two retreats during the year, and met weekly as a group to discuss issues of community riving...

...Our unease grew deeper when discussions about autonomy for the faith community were cut off by Ritter...

...Yet even in this undertaking once again Covenant House exhibited the same mania for size that seemed to shadow all its work...

...Most impressively, Covenant House maintained an entire office of correspondents who would answer each letter the agency received from its supporters...

...When Covenant House first came under public scrutiny in December 1989 following allegations of sexual and financial misconduct against Father Ritter, we hoped the crisis might be a transforming moment...

...As donations grew, Covenant House directors became more and more impatient with those within the agency who objected to this false portrayal...

...In taking license with the facts, Covenant House managers openly rationalized that the agency's largely white donors would be unlikely to support a program for primarily black and Hispanic young people...

...At that point, it seemed Ritter should be allowed to continue leading the agency if the charges of misconduct could not be substantiated...

...How could Father Bruce be in trouble...

...We each spent time as child-care workers...

...It was just before Christmas, and the agency was flooded with mail...

...We learned in our work with residents that the sex industry merely preyed on the already vanquished, the victims of other evils...

...Every contribution received a thank you...

...The language evoked darkly fascinating images of young bodies and neon lights...

...Most had been raised in poverty...

...It is difficult to cite an exact moment when we realized that the emperor had few clothes...

...However, accounts which we know to be credible circulated of inappropriate behavior on his part toward young male staff members...

...The superficiality of this portrait of the residents and their actual circumstances was the original and foremost fiction adopted by the agency...

...The myth of Ritter as savior to our worst, most fallen selves-the savior of the inadequate parent whose child has run away, the enemy of the urban underworld that guiltily fascinates us as it repulses us, the righteous banner carrier of our traditional Catholic moral values in the dark arenas of the street-was a distortion...

...Only in Boston was this approach effectively challenged...

...When moving into new cities, Covenant House consistently did two things: one, it refused to modify its programs to the specific needs of local youth, and two, it ignored the efforts of already-existing programs...

...According to Ritter, the real estate was to be the agency's "endowment...

...A particularly distressing moment came while working in Donor Communications...

...Despite our personal disappointment, we remained hopeful over the years that the agency would find a true course, and that the undeniable virtues of the place would eventually triumph...

...But talking with residents and staff about the needs of residents made it clear that Covenant House's services were terribly inadequate...

...He informed us further that Covenant House, and within it the community, was legally his corporation...

...The recent avalanche of allegations of financial improprieties, unprofessional conduct, nepotism, and managerial arrogance presents an extraordinary paradox: How could so popular a charity, so celebrated for its good works, be guilty of such misdeeds...

...We should be eager to master common enemies: ignorance, disease, despair...

...Yet the value could only be realized if the properties were vacant, and with over seven hundred rooms, the Times Square Hotel was the city's largest SRO (single room occupancy) hotel, providing modest housing to marginal individuals...

...We hope the agency survives this crisis, and that with new management, careful spending, and a clearly defined mission, Covenant House can emerge as a more effective program...

...And without negating the value of the attention that Covenant House has provided to "street kids" for twenty years, we believe that as a society, we are properly inclined to demand more...

...Even in situations where residents and staff were at risk, workers' crisis judgments were frequently undermined and challenged...

...They were told-and left believing- that the greatest needs of disenfranchised youth were for more shelters like Covenant House and stronger antipornography legislation...

...Covenant House found it had tapped a golden flow when it promoted the image of the white runaway exploited by the merchants of sex...

...every donor received an invitation to Mass at Christmas and Easter in the faith community chapel, followed by receptions stocked with baked goods prepared in biannual frenzies by community members...

...Quite a few couples, like ourselves, had met while volunteering at Covenant House and living in the community...

...These children and their families require intensive help at the earliest possible moment, before young spirits and bodies are destroyed, and before young people find their way to the streets...

...In legislative offices and in schools throughout the country, and in hundreds of thousands of homes, people had heard and responded to Ritter's uniquely effective appeal to help the children of Times Square...

...But at their worst, the newsletters were intentionally misleading, manipulative, and prurient...

...A steady stream of local, state, and national political leaders visited Covenant House...

...There was growing evidence of profligate spending: jobs created for favorites of Ritter in the executive offices...

...To some degree, this blindness afflicted all of us at Covenant House...

...We don't know if the Franciscans made any response to this information...

...Frequently, donors were writing to Ritter as the only priest or counselor they knew and trusted during their own times of struggle...

...Usually, Covenant House was invited to a city by wealthy Catholic businessmen or, at times, by the bishop of the diocese, who would pledge significant financial support to the venture...

...They are not the problem...

...At those moments the agency's questionable practices seemed not to matter much in the face of so much misery and degradation relieved only, it appeared, by the presence of Covenant House...

...All forces but the truth then conspired to enlarge and sustain this great myth...

...In effect, Ritter was its owner, with complete discretion in appointing and firing the board members who were supposed to be supervising him in his role as executive director...

...Unfortunately, the potential for abuse was designed into the formal structure of the enterprise...

...That their circumstances are largely unknown is partly the result of the deliberate obfuscations of Covenant House...

...While we were there, Covenant House's own legislative agenda was focused almost exclusively on promoting politically inoffensive measures to regulate and penalize the distribution of child pornography...

...The other of us directed the High School/College Program, through which Covenant House presented information about its growing network of shelters...

...Covenant House is not unique in taking such license...

...That's a good place...

...he made the rules...

...This from the agency whose motto at the time was "Times Square-No Place for a Child...

...Working at the Times Square center, it was very apparent that the actual population of young people did not begin to match up with Covenant House's portrayal of them...

...Hearing this, Ritter met with us to announce that he would not allow the community to influence in any way the public image of Covenant House...

...Their pleasure at being informed of the work, introduced to presumably archetypal residents, told of major developments in the program, and given the lurid details of the dangerous underworld of sex and violence lurking outside Covenant House's doors, revealed a complex chemistry at work...

...Few donors could miss the message that "this could be your child...

...And all of us should be asking better questions in choosing which charities to support...

...At full-time salaries of under $11,000, most child-care staff were themselves in a grim battle for economic survival in New York City...

...These agencies are held accountable by their funding sources through regular program and financial reviews...

...We received a stipend of $12 a week in addition to room and board at a dilapidated complex of buildings at 44th Street and 8th Avenue...

...That falsehood became ever easier to justify and manipulate once the agency's multimillion dollar operating budgets were built on its popularity...

...What's going on with Father Bruce and Covenant House...

...He had successfully completed a drug rehabilitation program in North Carolina, was living down there with his sister, and was looking for a job...

...Like so many homeless young people in New York, Tommy had found at Covenant House not just shelter and attention to his immediate needs, but an atmosphere of genuine caring...

...Since we met Tommy at Covenant House in New York City eight years ago, he has spent time in a series of shelters, prisons, and drug rehab programs...

...Sister Whelan even began appearing at Ritter 's speeches to challenge him on his plans...

...No other private or church-sponsored charity compares with Covenant House's success in this area...

...I was the guy holding the light," he said...

...It also has been disclosed that certain board members received personal loans from a trust fund established with the bulk of Ritter's salary for the benefit of the children at Covenant House...

...Bruce Ritter, O.F.M...

...For all of us, our experiences at Covenant House had been the catalyst for our life choices...

...They helped me out, they help a lot of people...

...At the time, New York City was belatedly implementing a moratorium on the closing of SRO hotels, as the loss of this inexpensive housing had contributed significantly to the growing homeless population...

...Cardinal John O'Connor spoke forcefully of the church's support for this legislation...

...This was followed by a year directing the development and operations of the growing faith community...

...a top-heavy and disproportionately well-paid corporate staff...

...Many had been abused physically or sexually in their homes...

...One letter was from a young widow...

...The paradox of Covenant House-being at its best so exceptional in its vision, and now seeming to be so malignant-is an occasion for serious reflection...

...They asked eagerly about the program, and described how moved they were by Ritter's monthly newsletter...

...Equally troubling was the atmosphere of fear and intimidation created by management...

...Shortly after we left the agency, we were amazed to learn of the purchase of the Times Square Hotel for $17 million...

...We were struck by a phrase used by Macchiarola, a man we know and respect, in explaining his forced resignation...

...When challenged by the Coalition for the Homeless and others, Ritter expressed annoyance...

...It is well known that adults who sexually abuse children often seek out situations where they will have access to trusting minors...

...Many young people have received valuable services at Covenant House...

...The building housed the residential programs on the lower levels, and the agency's corporate offices on four floors above the crisis center...

...She was dead right...

...It is time that attention and resources are directed at intervention and prevention services...

...Through the monthly newsletter, Father Ritter won an intensely loyal following, and convinced his supporters both of his expertise in dealing with troubled youth, and of the freshness and humility of his organization...

...This image was somehow sustained through Covenant House's meteoric growth in the 1980s into one of the nation's largest, most conservative charities, which spent vast sums on administration and fundraising...

...A study of the Covenant House program dur- ing our years there would have shown a ram- pant pattern of recidivism-residents, such as Tommy, coming back again and again, hopelessly stuck on the streets without promise of permanent housing or a stable job...

...Members of the community brought these accounts to the attention of Ritter and his Conventual Franciscan province in 1983...

...Among the first signs was how callously the agency treated its child-care staff...

...The hotel was adjacent to the original Covenant House center, where the Covenant House community now lived...

...Equally destructive was Covenant House's attitude that any action could be rationalized as in the interest of "the kids...

...As an agency working with troubled, sexually active young people, Covenant House should have been more alert to this threat, and should have insisted on the most rigorous standards of personal conduct on the part of the staff at all levels...

...people being flown all over the continent to examine new sites for expansion...

...The gathering reminded us of the many exceptional aspects of Covenant House, the extraordinary people we had encountered there, its vitality and excitement, and the fact that for all its shortcomings Covenant House's doors were always open to young people in need...

...Posters, brochures, and other agency advertisements, including the widely circulated fundraising booklet "Sometimes God Has a Kid's Face," featured young, white men and women, usually fair-haired and often carrying a backpack...

...He said he had "a very conservative donor base," who would be alienated were Covenant House, through the community, to be identified with the peace and justice movement within the church...

...The street culture of casual manipulation, deceit, unchecked self-aggrandizement, and scorn for conventional standards of behavior seeped in...

...We would debate the meaning of "simple living" and "chaste love," the two tenets of our community life as established by Father Ritter, and discuss, at his encouragement, the possibility of the community's eventual autonomy from Covenant House...

...Managers rarely visited the residential floors and had little comprehension of or sympathy for the day-to-day struggles of the staff to keep order and provide care...

...Instead, the agency directed its new income to an ever-widening expansion into new cities...

...The agency and its leaders were dangerously out of touch with their motivations, and the reality that the impulse to do good is always, in some manner, complex...

...In addition, certain senior staff received loans directly from the agency...

...One of us spent two months working in Donor Communications, where personal responses were prepared to each letter written to Father Ritter...

...he demanded...

...For most young people, involvement in the sex industry was a result of the impoverishment and abuse they had grown up with...

...Covenant House spent six hundred thousand dollars buying a building there...

...Covenant House distanced itself from the advocacy agenda of virtually every other social service agency serving young people-for help to troubled and abusive families, affordable housing, increased job training opportunities, and better supports in schools and poor communities to prevent or treat problems early...

...We do know that Ritter continued to live alone in an apartment behind his office at the center, rather than in the more traditional and disciplined setting of his Franciscan community residence located just blocks away...

...A powerful sense of mission carried us along, kept us looking ahead to new centers in new cities, and diverted our attention from the reality around us...

...There, a local agency called Bridge Over Troubled Waters had been providing shelter and counseling to young people for years...

...Several hundred former volunteers and their spouses returned to New York City for a weekend of socializing and reflection...

...We were struck once again by the paradox of the place, and reminded that for all our anger at the betrayals and abuses we had seen and heard of, we felt a strange loyalty to the elements of good that somehow survived there...

...Child-care workers often were barely able to establish contact with each resident between crises, much less provide meaningful counseling...

...Covenant House was organized independently of the Archdiocese of New York as a membership corporation, with Father Ritter the sole member of the corporation...

...At that time the agency's reputation was growing, donations were pouring in, and Covenant House was expanding into a number of North American cities...

...It seemed an obvious conflict that a member of the board of directors was also a paid employee of the agency, and that one of our offices had purchased an obsolete piece of business machinery at a premium from another of Ritter's close advisers...

...But this also is an opportunity, finally, to begin acknowledging the true needs of the nation's most neglected children...

...Firings occurred as if at whim...

...After discussing his current prospects, Tommy got to the point of his call...

...Many had grown up in foster care and had been discharged at age eighteen to fend for themselves...

...Among the seventy or so community members, there were widows, retired people, and priests and nuns on temporary assignment from their dioceses or religious communities...

...At those meetings, we would talk about our work with the kids, and about our shared experiences...

...Most were in poor health, undereducated, untrained, and unemployable...

...She described how deeply offended she was by the "lascivious quality of the message...

...Sister Barbara Whelan, C.S.J., the program's director, was incensed by Covenant House's standard claim that no one was doing anything in Boston, and that what was needed was a large crisis center smack in the middle of the city's infamous Combat Zone...

...The letters were very personal in tone, highly emotional, and both despairing and humble in their actual request for contributions...

...Each member was assigned a full-time job at Covenant House's main facility in Tunes Square...

...How should they be held accountable...

...Like many others in this faith-centered group, we were just out of college, idealistic, curious about the role that faith would play in our lives, and drawn there by Ritter's challenge: "Give me a year of your life to help me help my kids...

...The quality of the Covenant House shelter programs was a matter of considerable discussion within the child-care field, even during our years there...

...Other charitable groups have fallen victim to the temptation of operating beyond the limits of moral propriety...

...Large short-term shelters similar to the Times Square prototype were planned for Houston, Fort Lauderdale, and Boston...

...In fact, Covenant House would describe its expansion as necessitated by the absence of services for young people in that city...

...In each of these roles we acquired a profound appreciation for the passionate good will of Covenant House's supporters...

...As a result of her questioning, Covenant House, which refused to discuss or modify its approach, sold its building (at a profit) and packed its bags...

...Perhaps Covenant House's saddest legacy is that it misdirected the public's perception of the real circumstances and needs of homeless and runaway young people, thereby contributing to misconceived public policy and spending for this group...

...But like many others there, we found our experience at Covenant House an ambivalent and finally a disillusioning one...

...Ironically, child care is one of the most highly regulated fields in social services...

...What had been designed as a highly structured and supervised program for twenty-five young people was transformed into a massive and loosely regulated program for three hundred in one large facility...

...For all its growing resourcesCovenant House's annual budget increased from $11 million in 1981 when we began work there, to $30 million when we left at the end of 1983-the agency displayed little interest in examining the effectiveness of its services...

...Much of the trouble revealed lately grew out of this fundamental falsehood of the popular Covenant House mythology...

...Made up of full-time volunteers, the community had been established by Father Ritter as an element of the Covenant House program in 1977...

...Covenant House also was blind to the dangerous fascination and threat of the seamy subculture that was its context...

...But by the early 1980s, when our involvement with Covenant House began, over 85 percent of the residents at Covenant House's flagship program in Times Square were black or Hispanic, and victims of far more complex evils than the sex industry...

...An important factor in the loyal relationships Covenant House established with its donors was the agency's attention to simple courtesies and its thoughtful treatment of its supporters...

...We were often approached by individuals who knew we worked at Covenant House...

...We thought especially of the faith and sacrifices of that family-who were so typical of many Covenant House supporters-when, soon after, the agency commissioned a lavish and costly redecoration of the lobby, lounge, and executive offices at its main building...

...More children now live in poverty in our country than at any time in our nation's history...

...Ritter insisted on absolute control of every element of Covenant House, and did not hesitate to eliminate even perceived challenges to his authority...

...Like a canvas pressed against a volatile substance, the streets impressed their image on Covenant House...

...The newsletters, for the most part, presented extreme cases of young people caught in the sex industry...

...Yet they were so short-term and superficial in nature as to have little real impact on the circumstances of the residents...

...New guidelines and sanctions must be developed for the board members of such charitable organizations...

...These transactions, now under investigation by the New York state attorney general, may be technically legal, but they seem a dubious practice for any charitable organization and are sadly symptomatic of the agency's management style...

...Our own work experiences at Covenant House were quite varied...

...Most came from the five boroughs of New York City, and from the city's most troubled communities...

...Among the most pathetic of the recent revelations on Covenant House finances was the disclosure that when fundraising projections were not met in 1987, rather than tighten belts on the corporate side or scale back expansion plans, Covenant House canceled the health benefits of its child-care workers, at an annual savings of $80,000 out of a budget that year of over $75 million...

...Almost everyone still worked in social services...

...When the moratorium was passed nevertheless, Covenant House attempted to evict SRO tenants...

...The short-term shelter services the agency provided on a grand scale, housing upwards of two hundred young people a night in its Times Square facility, were indeed valuable...

...Rumors or accounts of misconduct should have been vigilantly investigated...

...Walking home from the center at night after a child-care shift, through the human wasteland of 42nd Street, we would offer thanks for the existence of Covenant House, that so many young people were there and not out on the streets...

...How should religious and charitable agencies conduct themselves...

...There is an aspect of the Covenant House story that is quite frightening...

...From misleading the public and its donors about the identity of most residents, to acquiring multimillion dollar real estate and chasing poor tenants from their rooms, to awarding six-figure salaries to some in management while paying child-care staff subsistence wages, to operating its corporate and financial affairs at the margins of legality, Covenant House was perched on a slippery slope where objective reality had little meaning...

...We have been deeply troubled by the institutional values of Covenant House since we both worked at the main Covenant House program in New York City's Times Square in the early 1980s...

...From the community dining room, we could look out in one direction and see the marquees for a live-sex show, two peep shows, a porn book store, a prostitution hotel, and the sidewalk in front of these lined with dazed, pleading women and boys...

...Our bleak view turned to outrage when Ritter and his loyalists on the board forced the ouster of acting president Frank J. Macchiarola following Macchiarola's call for a full investigation of the agency's operations as the first step in a program of reform...

...With Ritter, we imagined that such a community might become a new type of presence in the Catholic church: an intentional community of lay people devoted to the care of runaway and homeless youth, who would make a permanent commitment to live in community and contribute to the work of the church...

...Her husband had been killed in a traffic accident that fall, and at the request of her two young children, she was sending Ritter all the money she had saved during the year to buy her own children's gifts, as "a Christmas present to Daddy...

...He spoke of Covenant House with great fondness and of the child-care staff he came to know in the course of his many stays at the shelter-one month in, one month out for a number of years-as the best people he knew...

...It would be particularly unfortunate, however, if Covenant House's conduct resulted in diminished regard and support for the many church-affiliated child-care agencies that operate programs of high quality...

...There was no promise of reunification with family for these young people, no better life to return to from Covenant House...

...Particularly shocking are the allegations that Ritter, one of the nation's most outspoken advocates for sexually exploited young people, may have been guilty of such exploitation...

...There is a young underclass in our society with acute needs...

...He told the press he was having to subsidize the operation of the hotel since his tenants could afford only limited rents, and he now had a large mortgage to pay...

...Despite their effectiveness as fundraising tools, the newsletters themselves exploited the subjects of the stories...

...Shortly after leaving Covenant House, we met a woman who had just received her first Covenant House direct mail solicitation...

...Given Covenant House's association with the Catholic church, it is extraordinary that church officials did not require greater accountability from the organization...

...Neither Ritter's Franciscan province nor the agency's board of directors, both with authority over Ritter and his operation of Covenant House, seemed to have scrutinized the program carefully...

...In contemplating the loyalty and support shown by many good people to an obviously troubled institution, and the silence that this loyalty commanded, we are reminded of how frail and malleable of conscience we are...

...Both the Reagan and Bush administrations loved to point to Covenant House as exactly the type of narrow, privatized social service program they had in mind in proposing that volunteers could solve our nation's most intractable social problems, rather than professionals using public resources...

...Covenant House purchased a good deal of real estate, some of it speculatively...

...Those in charge operated as though the virtue of their mission allowed them to establish their own rules of conduct...

...The agency promoted itself as a haven for runaways who, but for Covenant House, would almost inescapably be dragged into a life of prostitution...

...In our years at Covenant House, we did not see or hear of any improper conduct involving Ritter and residents of the center...

...In the long run, however, the agency's real contributions to improving the lives of young people have been limited from the start...

...frequent redec-orations of the executive offices and the center (under the paid supervision of Ritter's niece...

...While the Times Square Hotel story was unfolding, at a time when our regard for the agency had rarely been lower, we attended the ten-year reunion of the Covenant Community in October 1987...

...As one friend observed, Father Ritter had played the same role in the 1980s as had John and Robert Kennedy in the 1960s, calling young people to devote their gifts to the service of others and providing the opportunity...

...The most serious allegations facing Covenant House are made by four former residents who say Father Ritter engaged them in sexual relationships while they were in his charge...

...It was a simpler and more comfortable message of good and evil than the ugly and unsettling truth of abuse perpetrated by family members, homelessness, illiteracy, racism, chronic poverty, and the general breakdown of family and community life, particularly in inner city neighborhoods...

...Now, with Covenant House in disarray, the specter looms of no safety net to catch these needy young people...

...The view in the other direction was of the Broadway theaters along 44th Street, and of the limousines depositing their affluent fares just yards from scenes of degradation and suffering, of which the theatergoers seemed thoroughly unaware...

...It would have revealed a dubious practice of mixing hardened street kids with younger, meeker runaways on the residential floors, and chronic understaffing in the center...

...A Methodist minister was part of our group...

...Most community members worked with the residents as child-care staff, but several were assigned to other areas of the program...

...Sadly, the "covenant" did not extend to the line staff...

...every donor was invited to visit the centers...

...What made Covenant House such a phenomenon in social services was not simply its genius at fundraising, but its ability to strike connections among people, to create deep mutual bonds between the largely middle-class, Catholic, suburban donors who support Covenant House, and the poor urban youth the program serves...

...But charities such as Covenant House which exist largely independently of government support and its attendant regulations, require far greater public scrutiny...

...Though undeniably compelling, there was a voyeuristic undercurrent to the stories that used the sexual history of the residents to titillate readers...

...Conv...

...In the early days of his work, Ritter apparently did work mainly with white teenage runaways...

...As the months went by, there were other signs of a gap between the "myth" of Covenant House and the reality we were living...

...This was followed by an assignment doing research at Covenant House's Institute for Youth Advocacy, where the experience of the agency was to be analyzed and used to develop a legislative agenda and social policy positions based on the needs and circumstances of the residents...

...To its credit, Covenant House eventually added a longer-term residential and job-training program, Rights of Passage...