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Tuesday, January 08, 2002

By Monica L. Haynes, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

What some people view as a challenge, Karen Payne accepts as an opportunity.

This Wilkinsburg community activist has spent almost her entire life discovering needs and finding ways to fulfill them.

Whether it's starting a Girl Scout troop, heading the Wilkinsburg school board, becoming a foster parent or helping to establish two transitional residences for women and their children, Payne steps out on faith to get the job done.

"I guess this is how my life is," said Payne, project director for the East Side Community Collaborative. "I'm a helping person."

This Community Champion, Jefferson Award recipient is being modest.

"She's on a lot of boards -- Hosanna House, school board," said Velma Parker, director of housing for the collaborative and Payne's longtime friend. "She's not a person whose name is just on the letterhead; she's very intimately involved in the community."

Payne's crowning achievement is Sankofa House and Open Arms, transitional residences in Homewood that give women who are homeless, recovering substance abusers or domestic violence victims a place to live with their children.

For this she is one of six Community Champions being honored with a Jefferson Award, considered the Nobel Prize of volunteerism. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, AT&T Broadband and Eat'n Park, with help from the United Way, sponsor Community Champions, a program of the national Jefferson Awards.

Karen Payne, who has surmounted many different challenges over the years as a community activist, is surrounded by friends staying at the Sankofa House in Homewood. (Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette)

The public and workers in the nonprofit community nominated the 50 people who became Community Champions, featured in public service ads last year in the PG and on AT&T cable stations.

From that number, judges chose the Jefferson Award recipients, who will receive a medallion and $1,000 for the nonprofit organization of their choice. On Jan. 24, at 7 p.m., they will be recognized at a public reception and ceremony in Carnegie Music Hall, Oakland.

Payne, now 53, saw an opportunity to realize the dream of transitional housing for women in the East End when she accepted the challenge of seeking money for the project.

"Those were a hard five or six years, but they have truly, truly paid off," Payne said.

Sankofa -- the name is the Ghanaian term meaning "looking back to where you came from to understand where you are going" -- opened last July. But the dream almost dissolved when someone vandalized the three-story Open Arms building in 1999.

Burglars broke through the walls of all 14 apartments and took tens of thousands of dollars' worth of goods, including new furniture, stoves, refrigerators and hot water tanks.

"It was just as if somebody takes a hot poker or knife and jabs it right through you," Payne said. "It felt horrible. It still does every time I think about it."

But she and the collaborative persevered.

"We were not going to let the devil have his way. We had a mission and that mission was to provide housing for these women and children," Payne said.

Open Arms opened in July 2000.

Belinda Stevenson, a recovering drug abuser, has been living at Open Arms for eight months.

"The program has put me back into society, where I wanted to be," Stevenson said. A mother of 10, she lives there with her youngest child, an 11-month-old son. Her other children had been placed in foster care. "This is my first time taking care of a baby."

Brenda Tillman, a 24-year-old recovering alcoholic, also had lost custody of her two children. But since entering Sankofa House six months ago, "I got my children, a year clean and a good job. I've benefited a lot from this program."

There are about 13 families living in Sankofa House and Open Arms. Since opening, the two have housed as many as 22 families at one time.

A native of Elizabeth, Payne had been active in the community even as a teen through her church, Allen Chapel AME. "We had a youth fellowship group and we would go different places and sing at Christmas time, work with the older people in the community," Payne recalled.

In 1973, following her divorce, Payne moved from East Liberty to Wilkinsburg with her daughter, Susan, now 32. During a short-lived second marriage, she had two more daughters, Kendra, now 24 and Mikall, 22. Immediately, she became involved with the Wilkinsburg PTA.

"I saw that there were so many little girls with nothing to do so I ran a Girl Scout troop," Payne said.

She also became a foster parent.

"My kids grew up thinking they had lots of brothers and sisters."

In 1985, she joined the school board, "thinking that I could change things for not only my kids but for other kids." She also joined the Economic Development Group East or EDGE board, hoping to revitalize the borough.

Then Payne joined the board of Hosanna House, which transformed Horner Middle School into a community center.

During the '80s, Payne left the business sector and began her social service work, first at St. Peter's Child Development Center, Turtle Creek, and later at ARC, where she met Parker.

Then, the YWCA of Homewood tapped Payne as its director.

"This was a big challenge," she said. "I thought, what does God have in store for me? I've never done budgets." But Payne learned quickly, and the knowledge came in handy.

In 1992, she and four others established the Homewood-Brushton Collaborative, later changed to the East Side Community Collaborative. Among its services, the organization envisioned housing for mothers trying to get their lives on track.

When someone was needed to seek funding for the transitional housing, she threw her hat into the ring.

Over the next six years, Payne worked diligently during her spare time to get the necessary funds. She traveled to seminars and visited similar transitional shelters, using her own money. She knew the women could not be successful without the proper housing.

"If they were in recovery and went back into the projects, they'd be stuck all over again," Payne said. "I somehow took that challenge that we were going to get housing for these women."

PNC Foundation is donating $1,000 on behalf of Karen Payne to the East Side Community Collaborative.