Grantees in the News

Courtney Smith is leading a life of service, helping youth who are experiencing homelessness in Detroit with her nonprofit organization, the Detroit Phoenix Center. She is the founder and CEO of the center which opened in 2017 and is the youngest CEO of a homeless youth service provider in the city and the only woman of color.

Smith, 29, knows what it’s like to experience homelessness at a young age. A Detroit native, she was in the foster care system as a baby until she was adopted at three years old. Throughout the years, family conflict and challenges arose at home, forcing her to go into a shelter for teens at the age of 15.

From then through her early 20’s, she was in and out of different shelters and staying with family members and friends. As an undergraduate honor student at Eastern Michigan University who nevertheless continued to struggle with homelessness, Smith realized that it was a systemic issue that needed to be addressed.

According to Michigan League for Public Policy, “One in 30 unaccompanied youth ages 12-17 will experience homelessness in a given year. This number jumps to one in 10 from age 18-24. Youth who are in or aging out of foster care, involved in the juvenile justice system, identify as LGBTQ, or are Black or part of the Latinx community are also more likely to experience one or more instances of homelessness between the ages of 12 and 24.”

Courtesy of Courtney Smith

From 2013-2016, Smith worked at the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth as the Michigan youth task force coordinator, responsible for bringing service providers and youth together to find solutions to end homelessness in their communities. Smith left Detroit in 2015 (still working remotely for NAEHCY) and headed to Kentucky to do a year at AmeriCorps, where she worked at a community center serving immigrants and refugees.

In 2016, Smith returned to her hometown to help her family and youngest brother, Blair. While trying to help Blair and his friends secure housing and resources, she asked herself, ‘Where do people like my brother, who may not identify themselves as someone who is experiencing homelessness, go?’

That same year, she submitted a proposal to join the Millennial Trains Project to help find solutions to the issue of youth experiencing homelessness. The organization provided Smith and 25 social service entrepreneurs training, resources, and the opportunity to travel to six different communities and learn from CEOs of non-profit organizations. Smith was one of the five social service entrepreneurs who received a $10K grant.

During the trip, she met a 16-year-old girl who shared her experiences and told Smith how helpful drop-in centers were. She loved the idea.

“She said the best way that you can thank me is to go back to your own community and do something,” Smith said in an interview with theGrio.“This 16-year-old-girl really challenged me to put my money where my mouth was, and I didn’t have [any] money, so I was really moved by that.”

She continues, “It just so happened that I got on the train in the year that the last stop, for the first time that they’ve ever done this, the train was actually going to be in my city. So I convened a group of youth in Detroit and a group of stakeholders, and I talked to them about this model of a drop-in center and we built out what is known today as the Detroit Phoenix Center.”

Courtesy of Courtney Smith

Detroit Phoenix Center opened in January 2017. It is a low barrier resource center where young people can drop in off the street. They can shower, wash clothes, get emergency assistance, food, and access to mental health resources. If they need housing that night, the organization connects them with housing. They also have an after-school enrichment program along with life skills and educational courses.

“So we don’t just focus on basic needs,” Smith explains.”We also focus on career readiness, life skills, educational workshops. We also have a youth action board. The Youth Action Board is comprised of a group of youth who were with us when we first started to make sure that our work is youth-centric.”

Young people serviced by the program can apply for a 12-month fellowship to learn about nonprofit leadership, nonprofit management, and advocacy.

“We believe that those who are closest to the problem need to be the ones driving the solutions,” Smith says. “So we want to empower the youth that we serve to be change agents in the community and also to hold us accountable as an agency to make sure that we don’t get too far removed from the heart of the matter. “

Like many organizations and businesses impacted by COVID-19, Detroit Phoenix Center has had to make some changes. The building the center was leasing closed so they’ve transitioned to virtual and mobile services. Throughout the pandemic, the center’s youth fellows have remained involved by helping register voters and providing legwork for supply giveaways and more.

“We had to go out and literally find the youth,” Smith shares. “We had to go to hotels. We had to go to the abandoned houses. We had to go to the last known address and thankfully, we haven’t lost any of our young people, but it definitely changed the scope of what we do.”

Smith and her team have delivered care packages, clothing, paid security deposits and outstanding rent and provided hotel vouchers for emergency housing.

“We did mental health workshops,” continues Smith.”We paid cell phone bills. We delivered laptop computers and routers. We literally provided wraparound support during this time. We’ve been able to serve more youth in the community because, again, transportation was a barrier. But since we have literally been taking our services to the young people, they’ve been reaching out through word of mouth.”

On Nov, 30, the Detroit Phoenix Center is launching a social media challenge for their December fundraising campaign One Night Without a Bed.

“It’s a call-to-action,” says Smith. “We want people to give up their bed for one night in December for the 4.2 million young people who experience homelessness on any given night. ‘We’re kicking it off on Nov. 30th, which is the last day of National Homeless Youth Awareness Month.”

Though youth homelessness is often talked about as a separate issue, Smith believes you can’t talk about youth homelessness without talking about poverty, educational disparities, and health outcomes.

“We have to really look at youth homelessness in relation to other systems…like the juvenile justice system,” she explains. “And the only way that we can truly, truly break the cycle of youth homelessness in our community is if all those systems work together to really move the needle. And also, to really, truly elevate the voices in the lived experiences of young people in the community and those who have actually experienced homelessness and center their voices and center their experiences in our solutions.”

Smith shared her advice to those who are interested in creating more Black-owned nonprofit organizations that are helping young people in need. “I would definitely tell them that we are uniquely positioned to really create the change in the community that we want.”

“No one is more qualified than we are,” Smith continues. “And you deserve to be at the table. And if you don’t have a seat at the table, then you need to open up a window to build your own table. Do what you need to do to bring your passion to fruition. One thing that I always remember, even in moments where I’m doubting myself, is that someone else’s life…someone else’s freedom, someone else’s joy is attached to my purpose, and that is a big calling, that is a deep calling.”

On the opening day of the Detroit Phoenix Center, Smith learned her youngest brother, Blair Smith, transitioned by suicide at the age of 19. Her brother’s life and his legacy are embedded in the very mission of the Detroit Phoenix Center and she has started a scholarship fund in his honor. 

I am a formerly incarcerated Jewish lesbian and the child of two Holocaust survivors. I served time in two federal prisons, including stints in solitary confinement.

On the first day of my incarceration, I requested and was given a Siddur – a Jewish prayer book. By the second day, I began saying the Sh’ma prayer over and over every day.  It took no more than a few seconds to realize why I was repeating the Sh’ma and holding the prayer book. A story my father told me came to mind immediately.

In 1940, after the Nazis conquered Poland and came to power, a Jew carrying a Siddur, a tallit, and tefillin could be shot. Still, my father took his velvet pouch, which held his siddur, tallit and tefillin, to work. A Nazi stopped him, saw the items and decided to make an example of him.

The Nazi summoned other Jews to watch as he beat my father. Summoning his strength and faith, my father looked up to G-d and said, “if you let me live, I will honor you every day through prayer.”

He survived 12 labor and concentration camps and was liberated at Dachau in 1945.

As a three-year-old child, I would watch my father prepare to pray. When he put the leather straps around his arm, I ran over held out my arm so he would put them on my arm too. It was my father’s absolute joy of davening and lacing up the leather strap on his arm that I remembered. It was his love for Judaism that I saw clearly.

And it was the Jewish values my parents would repeat and model throughout my childhood that stayed with me and were so important during my incarceration, that is, that Jews have a moral obligation to care about the dignity of every person. It was my parents’ reminder of our moral obligation that led me to watch, learn and record in my mind everything that happened in prison.

I formed Witness to Mass Incarceration to position the voices of formerly imprisoned women and LGBTQIA people at the front of the movement for alternatives. It was my Jewish eyes, soul and values guiding me.

The American Jewish community knows about mass incarceration but must do more to end it. By allowing incarcerated people to be in prison in 120 degree temperatures with no air-conditioning, by ignoring daily threats of sexual violence, to tolerating prisoner slave labor or, most importantly, by allowing for the over-incarceration and sentencing of people of color and LGBTQIA people is to forget that we are all created in G0d’s image, b’tzelem Elohim. 

Being released from prison was harder than being in prison. I was released homeless and penniless. I was given a Greyhound bus ticket and 30 dollars and that was all. There was no place for me to go, no services to help me get housing, a job, a community, and no immediate help for my deteriorated mental health.

Formerly incarcerated people need help on the first day of their release. Current reentry services that have been funded for decades haven’t provided the jobs and housing we need.

I ask the American Jewish community to not only make a commitment to end the era of mass incarceration but to welcome home the strangers that are being released from prison.

The task of welcoming home a newly released person is not easy. They start with less than nothing because, in addition to their poverty and homelessness, they have to fight the anxiety, fears and triggers from their incarceration.

Witness partners with Jewish synagogues to meet and greet a newly released person, provide them with a suitcase with critical items and, going forward, a community.

While our “Suitcase Project,” as it is called, is an important first step, a much broader Jewish Response to Reentry is a necessary second step, mobilizing the Jewish community to embrace its core values and lessons of its own history with oppression to engage with justice and fairness for others.

In this way, we honor all of G-d’s creations – Kavod Ha-Briyot – and repair the world, Tikkun Olam.

They contact her by e-mail, text and phone, entreating her to help them, each story more heartrending than the last. The teenager whose parents are determined to marry her off to an older cousin. The couple who grew up in a religious cult and were married against their will at 15. The young gay woman forced into marriage at 19 to a man who repeatedly beat and raped her. The sisters whose abusive father wanted them to marry men he could control. Their stories haunt Fraidy Reiss, but they also impel her to action. The founder of Unchained at Last, a nonprofit based in Westfield and dedicated to ending forced and child marriage in the United States, Reiss understands the stories as if they were her own. Because, in fact, they are.

Raised in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, Reiss was forced, at 19, to marry a virtual stranger who threatened to kill her less than two weeks after the wedding and continued to do so for the 12 years they were together. Eventually, she found a way out of the marriage—an extraordinarily difficult and courageous act for a woman raised in an ultra-conservative religious milieu. As she built a new life for herself and her two daughters, she found she couldn’t forget the suffering of other women like her. It was that sense of survivor’s guilt that became the impetus for the founding of Unchained at Last in 2011.

If you think that forced marriage is a third-world problem, or perhaps limited in the United States to fringe religious communities, Reiss will quickly set you straight. In her small office, she reels off the statistics: “Across the U.S., between 2000 and 2010, an estimated 248,000 children were married, some as young as 12, almost all of them girls married to older men.” (The estimate is based on the available data from 38 states.)

There are no hard numbers on forced marriages overall, but anecdotally, Reiss says, “I can tell you it’s happening everywhere. Our clients come from every major religion, minor religions, secular backgrounds; they come from every socioeconomic level; they come from families who’ve been in America for many generations and from immigrant families from countries of origin on every inhabited continent.” It’s happening in the LGBTQ community, where parents employ forced marriage as a form of conversion therapy. And in the vast majority of cases Reiss has worked on, the perpetrators are parents. “Think about that betrayal,” she says. “The people you’d normally go to for help are the ones causing you harm.”

That was certainly Reiss’s experience, but it wasn’t one she rebelled against initially. As a teenager in the ultra-Orthodox community, she expected an arranged marriage, even welcomed it. It was only when her husband began to threaten her that she realized there could be a downside to the custom. “He would describe to me in detail how he was going to kill me,” she says, “and he gave me good reason to believe him, because while he was saying it, he would punch his fist through the wall, smash windows, dishes, furniture.” Still, she had two children with him and moved with him to an Orthodox community in New Jersey, all the while enduring his mounting abuse. At 27, she says, “I realized that the only way out of the marriage, other than a coffin, was through an education.”

She enrolled in Rutgers, graduating at 32 with a degree in journalism, and found a job as a reporter at the Asbury Park Press. In her last year at Rutgers, she’d stopped wearing a head covering—traditional for Orthodox women. Her parents’ response was to declare her dead to them. In a strange sense, that freed her to leave the marriage. “I was no longer worried about losing my family,” she says. “I’d already lost them, so what more could I lose?” She changed the locks, filed for divorce, and four years later, scraped together enough cash to buy a small Cape Cod in Union County, which she and her daughters referred to as the Palais de Triomphe. That same month, she founded Unchained, the only U.S. nonprofit devoted to aiding and advocating for victims of forced and child marriage.

Reiss figured she could devote a couple of hours a week to it: maybe help five women the first year, 10 the next, offer some emotional support, help them find pro bono attorneys. “By the end of the first year,” she says, “Unchained had 30 clients, and they needed a lot more than just emotional support and attorneys.” Often, the women are fearful they’ll be tracked down and returned to their marriages. For this reason, Unchained fiercely guards their privacy. (Due to privacy issues, New Jersey Monthly was unable to interview any of the women for this story.)

From its inception as a one-woman operation to its current stature as a globally recognized nonprofit with a full-time staff of four and a devoted cadre of volunteers, Unchained has helped more than 500 women and girls escape forced marriage, offering them a safe haven (usually a shelter for survivors of domestic violence), free legal aid to secure a divorce (and sometimes, a restraining order), and emotional support for as long as it’s needed. The organization offers assistance to any girl or woman in the U.S. who, in the words of its mission statement, is or has been pressured, bribed, tricked, threatened, beaten or otherwise forced into marriage, as well as American citizens who have been taken overseas for the purposes of forced marriage.

Clients find Unchained through word of mouth or referrals from law-enforcement or domestic-violence agencies. When a woman is taken overseas for a forced marriage and makes her way into a U.S. embassy, the State Department may refer her to Unchained. Some find the organization through an online search, even in religious communities that ban the Internet. (“It’s really hard to enforce those Internet bans,” Reiss says from personal experience.)

Unfortunately, if those clients are under 18, the extent of the help that Unchained can offer is limited. That’s because, thanks to a variety of legal loopholes, child marriage is still legal in 48 states. And then there are the various legal measures designed to protect children: In most states, for instance, it’s illegal to help a child leave home. In addition, largely because of liability issues, most domestic-violence shelters won’t take in a child without a parent or guardian.

“That means,” says Reiss, “that in a lot of states right now, children can marry but aren’t allowed to file for divorce. We like to say that puts the ‘lock’ in ‘wedlock.’” What’s more, in most states, it’s virtually impossible for a child to retain an attorney or mount a legal action in her or his own name.

“Think about that betrayal,” says Reiss. “The people you’d normally go to for help are the ones causing you harm.” Photo by Jennifer S. Altman

Given those realities, Reiss felt it was a no-brainer to advocate for a legal ban on child marriage. However, it would have to be done on a state-by-state basis, and eventually on the federal level. She figured that most legislators wouldn’t even be aware that child marriage was still legal, or would think that it was simply the result of archaic laws that no one had seen fit to remove from the books. Once they knew, she assumed, arriving at a legislative fix would be a slam dunk.

Her first assumption turned out to be correct; alas, the second, she learned as she proposed the legislation to lawmakers across the country, was a tougher hurdle. “In state after state,” Reiss says, “the argument was that if a girl got pregnant, she had no choice—she’d have to get married, even if she was raped.”

Reiss and Unchained battled on, wielding statistics as a weapon. Consider, they told the legislators, that a teenage girl who marries in the United States is 31 percent more likely to live in poverty and 51 percent more likely to drop out of high school, and that globally, child marriage makes a woman three times more likely to be a victim of domestic violence than if she marries at 21 or older.

Concentrating on her home state of New Jersey, Reiss chipped away at legislative resistance until all but five legislators gave the thumbs up to a bill raising the minimum age to marry to 18. (Previous state law permitted 16- and 17-year-olds to marry with parental consent, and those under 16 with the consent of parents and a judge.) The bill passed both houses of the Legislature in 2017, but Governor Chris Christie vetoed it, citing religious customs and recommending that it restrict marriage to those 16 and older. Meanwhile, Reiss and Unchained got a bill banning child marriage—the first of its kind in the nation—passed in Delaware in May 2018. The New Jersey bill was brought up again and signed into law last June by Governor Phil Murphy.

Assemblywoman Nancy Munoz (R-Union), a sponsor of the bill, ascribes much of its success to Reiss. “She was determined,” says Munoz. “She visited the offices of the majority of legislators, and she was extremely persuasive. She had the facts on her side, and she wouldn’t back down.” Munoz notes that she has sponsored many pieces of legislation, but the bill banning child marriage is one of which she is especially proud.

So far, Reiss and Unchained have helped to introduce similar legislation in more than 20 states, with the goal of getting child marriage banned nationwide. But even if that happens, Reiss says, she’ll probably be in business for a long time to come. Women over 18, after all, can still be forced into marriage, and few states have laws banning forced marriage overall. Then there’s the problem of parents forcing their children to marry in religious-only ceremonies. In some states it’s illegal to officiate at a marriage without a civil marriage certificate, “but that doesn’t stop the practice from happening,” Reiss says.

If Reiss is angry, she’s also remarkably upbeat. As she tells her story, she pulls up her sleeve to reveal a tattoo braceleting her right wrist; it depicts a series of links, one of which has been explosively severed. In the early days of the fight to ban child marriage, she explains, she and her staff vowed to get celebratory tattoos when the first bill was signed into law. Getting that tattoo, she says, was one of the most triumphant moments of her life. Given her iron determination to right the wrong of forced marriage, that triumph is likely to be one of many.

In Israel, ultra-Orthodox women have seven children on average and, if their husbands study Torah full time, which is a communitywide ideal, women may also be their family’s sole breadwinners. RNS photo by Michele Chabin

JERUSALEM (RNS) — Esty Shushan breathed a sigh of relief when Israel’s High Court recently urged an ultra-Orthodox political party to allow women to run for political office or face a court ruling.

“We women are 50 percent of the haredi (ultra-Orthodox Jewish) population but we have no access at the decision-making table,” said Shushan, the founder of Nivcharot, an organization that advocates for the participation of ultra-Orthodox women in local and national politics.  “We have problems no one, including male haredi Knesset members, are addressing.”

Tamar Ben-Porath, a secular attorney, and 10 women’s organizations, all but one of them secular, petitioned Israel’s Supreme Court to force religious parties to change their rules. The court agreed to hear the case and gave the ultra-Orthodox party Agudath Yisrael until Sept. 2 to change its policy and allow women to run. If it doesn’t, the court said it would issue a ruling.

“We are women supporting women,” Porath said. “It is unacceptable that a certain sector of society is discriminating against women, claiming this discrimination is based on the sector’s social norms. Today it’s haredi women who are being barred from being candidates. Tomorrow it could be Arabs or another group.”

Although ultra-Orthodox women are not named in the lawsuit because it would imperil their standing within the very community they are trying to reform, Porath said, they are the true trailblazers fighting for change within the insular, patriarchal ultra-Orthodox community.

The demands for representation by Shushan and a small but growing number of religious women come amid a seismic shift in Israeli ultra-Orthodox society, where women give birth to an average of seven children and many support their families financially, allowing their husbands to study Torah full time.

As the community, which comprises 12 percent of Israel’s population, has grown, this spiritually rich but economically precarious lifestyle has become increasingly unsustainable. To meet the challenge, several ultra-Orthodox rabbis have given women greater latitude to study for secular professions, as long as they do so in a gender-segregated environment.

Esty Shushan, right, co-CEO and founder, and Estee Rieder-Indursky, co-CEO, of the organization Nivcharot are demanding that Israel’s ultra-Orthodox political parties allow women to run on their ballots for national and local elections. Photo by Efrat Ben-Yosef

“In the past decade there have been a lot of social changes in haredi society,” Shushan explained. “Haredi women are allowed to become marketers, lawyers, journalists, but the one place they can’t enter is politics. There are zero haredi women in the Knesset, in municipal parties, and it is intolerable.” (Knesset is the term for Israel’s Parliament.)

Kimmy Caplan, a political scientist at Bar-Ilan University, says that for ultra-Orthodox society, there is “a huge difference” between a woman working in an office and a woman campaigning during an election.

“Haredi women are having a lot of impact, changing social norms,” Caplan said. “They are meeting mainstream Israeli society and society is meeting them. They are ending stereotypes. But in the eyes of haredi political parties, which take their directions from haredi rabbis, women should not be up on a podium making speeches. There is still an ideological barrier ultra-Orthodox women are up against.”

Since Israel was established in 1948, no haredi party has allowed a woman to run on its ticket, citing bylaws that require the approval of prominent rabbis. In 2015, Ruth Colian, an ultra-Orthodox activist, created U’Bizchutan, a party focused on haredi women’s issues, but it received only 1,802 votes, far fewer than the threshold needed to win a seat in the Knesset.

Only one haredi woman, Tzvia Greenfeld, served as a parliamentarian, from 2006 to 2009, for a party that is not haredi. Today, 35 women serve in the 120-member Knesset.

Shushan said that for ultra-Orthodox women to have any influence in the public sphere, “we need to join the existing parties,” which wield a great deal of power in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition.

Not all ultra-Orthodox women agree. In July, Adina Bar-Shalom, daughter of the late, revered Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, formally registered the mixed-religious political party she helped create, Achi Yisraeli.

But Bar-Shalom, an activist and educator, told the Times of Israel she does not expect to become a candidate.

Ultra-Orthodox women can “make use of politics even without being a member of Knesset,” Bar-Shalom said.

Shushan, however, believes only ultra-Orthodox women working within an established ultra-Orthodox party can effectively tackle the many challenges they face.

“The government is giving many scholarships to encourage more haredi men into the workplace, but haredi women receive much less funding. Haredi women are diagnosed with breast cancer later than other women because haredi society says it’s ‘immodest’ to name female body parts. The pay gap between haredi women and other women in the workplace is something like 30 percent,” Shushan said.

In Jerusalem an ultra-Orthodox woman passes a billboard full of “pashkvilim,” public notices of rabbinic decrees, death notices and other timely information. RNS photo by Michele Chabin

Rachel Stomel, a spokeswoman for the Center for Women’s Justice, one of the court case’s petitioners, said ultra-Orthodox male lawmakers “don’t show up” to Knesset forums on the well-being of women.

“Haredi women need the opportunity to speak for themselves,” Stomel said.

And while ultra-Orthodox lawmakers deny religious women the right to serve, “they have no problems working with secular women in the Knesset,” Shushan noted.

A spokesman for the Agudath Yisrael political party that Ben-Porath and others are suing declined to comment, but during the recent court hearing, the party’s lawyer told a judge: “Just as you would not expect us to give representation to children, you would not expect us to give representation to women.”

While these words may sound patronizing, Chevy Weiss, an American-Israeli ultra-Orthodox religious strategist to political parties in the U.S., said women are “very respected and revered” by ultra-Orthodox society.

“The greatest rabbis of our generation consult their wives on pressing issues,” Weiss said. “We have a great deal of influence behind the scenes.”

Weiss questioned how ultra-Orthodox women who want to become lawmakers can call themselves haredi if they do not follow their rabbis’ rulings.

“In haredi society we follow the leadership. They tell you who to vote for, what schools to send your children to. You don’t have to listen, but then you’re not really haredi,” Weiss maintained.

Shushan acknowledged that she and other female ultra-Orthodox activists “have paid a price” for demanding that women be allowed to run for office, even if they didn’t spearhead the court case.

“There are people in the community who either ignore us or shame us on the internet and elsewhere. One rabbi said we’re schizophrenic and need psychiatric help.”

She moved her four children to different schools after receiving threats.

Though she has high hopes for the court case, Shushan is realistic about its potential impact, even if it succeeds.

“The parties will find a way to get around it, but I feel the change in our community,” she said. “Slowly, slowly things are happening.”