The Triumphs of Joseph: How Today's Community Healers Are Reviving Our Streets and Neighborhoods.

• Author: Sherman, Amy L.

Robert L. Woodson Sr., New York: The Free Press, 158 pages, $20.00

I've never thought of calling my elderly friend Mrs. Rogers "Joseph," but I may begin doing so now that I've read Robert L. Woodson's thoughtful book, The Triumphs of Joseph: How Today's Community Healers Are Reviving Our Streets and Neighborhoods. Mrs. Rogers is the "community grandmother" of Blue Ridge Commons, a low-income housing development where my church's urban ministry center is located in Charlottesville, Virginia. Though in her late 70s and in frail health, she retains an indomitable commitment to work for her neighborhood's improvement.

For 27 years, she has counseled single moms in distress, lovingly pushed wayward teens in a better direction, served as president of the tenants association, organized block parties and service projects, and lobbied city officials for better service and more cops. She is the spiritual head of Abundant Life Ministries, my church's partnership with the residents of Blue Ridge Commons. She guides and encourages us as we try to keep kids in school, match fatherless boys with positive adult male role models, dissuade the girls in our teen club from drugs and sex, and prepare adults for the work force through our joband-life-skills training program. Mrs. Rogers is definitely what Woodson calls a "Joseph."

Woodson draws on the biblical story in which Joseph, a Hebrew boy persecuted by his brothers and sold into slavery in Egypt, eventually becomes second-in-command to the Egyptian Pharaoh by dint of his integrity, leadership skills, and uncanny powers of discernment. Along the way, Joseph overcomes many obstacles - including an unjust prison sentence - but never gives in to self-indulgent defeatism or abandons his faith in God. Despite his humble beginnings, minority ethnic status, and "dysfunctional" family, Joseph excels Pharaoh's courtiers in wise counsel and leads Egypt successfully through a seven-year famine.

Woodson argues that many such Josephs exist today in our inner cities and that these grassroots, faith-based leaders are effectively transforming lives and neighborhoods that no one else has been able to influence. His book tells their stories. The "Josephs" speak for themselves through Woodson's interviews, and we get a close look at a few particularly effective organizations through his short case studies. While not a social scientist, Woodson makes a thoughtful journalist, not only describing the Josephs but analyzing their philosophy.

Woodson has met these Josephs over many years through his National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, an umbrella organization that supports grassroots urban leaders who are reclaiming the lives of drug addicts, rescuing youth from gangs, fighting crime, renovating abandoned properties, and launching inner-city businesses. Many Josephs have themselves undergone radical personal transformation - liberation from a life of drugs or crime - and are devoting themselves to helping others caught in such traps. Other Josephs are neighborhood residents who resisted these pathologies and succeeded despite innumerable obstacles, and are now giving back to their communities.

Freddie Garcia, an ex-drug user whose Texas-based Victory Christian Fellowship has led over 13,000 men and women out of addiction, is a Joseph. So is Toni McIlwane, who left her abusive husband and single-handedly mobilized residents in a drug-infested, violence-ravaged Detroit community for a campaign that has cut crime by 42 percent. The members of McIlwane's...