Status in Washington, D.C., is based on power and access to power, which leads to wealth and media fame. Rarely in this town do those who have power or access to power turn down the ensuing wealth or fame. Malika Saada-Saar is one of those selfless few.

Saada-Saar is the founder and executive director of the Rebecca Project for Human Rights, a non-partisan, non-profit which advocates for public policy reform and justice on behalf of women on the margins of society -- the poor, the addicted, the victims of abuse and domestic violence, and especially those in prison.

Saada-Saar has effectively changed the laws and criminal justice methodology at the national and local level. In the past year, Saada-Saar and her team persuaded the federal government to ban the practice of shackling female inmates during childbirth.

Such success does not come as a surprise to those who know her, including power brokers on both sides of the aisle.

"I've been in D.C. since 1974, and Malika simply is the best political advocate for these women -- actually the best political advocate period – I've ever seen," says Tom Downey, former Democratic congressman from New York and now a top lobbyist. Downey, who provides pro-bono work for Rebecca Project, has become a mentor to Saada-Saar.

Consultant Autumn VandeHei, a Bush 43 political appointee and staffer for former House Republican Leader Tom DeLay, says Saada-Saar has "increased funding for family treatment [and] created this national advocacy organization that has changed laws and impacted real lives. She's quietly amassed the kind of reputation in this city that gets her calls returned and her opinion respected."

"Malika," says VandeHei, "is a force."

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The Rebecca Project leases office space on a third-floor walk-up in DuPont Circle. The sunny rooms and relative spaciousness are a huge improvement over the project's previous rat-infested, cramped space in Adams Morgan, and the new digs have brightened the workdays of the small, dedicated staff of five.

Saada-Saar greets me with a hug and a smile. Her hair is in twists and she's wearing s a brown knit dress and gray sweater over her baby bump. Seven months pregnant with her third child, Saada-Saar gives off an air of warmth and joy. She looks like the singer Alicia Keys, with eyes that light up in genuine smiles.

I ask her how she was able to banish shackles from prison maternity wards, an accomplishment that far outpaces the budget, staff and expectations of her small advocacy group. Saada-Saar says she had heard that female prisoner's legs, wrists and even bellies were shackled during childbirth, but she believed it was rare. Her staff, however, convinced her it was "routine practice" in federal and state prisons, even during Caesarean sections, when women are incapacitated.

Saada-Saar engaged Senate Assistant Majority Leader Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) in the cause and within the year – a time frame for success that is unheard of on Capitol Hill -- a federal law was passed that prohibits restraining female inmates during labor, delivery and post-delivery. The law also bans the Bureau of Prisons from putting restraints around the bellies of pregnant inmates when they are being transported, or at any other time.

But the war is not over. Laws in 44 states still alow state prisons to shackle pregnant inmates. Saada-Saar's advocates have gotten such laws overturned in New Mexico, New York and Texas. Saada-Saar says she was most surprised by the success in Texas.

"The ACLU, Conference of Catholic Bishops, reproductive health organizations all agreed that childbirth should be sacred and women should not be shackled. These disparate groups found common ground . . . in Texas!" she says, smiling.

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Saada-Saar came to Washington with a plan for changing the lives of women and children based on her experiences as a public schoolteacher in a high-poverty, high-crime area, and while getting her M.A. in Education at Stanford.

She learned two things from working with the poorest children and their families.

First, she developed the philosophy that most of the women in prison were there because "the poverty industry was not focusing on the original trauma to the woman. Women who are victims of violence, trauma and poverty (turn to drugs and alcohol for escape) and almost all end up in the criminal justice system."

Secondly, Saada-Saar realized she needed a law degree because "just being a community organizer, I didn't have credibility with lawmakers and access to be effective." She was accepted Georgetown University Law School, where she graduated.

Because she grew up an only child in a tight-knit household of women in Philadelphia, helping women comes naturally to Saada-Saar.

Her father left when she was very young, and she and her mother moved in with her mother's mother. So she "learned the sacredness of mothering, even in the hardest of circumstances" as she grew up with "three generations of women in a very small, one-floor, partial row house."

Her grandmother "raised both my mother and me on her Social Security checks."

When Saada-Saar was in sixth grade, her grandmother supported them while her mother went to college and then got a master's degree. Her mother also worked two jobs to put Saada-Saar in a private school. She had a scholarship, but Saada-Saar said the other expenses were difficult.

"We had the basic necessities, but there was always a sense of being on the edge and a sense of struggle," Saada-Saar remembers. "We lived off my grandmother's coupons, never used a tea bag once, never used tinfoil once."

Saada-Saar's mother died when Saada-Saar was in college, and her grandmother died less than a year later. At her grandmother's funeral, the grave digger said the dirt was so fresh "the wall between the two graves would fall over time." Saada-Saar says she always felt that was "symbolic of how they gave to each other and tried to give a better life for me than either of they had themselves."

"I still have dreams that they are still alive. I felt so blessed that my first child was a daughter because I felt the line of mother-daughter continues through her."

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The Rebecca Project was an offshoot of family treatment program Saada-Saar started while she was in law school. "Crossing the River," funded by a grant, worked with mothers to write about the initial trauma that led them to drug addiction and prison.

One of the women in the program was Imani Walker (seen in photo at left), a mother of four. Walker and Saada-Saar joined forces -- the new lawyer and the newly sober mother – and started the Rebecca Project in 2001 with a two-year grant from the Ford Foundation. They decided to name their organization both to honor one of the other women in family treatment who died that same year, as well as a reference to biblical Rebecca who "as a midwife, brought people from one world into another."

Walker gave Saada-Saar two valuable insights.

Walker, who is in recovery, explained to Saada-Saar that in the depths of poverty, she didn't have access to Zoloft or Prozac to deal with the violence in her childhood, so she turned to the nearest drug on the streets to "self-medicate."

"Women use drugs to deal with the trauma of their childhoods, and in the process, many become addicted," says Saada-Saar. "So I learned . . . that to make change, we need to address the underlying trauma in women's lives."

The best way to do that, she believes, is through family treatment programs -- in which mothers bring their children with them to rehab – because it keeps the family intact and heals the wounds between mother and child. "Family treatment breaks the cycle of what the mother lived through in her childhood to her own child," says Saada-Saar.

She says that the rate of relapse after family treatment is much lower than with standard rehab, in which mothers are separated from their children.

Family treatment is also cost effective. Saada-Saar said it costs the government $25,000 a year for a child in foster care and $30,000 a year to jail a mother. In stark contrast, it costs $14,000 to put a mother and her children in family treatment for six months.

With state governments cutting budgets and expenses, Saada-Saar points out how fiscally smart it would be for the states to put non-violent addicted criminals in family treatment instead of jail.

Another lesson Walker taught Saada-Saar: hiring people who have walked the walk.

Saada-Saar believes what makes Rebecca Project so effective is "the staff in leadership roles . . . have lived experiences as victims of violence and being in the criminal justice system." Her belief is that the best advocates are women who "bring the power of their personal narratives as women in recovery from violence, addiction, trauma, poverty" to the lawmakers.

Walker, the co-founder and director of the "Sacred Authority" network of mother-advocates, is Saada-Saar's constant "touchstone" to keep the organization "based in real human experience."

The 11 state chapters of the "Sacred Authority" network are staffed by 150 "mother advocates" who lobby state governments on behalf of other vulnerable mothers and their families. Saada-Saar says that advocates with the "real life experience" are incredibly effective in bridging the cultural divide between the national and state legislators and low-income families.

It took Saada-Saar and Walker two years to get 501C3 tax exempt status to operate as a non-profit and to get office space. In 2002, they invited Autumn VandeHei, who was deputy assistant secretary for legislation (Human Services) at the Department of Health and Human Services and her staff to meet mothers in family treatment in Anacostia.

Saada-Saar says she was stunned to see VandeHei "sit down with the mothers to talk to them directly." She said in all her years working with federal government, no one had ever sat with the women when visiting the treatment center. She said VandeHei "honored the women by disregarding the 'othernesses.'"

VandeHei then helped Saada-Saar by bringing the family treatment center funding issue to the attention of her former boss, then Majority Whip Tom DeLay. DeLay and his staffer, Cassie Bevan, were able to appropriate $1.2 million in 2003 to keep the one D.C. family treatment center open for these women. The center closed after that year and no other family treatment center exists in Washington.

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Today, 73 percent of the women in federal prison are in for drug-related, non-violent crimes, says Saada-Saar. Of these women, 88 percent were themselves victims of sexual and physical violence.

"Most women in jail should be in the public health system instead," says Saada-Saar.

Should that change ever come about, Walker and Saada-Saar say they will know their work has paid off.

In the meantime, in line with their concept of "Co-Madre" (Spanish for "mothering with"), Saada-Saar and VandeHei have organized a fundraiser this weekend to bring the elite D.C. women of politics, media and society together with the "mother advocates" from Rebecca Project.

Their goal is to create a network in Washington for women and mothers to "support one another across the divides of racial, economic and education differences."

Until now, Saada-Saar has avoided the limelight and lives and works far from the photographers and reporters in the city. Asked why she has decided to branch out to private donors and bring Rebecca Project to the social scene, Saada-Saar says simply, "It's all about Co-Madre -- all these women can learn from each other's power and strength."

And, we all can learn from Saada-Saar's example of using her power to serve and help others more vulnerable and not to increase our own status, fame or money.

Truly beautiful people are a rare breed in Washington, D.C., but Malika Saada-Saar is proof they exist.


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