Not many people choose to spend their lives working with convicted felons and drug addicts. But Mimi Silbert, founder of San Francisco’s Delancey Street rehabilitation project, has committed her every waking hour to helping ex-cons become productive, welcome members of society.

Silbert knows what gets results: in the first 26 years of the program, Delancey Street rescued over 11,000 former convicts, addicts, prostitutes, and alcoholics, without government funding and without a single act of violence. The foundation has grown to include 25 commercial enterprises run by 500 recovering addicts and convicts working out of a $30 million residential/ business complex on San Francisco’s waterfront. Taken together, Delancey Street’s enterprises generate enough revenue to keep the foundation fully self-sufficient.

Silbert could have taken her formidable skills anywhere. But she cites her solid family upbringing as the reason she chooses to stick her neck out for the common good: “Delancey Street functions the way my own family did—everybody looked out for everybody else as we struggled upward. That’s what happens here every day. Together we rise or fall.”

Silbert’s approach is simple. Incoming Delancey Street residents must learn three different trades and take part in weekly group sessions that promote self-understanding, interpersonal communication, and basic life skills. And no one leaves without the equivalent of a high school diploma.

Despite daunting national statistics on recividism among ex-convicts, Silbert starts with the assumption that people can change, and from there, creates that change.

“We have a saying ‘to act as if,’” Silbert explains. “We say if you walk around saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’ you will become a person who talks that way naturally. And if you act as if you believe in yourself, you will.”

For Silbert, Delancey Street remains a work-in-progress, mirroring the lives of her “clients.” The foundation’s construction projects provide a case in point: “You’re building your own foundation here. If you make a mistake with a wall or a joint, you tear it down and rebuild it. That’s what we’re doing here at Delancey Street for ourselves-tearing down bad crooked things and replacing them with good straight things.”

In a world where most convicted criminal offenders and hard core drug addicts emerge from prison and from treatment programs unchanged, Silbert wants to spread the Delancey Street success: “Our biggest issue now is to replicate this model. You need a strong, visionary, committed lunatic to dedicate a life to initiate something. But to continue, Delancey Street must be bigger than I am. I think we’re succeeding.”