SoHo is the name of a neighborhood in New York City that's south of Houston Street. It's also shorthand for a kind of glamorous urban lifestyle epitomized by high-end shopping and trendy cafes. The neighborhood's cobblestone streets are lined with galleries and luxury boutiques, and famously crowded with a churning mix of tourists, sleekly turned-out locals, and the more-than-occasional celebrity.

But in the early 1990s, SoHo's sidewalks were filled not with people carrying Armani and Prada shopping bags but with garbage. Artists had begun establishing studios in the neighborhood's ornate cast-iron buildings decades earlier, but it wasn't uncommon to see homeless men and women asleep in doorways and panhandling on the street.

It was there - on the street - that Henry Buhl was stopped one summer day in 1992 by a man who asked him for a $20 loan. Buhl, a businessman who operated photography studios in a building on Greene Street, offered a counterproposal: Instead of a loan, how about a job sweeping the street in front of Buhl's building?

Door to Door
As it turned out, that working relationship didn't last. But the idea of creating jobs took root. "There was a lot of begging going on in the neighborhood," said Buhl, who paid a visit to the nearby Bowery Residents' Committee (BRC), an organization working to help people who had landed on what was then Manhattan's Skid Row. Was there anyone at BRC, Buhl asked the director, whom he might hire to sweep the streets?

At the time, BRC was spending tens of thousands of dollars a year toward rehabilitation services for each client - but almost none of them could get jobs because of having served time in prison. "I suggested this little simple thing, and the director threw up his hands," Buhl recalled. "He said, ‘Hallelujah! You could be my savior!'"

Buhl started with one sweeper and one block, asking his neighbors and other storeowners on Greene Street if they wanted to chip in. Two days later, BRC's director contacted Buhl to ask him if he could use another sweeper. Buhl recalled: "I said, ‘Well, you'll have to wait. I have to go door-to-door to get more stores and restaurants to sign up.'" Buhl continued to add subscribers and sweepers to the service, and within three months, he was overseeing a team of eight workers. Within four months, Buhl gave up his photography business and founded the not-for-profit SoHo Partnership to manage the program.

Seventeen years later, Buhl's "little simple thing" has grown into the Association of Community Employment Programs for the Homeless (ACE), an intensive job-training and job-placement service that works through three neighborhood organizations: the original SoHo Partnership; the TriBeCa Partnership, established in 1997; and the newly created NoHo/Bowery Partnership. And, while the streets of SoHo and TriBeCa are now among the cleanest in Manhattan - they regularly earn scores of 100 percent from the New York City Department of Sanitation - that only sweeps the surface of what ACE has accomplished. Since its founding, the organization has helped hundreds of homeless men and women work themselves out of shelters and into jobs. Eighty-seven percent of ACE's graduates keep jobs for more than two years, a success rate many times higher than that of similar programs.

Today, the organization that Buhl founded at 62 - an age when your average successful businessperson is thinking of retiring to a life of golf and travel - is a national model. Buhl's goal is nothing less than breaking the cycle of unemployment and homelessness by helping workers get the skills they need to find and keep jobs. "I wanted just to clean one street," Buhl said. "But once it got going, well, what are you going to do? Are we going to stop this thing? It snowballed."

Working His Way Up
Buhl grew up in Detroit, the son of a wealthy family, and attended Trinity University in Connecticut. Despite his family connections, when Buhl came to New York City, he started out like thousands of others: by living in a rented room in the YMCA. He began as a clerk on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and worked his way up to positions managing mutual funds in New York and Geneva.

In midlife, Buhl began a second career as a photographer, literally by accident. He brought his camera along to take some pictures at a niece's wedding, and when the professional photographer's camera jammed, Buhl's photos were the only ones of the event. The wedding party and their families were delighted with them, and Buhl grew a photography business through word of mouth. "My friends were my agents," he said. From photographing weddings and bar mitzvahs, Buhl got an opportunity to shoot a fashion opening featuring Yves St. Laurent. Soon Buhl's photographs of socialites appeared in magazines. From there, he said, work flowed nonstop.

There was nothing in his earlier life, Buhl said during a recent interview in his art-filled loft apartment on Greene Street, that would have hinted to him that eventually he would devote so much of himself - including giving up his photography business - to helping homeless people find jobs. "No," he said. "Not a drop." But after a little prodding from Jennifer Joyce, a former investment banker who works as ACE's executive director of business development and marketing, Buhl recalled some days he spent on his own, without a home. "After I moved back from Switzerland, where I lived for 12 years, my wife threw me out of the house," he said. "I was living in the office in a roll-out cot." Slowly, he said, he got back on his feet.

Comeback and Stay
Steer the conversation away from his own story and back to ACE, and Buhl is more forthcoming. The way his program helps people change their own lives "isn't rocket science," he said. "I could explain it in 15 minutes." Participants come from 30 to 40 different homeless shelters around the city, and are carefully screened to make sure they have a desire to "get out of the shelters and into our organization," Buhl said. Not everyone who is on the streets is interested in the program. "Beggars" - an unvarnished term that Buhl uses instead of "panhandlers" - can easily make much more in a day than the hourly wage they're paid to sweep the streets. And they often remind Buhl of that, he said, when he approaches them to tell them about the program.

"The partnerships work," Joyce interjected, "because it takes people who are very much committed to changing their lives and gives them opportunity." She said: "Sweeping the streets is a very humbling experience. People don't look at you as a real person." Joyce isn't just talking in the abstract. Every member of ACE's staff - including Buhl - goes out periodically to sweep with partnership participants. One staff member had a soda thrown at him by a pedestrian who was aiming for a trashcan. To put up with that, Joyce said, "you really have to be committed to a big change."

Along with working 20 to 24 hours a week, participants in ACE's Project Comeback training program must take 26 different classes, on topics that include resume writing, hygiene, sexual harassment, budgeting, and how to dress for interviews -"things that you and I take for granted," said ACE Executive Director James Martin. "We hammer away" at mock interviewing for two weeks, he said. "We really go in and discuss criminal history, and the effect it will have on their job search, what their rights are, how to explain their criminal history to an interviewer."

The work that participants do cleaning streets gives them practical experience in such things as signing in and out, but also provides Martin and other ACE staffers insight into where they might need a little extra help. "We're small enough so we can treat everyone like an individual," Martin said. "It really is like a small family." He added: "Henry is the driving force behind what we do. He's very compassionate and cares about every one of these individuals. That trickles down into everything we do."

After graduating from Project Comeback, participants are enrolled in an aftercare program called Project Stay - part of the comprehensive follow-up that helps distinguish ACE from similar initiatives. Participants must meet weekly with case managers, as well as their peers, to talk about their jobs, personal issues, or anything else. The program also sponsors monthly social gatherings, where graduates go out together for pizza or to a Knicks game. After spending years in and out of jail, many program participants "have no social life," Buhl said. "But they're all in the same boat. It's a great thing. It pulls them all together."

Project Stay is a lifelong support program. "We are able to really care for each person who comes through our doors - it's not a numbers things," Joyce said. "For us, it's an individual thing. If they lose their jobs, they are able to come back and we help them redo their resumes. We are something of a family for people who have no support systems."

The fact that ACE is 99-percent privately funded gives the program flexibility, Buhl said. It also means that Buhl spends much of his time raising money. "It's probably my principal role," he said. ACE sponsors an annual $1,000-a-plate gala dinner in early June. Last year's event raised $900,000. Buhl also hosts an annual party at his home in the Hamptons. Another event last summer auctioned off brooms signed by a host of celebrities, including Bette Midler and Eli Manning. Buhl has friends all over, and he works the phones, Joyce said, "making sure these things are a success."

But the most important social engagement on Buhl's calendar is the graduation ceremony for program participants. ACE sends out printed invitations, and hosts a luncheon afterward. During the ceremony, Project Comeback graduates, many with tears streaming down their faces, talk about their past lives and their future. In 12 years of quarterly graduations, Buhl has missed only one ceremony.

After the Towers
As befits an organization that is all about giving people second chances, ACE itself knows a thing or two about making a comeback. In 1999, Buhl founded a program in San Francisco called the SoMa Partnership. He was in talks with eight other cities across the country about starting programs modeled on the SoHo and TriBeCa partnerships.

Then, in 2001, Sept. 11 happened. SoHo is little more than a dozen blocks away from the World Trade Center. After the Twin Towers collapsed, smoke and dust blew into the neighborhood for weeks. "It was terrible," Buhl said. "People moved out. Stores closed, the money went down the drain, and we had a terrible time. [The SoMa Partnership] had to close, because we didn't take in enough money. And we were on the brink of closing here, too."

ACE has recovered fully, but limited its expansion to New York City, where the need for services has increased sharply. Project Comeback currently has more than 70 workers participating in its programs, a 44-percent jump from last year. There also is a waiting list - something the programs have never had before, Joyce said. But even as the need for their services has expanded, Buhl said, it's been harder to raise money.

At 79, Buhl works at ACE most days from 9 a.m. until 7 p.m. The next step for the organization, he said, is to develop transitional housing; right now, participants continue to live in shelters or treatment centers during their training. Housing has "always been Henry's vision," Joyce said, "and it's starting to come to fruition." Buhl said: "But you can't just give food and shelter. You need people to have the confidence that they can do this by themselves. Unless you train people so they can get a job and hold a job, I don't see much hope."

Members of the Club

When a treatment program counselor told Jacqueline Richardson about the street-sweeping responsibilities that came along with her participation in the SoHo Partnership's Project Comeback program, Richardson wasn't sure she was interested. It was this past January - and freezing outside. Her first thought, she recalled recently, was "No, I am not doing that."

Five months later, she regularly arrives at the project's third-floor offices on Spring Street in SoHo at 6:30 a.m. for a shift that begins an hour later. The offices share the same good architectural bones as the high-end apartments and retail shops that surround it, but none of their luxury. A light-filled front room with soaring ceilings holds a bank of computers and a long, scarred wooden table, where program participants gather for classes and to drink coffee and talk before work. "I am dedicated, and I am on time. I love my job," said Richardson, who in March was voted Most Valuable Player on the SoHo work crew. She pumped her arms: "Put me in, coach."

Spunk comes naturally to her, Richardson said, but she also credits her success to the community and support she has found at the project. In that, she's not alone. "There's always a good feeling coming in here," said Thomas Ford, who joined the program last December. His nickname for the project's offices is "The Clubhouse."

Richardson has a newly acquired bank account and a goal of getting a job with benefits in custodial maintenance. Ford has future plans to be trained as a counselor. For now, he said, he is focusing on staying free of the drug addiction that nearly cost him his family.

But even when the time comes to move on, Ford said, "you can't forget a place like this. Plain and simple, everybody - from the office staff to the work crew - cares about each other. It starts from the top."

Barbara Palmer is senior editor of Convene.

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