Newsday from New York, New York • 28

i i 4 a i lbl FV iv 1 1 J'6 1 ay rf.VS.V. I VV iivVi'. Jl I BROOKLYN NEIGHBORHOODS Phone Items to (718) 520-0505 BROOKLYN CLOSEUP An Advocate for the Poor and Homeless nonprofit groups that fund Dehavenons work. Only recently there seems to be more attention paid to the evidence she has compiled. That body of evidence is now very significant.

Despite the frustrations inherent in dealing with the poor and an often unfriendly government, Dehavenon at least tries. Even though, she says, her own life has been a roller-coaster ride. After her husbands death, Dehavenon married again and had two more children. Now, she has four grandchildren. She also has a passion for classical music.

She began putting her life back together after her first husband, world-renowned pianist William Kappell, died with 18 others on Oct. 29, 1953, while he was returning from a concert tour in Australia. Because of an insurance snafu, she got no compensation for his death. Instead, Kappells friends helped the surviving family with money for a while, until Dehavenon landed a job teaching classical music in the city school system. Part-time courses at Columbia University eventually led to a doctorate in 1978.

Dehavenon first brush with the city bureacracy came in 1974, when she went to a state hearing with a friend who was appealing a decision by the city to cut off public assistance to two of the womans five children. Dehavenon said the woman had personal documents jammed into a purse and, after three hours of waiting, she finally appeared before two government officials and placed her papers on a wobbly table. Without asking the woman, Dehavenon said, one of the officials grabbed the papers. Incensed by what she called his rude behavior, Dehavenon said she slapped the mans hand and told him, Dont touch those papers until she hands them to you. The incident, she said, prompted her to dedicate herself to helping others deal with insensitive governmental bureacrades.

At first, some public assistance recipients had problems answering her questions for the studies. They felt that I was invading what little shred of privacy they had left, Dehavenon said, calling her initial efforts emotionally exhausting. She said she started giving out her home telephone number to make clients believe that their new-found relationships were not one-sided. After nine years, she said she has seen women gain weight and bear healthy babies. By Howard Manly On a fog-smeared night in 1953, the DC-6 carrying her husband exploded into the San Francisco hills and, suddenly, Anna Lou Dehavenon was on her own, with little money, no job and two babies.

She was 26 years old then, faced with the responsibility of being a breadwinner and mother in New York City. Her comfortable childhood in Portland, was all but shattered. Those days of worrying about daily meals and rent burned into her an understanding of life with next to nothing. And during the next 34 years, it forged a resolve to try to help make life bearable for those unable to deal with living poor. When I look at the men and women who are homeless now, it strikes me still that it could have happened to me, Dehavenon said in a recent interview.

If it wasnt for incredible Mends, it would have been. Dehavenon, now armed with a doctoral degree in anthropology, is an advocate for the homeless and hungry in New York. Far the past nine years, the has prepared an annual study focusing an the causes of hunger and homelessness among people forced to use emergency food centers in East Harlem, Brooklyn and the Bronx. People would talk about being an anthropologist and would Bay things like your own society is not the same as in another culture, Dehavenon said. But here in New York, family life can be radically different within four blocks of your house.

I am an educated person, middle-aged and white, Dehavenon said. What that means to a powerless person is beyond words. In 1974 Dehavenon was one of the founders of the East Harlem Inter-faith Welfare Committee, the group with which she has done her studies. She is also a founder and former cochairwoman of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger. She recently received a two-year appointment at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx as an assistant clinical professor of epidemiology and social medicine.

Her studies are often critical of the Human Resources Administration, the city agency charged with implementing public assistance programs for about 859,000 people. Dehavenon says the HRA often adds to the problems of poor health, nutrition, hunger and homelessness by closing thousands NawadajBay atubbleMne At Emergency Assistance Center in Brooklyn, Anna Lou Dehavenon, right, and Shawn Leary of Legal Aid meet with Angela Taylor and her son Ian. tance cases for a variety of reasons. including recipients who failed to attend recertification meetings, and those who failed to meet other eligibility requirements. The officials said HRA reopened about half of the closed cases within 30 day's.

About 66,000 of the closed cases remained closed for more than a month, and the rest were not reopened within a year, either because the recipients did not reapply, or because they were found ineligible, the HRA said. Dehavenons work has been applauded by advocacy groups and has been used by lawyers in lawsuits aimed at forcing the city to provide habitable shelters and more food for the homeless and other families. Her work must have been frustrating, said Barbara Blum, former commissioner of the state Department of Social Services and now president of the Foundation for Child Development, one of several of cases for administrative reasons. Dehaven ons work is focused on the families living in the citys poorest neighborhoods and, as a result, represents a small percentage of public assistance recipients. In a study released in July, Dehavenon found that of the 1,708 city households with children receiving emergency assistance in 1986, 36 percent needed help with food because their public assistance had been cut off for administrative reasons.

Twenty-one percent of the people whose benefits were canceled said it was the result of a mistake made by the government, the report stated. No one has ever contradicted the data, she said. Thats satisfying scientifically But the conditions of hunger and homelessness have been accepted by city government and are now institutionalized. HRA officials said that in the fiscal year ending last June, the city closed about 200,000 public assis- NEWSDAY, MONDAY, JANUARY IB, 1968 NY-B FOOTNOTE Elderly Can Get Grants to Pay Heating Bills Elderly residents who need help paying their heating bills can apply for grants to the city Department of Aging. Grants range from $230 to $450 for homeowners and $165 to $200 for renters who must pay for their heat or utilities.

For more information, call the Department of Aging at (212) 334-9774. Any senior citizen facing shutoff of utilities should call the driving force behind construction of the housing complex, a group of two-family moderate-income homes located between Fourth and Fifth Avenues and Butler and Baltic Streets. The homes were completed in 1986. In addition to fighting for many years to make these homes a reality, Dorothy Quisenbuiy was the quintessential community activist, DiBrienza said. She cared deeply about her community and spent every day working to improve the lives of those living here.

Naming this street after Dorothy is a fitting tribute to a great woman. The councils Parks Committee and the full City Council must approve the bill. PARK SLOPE Renaming Of Street for Activist Pushed A bill has been introduced in the City Council to rename a street after community activist Dorothy Quisenbuiy, who was murdered in her home on Dean Street on Oct. 30. The bill, sponsored by Brooklyn Democratic Coundlmen Stephen DiBrienza and Abe Gerges, would change Gregory Place in the Park Slope Village housing complex to Quisenbuiy Drive.

The coundlmen cited Quisenbuiy, who was president of the Fifth Avenue Committee, as the IO vi i 7 1.4-4.