Wallace-Benjamin feels right at Home

David Cogger

One Saturday morning in the fall of 2005, Joan Wallace-Benjamin and Gloria Nemerowicz shared cups of coffee at a Starbucks in Chestnut Hill.

The two friends discussed the so-called “aged-out” population of young served by The Home For Little Wanderers, the Boston-based nonprofit where Wallace-Benjamin was president and chief executive officer. Nemerowicz was the president of Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill.

The young people the two women talked about had been a part of the social services system for their entire lives, in either residential programs or foster care. But despite having foster parents and outreach workers, many had reached the age of 21 without the requisite skills to get a good job or attend college. Deemed too old to receive city and state social services, many ended up in homeless shelters or living on the streets.

For her part, Nemerowicz recognized a similarity between some of the students enrolled at Pine Manor and the youth described by Wallace-Benjamin.

At that Saturday morning meeting, Wallace-Benjamin and Nemerowicz came up with a solution. They created a post-graduate residential program known as the Academic Support of College Life Program (ASCL), combining some spare dormitory rooms, the resources of the Boston University School of Social Work and a desire to create a “virtual group home” on the Pine Manor campus to house some of the estimated 600 young people who age out each year in Boston.

Following their post-graduate experience at Pine Manor, the students can matriculate into Pine Manor or a state school, because many are entitled to a free education provided by the state.

“We believed in each other and we got it done,” Nemerowicz said. “I’m very excited [that] not only on a local level, but nationally, this is a model for providing a safety net for this group of kids.”

The ASCL program is just one example of the “safety nets” that Wallace-Benjamin has monitored since returning to the helm of The Home for Little Wanderers. After riding the wave of Deval Patrick’s historic election as the governor’s chief of staff, Wallace-Benjamin went back to her old job in May.

“I was happy at The Home and doing a good job,” she said. “But the governor called me and asked me if I would come help him. He was a friend, so I said, ‘Sure.’”

Patrick was the first African American elected governor in Massachusetts and only the second since Reconstruction. In 1989, L. Douglas Wilder of Virginia became the first.

Wallace-Benjamin’s stint in the Patrick administration lasted just six months, the first three of which found her recruiting talent for the governor’s staff and cabinet. But just three months later, the 53-year-old Wallace-Benjamin returned to The Home after being wooed by the search team that had been hired to find her replacement.

“They had teed up some wonderful candidates,” Wallace-Benjamin said. “They were going to hire one of them unless I was willing to come back, so I said, ‘Isn’t that nice,’ and I returned.”

Patrick said he was extremely grateful for Wallace-Benjamin’s contributions to his staff.

“Joan has done a tremendous job, both with the transition and during the first months of the administration, helping to build our staff, achieve our first 100 days accomplishments and get the administration off to a strong start,” he said in a prepared statement. “I appreciate her friendship, hard work and dedication to public service, and wish her all the best as she returns to a place that she loves.”

Keeping up with the animated Wallace-Benjamin is no easy feat. Dressed in an olive suit and a white scoop-necked T-shirt, her office walls are covered with photographs chronicling her years in public service at the Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts, where she served as president and CEO for 11 years; as director of operations of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Boston; and as deputy director of Action for Boston Community Development (ABCD) Head Start.

Leonard Alkins, former president of the Boston branch of the NAACP, worked with Wallace-Benjamin when she ran the Urban League.

“We had similar concerns in the area of civil rights,” Alkins said. “She was a strong leader, committed and dedicated to community. The Urban League’s loss was the The Home For Little Wanderers’ gain.”

In addition to her current position with The Home For Little Wanderers, Wallace-Benjamin is a trustee of Wellesley College, where she received her bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1975, and a member of the board of overseers of the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University, where she received her Ph.D. in 1980.

Nemerowicz, for one, is glad that Wallace-Benjamin is back in public service.

“Her belief: follow-through and persistence are key,” Nemerowicz said. “It’s hard to do it all yourself. But her values are all about helping people that need help.”

Wallace-Benjamin is also the proud mother of two sons, both scholar-athletes at Williams College in western Massachusetts. Her older son has graduated and works for the Boston Red Sox. Her younger son is still at Williams. He’s studying to be an architect — when he’s not out “tipping cows,” a college prank that leaves his city girl mom just slightly perplexed.

Wallace-Benjamin’s work with underserved populations can be traced to her upbringing in the Jamaica neighborhood of Queens, N.Y. Her mother is a retired schoolteacher whose social activism began during the civil rights movement. Her father held a master’s degree from Columbia University and worked for the Health Services Corporation for New York and Harlem Hospital.

“I’d watch my parents for years and years picket and protest and march, and stand up and be counted in the civil rights movement,” she said. “I watched my grandparents do the same. I came from kind of an activist family, so as a result, I, my brother and hundreds of other African Americans, [including] women, got an opportunity to sort of break open the doors.”

Wallace-Benjamin’s grandparents left North Carolina when her mother was a child. Her grandfather had reprimanded a white man for disrespecting her grandmother.

“The KKK (Ku Klux Klan) sort of suggested that my grandparents might want to leave North Carolina,” Wallace-Benjamin said.

They ended up in Harlem. Wallace-Benjamin’s grandfather was illiterate and worked for a Horne and Hardart Automat restaurant on 72nd Street in Manhattan.

“He was a butcher and cooked meat,” Wallace-Benjamin said. “My mom, grandma and aunt helped him to memorize the recipes because he couldn’t read. Grandma worked as a domestic for wealthy white people downtown.”

Wallace-Benjamin said her decision to enter the world of public service was a natural one.

“I was able to go to Wellesley College and get my Ph.D. So, I said, ‘You know, I have some really great skills and I’ve been really well-educated,’” she explained. “A lot of people encouraged me to go to business school or law school and make a lot of money. I guess I could have done a lot of those things, but I sort of felt like the shoulders I stood on made all of this possible, so let me take these really great skills and bring them back into the community.”

Her first job out of graduate school was as deputy director of Boston’s Head Start Program. After stints at the Boys & Girls Clubs, the Urban League and Head Start, where she “cut her teeth,” Wallace-Benjamin made a foray into executive recruiting. But eventually found her way back to human services work.

Wallace-Benjamin is optimistic about the future of human services in Massachusetts under the Patrick administration. “Governor Patrick has a real affinity and concern for the people we serve,” she said.

Even so, she thinks it will take two terms for Patrick to set things right. She sees the state economy going nowhere if poverty and its related problems are not addressed.

“If you don’t help people get on their feet, get them a good job [and] get their kids an education, we’re in trouble,” she said.