NEW HANOVER — The storied 120-acre former Fellowship Farm off Sanatoga Road, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Congressman John Lewis first learned about non-violent protest, and where thousands of people learned how to better live with others, is once again a place where people in need of help will get it.
But they will have to work for it.
Ted Edwards, the executive director of the nonprofit that purchased the property in 2020, says the people his organization aims to help are those who have “burned the house down around themselves.”
The organization’s executive summary puts it more plainly.
“The individuals served are those in need of structure, purpose, and emotional support so that they can recover and develop into self-sufficient, contributing members of society. An overwhelming majority of individuals will have experienced trauma from physical and/or sexual abuse as children. They will also be in recovery from drug and alcohol abuse. Many will have lived lives of generational poverty, and some will have experienced the vicious cycle of incarceration and homelessness.”
In other words, “they are drug addicts, alcoholics, former gang members, prostitutes, felons who have been in and out of prison, and many will have been homeless at some point,” is how the people helped, called “students” under this model, is described on the organization’s web site — https://workingtogether.work/
Working to Get Better
Once accepted to the program — and not everyone is accepted — there will be no cost to the student or their family. All of the costs of food, clothing, housing, psychotherapy, and medical and dental care are paid for by Working Together.
They will pay for those basic needs, and the individual and group therapy they will undergo during their two-year stay, by working in one of the for-profit businesses set up to employ them. “They’re working to pay for their own recovery,” Edwards said.
One of those businesses is already up and running. The former Ellis Automotive on Farmington Avenue in Pottstown was purchased in March 2023. Working Together kept the long-time manager, Chu Rivera, who worked there for 15 years, and he will both run the ship, do repairs, and also teach the students, giving them a marketable skill.
Rivera attended Fellowship Farm as a youth and supported it into adulthood.
The shop will also service the trucks for The Moving Company, which is another of the businesses Working Together will set up and in which its students will work.
Another profession that the students can learn is landscaping and Christmas tree sales.
The fourth business, Tree Doctorz, will be up and running soon, having just purchased and outfitted a truck and chipper for the business, a business with which Edwards has experience as he had his own earlier in his career.
And it has been quite a career.
Edwards has a bachelor’s degree in economics from Hobart College, where he roomed with board member David Bradley, who was also on the board of Fellowship Farm in later years and informed Edwards about the property’s availability when he was looking for a place to start.
An ordained minister, Edwards has a master’s in theology from Palmer Seminary and anticipates graduating with a doctoral degree in marriage and family therapy from Eastern University later this year.
He has run a local recycling business, been a successful treasure hunter in Africa and the Philippines and an investment banker. Edwards is also one of three who founded Good Works in 1988, which is now the largest independent non-profit in Chester County,
And he is also a recovering alcoholic and addict, as well as a survivor of abuse.
He believes many of the things that lead people down the wrong path often begin with trauma, and he intends for Working Together to take a “trauma-informed approach” that is both understanding but also requires commitment.
‘A Hand Up, Not a Hand Out’
The philosophical underpinnings of the organization embody the concept of offering a “hand up, not a handout.”
The philosophical notion of “each one — teach one” governs orientation and lasts throughout the two-year stay. For example, an individual with one year of tenure helps guide a student with three months; an individual with one month guides the new student in their first week. Students will learn to observe and correct destructive patterns, to live in community, and contribute to society at large.
There are three primary rules: 1) no physical violence; 2) no threats of violence; and 3) no drugs or alcohol. Anyone who violates any of these rules will be asked to leave immediately without exception.
The students police each other regarding behavior and following the rules with minimum requirements for staff intervention and there are weekly procedures for allowing for confrontation and conflict resolution.
Working Together follows the practices of three successful operations. That of the Delancey Street Foundation in San Francisco, the TROSA Residential Recovery Program in Durham, North Carolina, and TOSA (The Other Side Academy) in Salt Lake City. Edwards said he spent 40 hours getting trained at all three, spending nights talking to the people being helped and working to understand why those operations had such a strong record of success.
Edwards said, “97 percent of those who leave TROSA, have never committed another crime and 99 percent of them remain sober.” Whereas “most rehabilitation facilities, 90 percent of them go back to using when they leave.”
All three are “a self-supporting, self-governing community maintained entirely by the men and women who come for help, representing all racial, cultural, and socioeconomic groups. Residents learn to care for others, to develop values and self-reliance, gain some dignity for themselves, learn occupational skills, get an education, and earn a sense of self-worth so they can ultimately graduate and make a legitimate and successful life in society,” according to the website.
“The principles of the therapeutic community encourage individuals to engage in the process of changing behavior as participants or partners, not as patients. All three organizations make it clear they are not a rehab or drug/alcohol treatment facility where participants engage all day every day in group sessions, educational sessions, and counseling,” according to the website.
For those with a prison record, “Pennsylvania makes it almost impossible to succeed outside. You can’t get a job or an apartment because of the background checks and you are actually required to pay a fee to the parole board,” Edwards said.
But students leaving Working Together will have a better chance of success because Edwards has seen it work at the other locations he visited.
Students do not leave without a job lined up, and they have an apartment in a building Working Together owns, and they have money in their pocket and have received lessons about living within a budget.
“This model works,” Edwards said emphatically. “Being self-sustaining is the key.”
Part of that model will include renting out the dining facility as a conference center, as was done in the past, as well as allowing companies and organizations to pay to use the farm’s extensive, and soon-to-be-expanded ropes course.
Edwards said when the operation is up and running fully, it will be home for 155 people, but it started last month with 23 while work is still being done.
A Long History of Helping
The property on which all of this will occur is well-known locally and nationally.
The origins of Fellowship Farm can be traced to 1931, with the convening of the Young People’s Interracial Fellowship of Philadelphia. This group went on to found Fellowship House in 1941 in North Philadelphia, which won the Philadelphia Award for its human relations work. In 1951, founder Margaret Penney added Fellowship Farm as a training center for human relations.
The farm has hosted such luminaries as anthropologist Margaret Mead and civil rights advocates like Frank Sinatra, Benny Goodman and Harry Bellefonte, as well as activists like John Lewis and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who credited Fellowship House as the place where he first learned of Gandhi’s practice of non-violence and became dramatically inspired by it.
In fact, Sinatra donated the proceeds of his 1945 short film about racial intolerance and anti-semitism, “The House I Live In,” to the farm.
Fellowship House and Farm went to train hundreds of local individuals who participated in the struggle for civil rights, both in Philadelphia and the South. Lewis worked closely with King, as the head of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. He helped plan the march on Washington and the march from Selma to Montgomery.
Lewis was the facility’s speaker for its 75th anniversary.
“We feel honored to be here and to carry that history forward,” Edwards said.
‘In the Business of Second Chances’
Since its founding, Fellowship House and later Fellowship Farm, have promoted the coming together of individuals from all backgrounds and circumstances. The organization has been involved in refugee resettlement, police-community relations, leadership development for youth, mediation between rival urban gangs and creating multicultural alliances.
The farm closed in 2013 and has been moldering and its fields have lain fallow for 15 years.
Working Together intends to put it all back into active use.
“With working together, it really feels like this is not just a continuation, but a deepening and an expansion, of what our mission has been for so long, which is for people when they work together when they are addressed as a human being, as someone who is a person of potential and accomplishment, not somebody who has made a mistake,” David Tulin, former executive director at the farm, said on a video post on the Working Together website.
“I think this place is going to provide a haven for those people who didn’t think they had a second chance, and all of the sudden they’re going to find themselves being treated with respect and dignity,” Rivera said in the same video.
“We’re in the business of second chances,” said Edwards.
