ORLANDO SENTINEL FAMILY FUND Jewish Family Services helps women achieve independence

Program puts women through six months of financial and life lessons, mental health counseling and social counseling. The aim: teach them to care for themselves.

Adrian Deon Dawkins spent decades relying on men in her life, taking care of her children and never learning how or even why to care for herself.

Dawkins, then Adrian Deon Mitchell, was valedictorian of the class of 1978 at Evans High School, with a scholarship offer from Bethune-Cookman College. That smart, hard-working, ambitious student already was a teen mother and pregnant again, and she abandoned her own dreams within a month of graduation. Her mother insisted she marry the father. He insisted she not pursue college but stay with the family, find a job and raise the kids.

And that was that. Over the next few decades, Dawkins' husband left her and two other men came and went. She went on and off welfare. She committed welfare fraud and served 90 days in jail, because she received checks after she got a job. She watched her two sons and two daughters grow up and leave, while her own dreams never returned.

So when the last man left her two years ago, and she realized that even her own children weren't in any position to help her, she hit bottom. Though still working a minimum-wage, part-time job as a motel maid, she found herself essentially homeless, penniless and hopeless.

"I was messed up," said Dawkins, who is now 53.

Enter Jewish Family Services of Orlando and its Family Stabilization Program. For six years, the Winter Park human services non-profit agency has focused on turning around the lives of people such as Dawkins. The program puts them through six months of financial and life lessons, mental health counseling and social counseling. The aim: teach them to care for themselves.

"We were tired of putting band aids on people that came in," explained Susan Weissmann, FJS Orlando's clinical director.

With assistance from experts at other nonprofits, JFS Orlando set up classes, teaching consumer debt management, financial literacy, employment and life planning. It covered simple things like how to read a pay stub or how to shop for food, to more complex things such as how to assess insurance needs or budget to pay bills and save money, all at no charge to the clients. The one-on-one counseling sessions with JFS Orlando therapists get people to care about themselves.

The agency works with people who are employed yet earning only 50 to 80 percent of the federal poverty level. They go through a six-month program, then JFS Orlando follows up with them six months later and again a year later. This year, the program has worked with 70 clients, down a little from 2012 because of a drop in outside contributions. Weissmann said 80 percent get on their feet, often for the first time.

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ORLANDO SENTINEL FAMILY FUND Jewish Family Services helps women achieve independence