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Off the Streets
The mission of Off the Streets is to assist women involved in prostitution move towards safety, recovery, empowerment, and community reintegration. Off the Streets a program specifically for women who are involved in prostitution. It is a program to help women explore positive changes.
What services are offered? We work with clients to coordinate the many services needed to work on their recovery. All services are coordinated on an individual basis to fit each woman’s unique needs. Clients participate in some services at our location, which help foster a sense of community and self esteem. These may include:
Our staff also makes referrals to other community-based programs such as:
How can I participate in the program? We will work with any woman who has experienced prostitution and wants to make life changes. The program accepts referrals from many sources including:
How long is the program? There is no set time for the program. Each woman makes progress in her recovery at her own pace. If a woman is referred by the Court or Probation, she may be required to participate in a specified amount of services. However, the program will work with women as log as is needed. Most women participate for about one year. Where is the program located? Off the Streets is located in downtown When is the program? The program occurs Monday through Friday from 8:00 am to 6:00 pm. Want more information? For general information, contact: Mary Carol Melton, Program Director 513-768-6905 Karla Holmes, Program Manager 513-768-6924
Prostitutes break cycle; pull lives together Women - more often used to being seen than heard - were given a voice Friday and spoke from their hearts. A group of 12 former prostitutes were honored in a graduation ceremony at the Anna Louise Inn downtown for completing the Off the Streets rehab program. To a woman, they were abused as children, sexually or physically - often both - and fell into a pattern of addiction that they said deadened their emotional pains but forced them to sell their bodies to feed the habit. Each woman took the microphone at a podium. They didn't flinch, their words searing, brutally and almost uncomfortably honest, their gratitude palpable. Tears flowed without apology. • http://news.cincinnati.com/apps/pbcs.dll/gallery?Site=AB&Date=20091113&Category=news01&ArtNo=911130810&Ref=PH" target="popup"onClick="window.open('','popup','width=950,height=700,status=no,toolbar=no,location=no,scrollbars=no,resizable=no')">Photos: Graduating Off the Streets This is the first time in my life I completed anything. The three-year-old Off the Streets program addresses not only drug addiction but the sex addiction, low self-esteem, childhood abuse and promiscuous behavior associated with prostitution. Women attend group and individual counseling. Through a network of more than 20 agencies, led by Cincinnati Union Bethel, the women receive emergency housing, health care and help getting a job. The program works. Of the 300 women entered in Off the Streets, 86 percent got substance abuse treatment and 84 percent got medical care. Of the more than 150 women who stayed in the program for more than a month, 75 percent got their own housing, 71 percent a job and 85 percent said they were no longer involved in prostitution. I've been here nine months. They've been the best nine months of my life. Eleven of the 12 graduates participated in the ceremony. They walked up an aisle between folding chairs while members of the MUSE Cincinnati Women's Choir sang, "We face our future proudly, never turning back." An audience of more than 100 people, family, friends and employees, gave them a standing ovation. The positive attention was a first for many of them. Off the Streets program director Mary Carol Melton said each graduate would receive a sterling silver heart and a homemade quilt created by the group Quilting Queens. I'm grateful to have people by my side, especially my children, who never gave up on me. Cornelia Reeves, 43, then spoke. Counselor Lisha Lungelow gave Reeves her diploma and an extended hug. Reeves cried. "I've been clean and sober six months and two days," said Reeves, who abused drugs and alcohol and turned tricks for 22 years. The sight of her sobbing 4-year-old granddaughter, hands pressed against the steamy window of a car driving away, finally convinced Cornelia Reeves that two decades of selling her body for drugs had to stop. Reeves needed help. She'd faked her way through alcohol and drug rehab programs, only to return quickly to gritty street corners in Over-the-Rhine and the West End and smoke-choked bars in Northern Kentucky. She had heard about Off the Streets from other women in her situation. These days, Reeves, 43, works as a telemarketer, is reunited with her two children and granddaughter and stands on the verge of getting her own apartment. "I've got my self-respect back," she said. Her mother's boyfriend abused her sexually beginning when she was 9. She started to drink and smoke marijuana to mask the hurt. She graduated to cocaine, pills and acid. She eventually became a full-time prostitute to pay for her drugs. Reeves' mother, Belinda Reeves, sat in the front row Friday. Cornelia dedicated her heart to her mother and apologized "for the hell I put you through." "I'm very proud of her," Belinda Reeves said. "I spent a lot of years on my knees praying for this day." Cornelia's fiancé, Terrence Baskin, was there, too. "I've been waiting 10 years," he said. "I don't have anybody else in the world." This is where you choose to change. Women newly enrolled in Off the Streets attended the graduation. Graduates encouraged them to stick out the program. "Don't quit," they said. "You can do it." Graduates were there to show support and draw strength and support. Angelina Cirinelli, 39, of Walnut Hills, clean and sober for 3½ years, brought three of her four children - whom she had once lost to foster care. She'd been promiscuous much of her adult life, trading sex for marijuana and alcohol. "Prostitution comes in many forms," she said. Chemical rehab programs only addressed half of her problem, she said. Off the Streets helped her understand, face and overcome what she called her sexual deviance. I was beat up emotionally, physically, mentally and spiritually. I'd given up on myself. Program outreach/intake coordinator Carol Thornton spoke last. Each graduate received a recovery tool kit. It included an eraser "to wipe away the past." A pen: "to write your gratitude list." A quarter or two: "to call anyone for help." A tea bag: "to remind you to relax every day." A thread: "to hang onto when that's all you feel like you've got left." I was a thug. They helped me become a little lady again.
April Chase, who is completing Off the Streets, a program that helps women leave prostitution, enjoys a spring day in downtown Cincinnati. For the 21 years that April Chase worked the streets of Avondale as a prostitute, she worked for many things. Most nights - and days and afternoons - she worked for crack cocaine. Some nights she traded sex for a place to sleep, a pair of second-hand shoes, a plate of hot food. She thought her body was the only commodity she had to sell to keep herself in drugs, to keep herself in that space where she didn't feel the frustration of motherhood too young, the boredom of a life that was going nowhere. The space where, in fact, she didn't feel a thing. But she was wrong. What she actually put out on the streets every night, what she left in the possession of men who didn't care to know her name, what she traded for crack and the tawdriest of objects was her soul. By the time April came to the point where she believed she was worth more than a battered pair of shoes, she had 28 criminal convictions and had spent more than 1,600 days in jail and prison. She had been beaten, threatened with guns and knives, stung by bedbugs and the disgusted looks of passersby. The police were very familiar with April and the other women who racked up 653 prostitution charges in the city last year, and 510 more in the county, clogging the criminal justice system. The officers watched them first appear on the streets, young and scared and vulnerable. They watched them work their trade over time and lose their youth, and then their fear and finally, if not their lives, at least their aliveness. It became a game, except there was no winner. Officers gathered up the women. Judges got them into drug treatment programs, sometimes put them in jail or on probation but then like a revolving door that leads nowhere, they were inevitably back on the streets. Until three years ago, when a collaborative program began offering women a way out of prostitution. Run by Cincinnati Union Bethel, it's called Off the Streets. Friday, April and nine other women will graduate from the program, joining the sisterhood of 36 women who have turned their backs on prostitution and their faces to education and jobs, who have let go of their fear and grabbed hold of their talents, who have lost their addictions and in the process found, once again, their souls. Last month, Off the Streets was one of three national programs to win the Mutual of America Community Partnership Award, as well as proclamations from the City of Cincinnati and Hamilton County. It offers women housing, refers them to substance abuse and mental health counseling, connects them to clinics, sometimes college and ultimately to themselves. For April, completing the program is an intensely personal victory. She has a job now as a cook, gets a regular paycheck, isn't threatened or beaten, and is working her way back to having custody of her sons, who were taken from her seven years ago. But April's success is a success for the city as well. Prostitution is a crime that breeds more crime, as the women who practice it become victims and sometimes perpetrators, as the degradation of the acts they perform leads them to more substance abuse and addiction. "The path of dreadfulness," April calls it. She is on a different path now, a path she believes God has laid open before her. She is healthy. She is humbled. She is healing. And she is happy, although "I need to not get too overly happy because I might rock the boat a little," she says cautiously. After 21 years of struggle, she smiles at the thought that her soul is her own again, and happiness her biggest fear. Krista Ramsey is a member of the Enquirer Editorial Board Published April 6, 2009 with the 2007 Ohio Association of Nonprofit Organizations' Nonprofit Excellence Award with the 2007 Outstandig Community Efforts in CPOP Award in the book "Last Look" by Mariah Stewart with the 2008 "Non-Profit of the Year" awarded by Over-The-Rhine Chamber with the 2008 Mutual of America Foundation's Community Partnership Award (Honorable Mention)
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