Susan Worgaftik at work at the Dorchester Center for Adult Education. Leo Huynh photo

By Bill Forry

When people talk about Dorchester having more activists per square mile than any other place in the country, they're only half-joking. Just ask anyone bold enough to run for office around here: Dorchester has enough civic groups to tucker out even the most hyperactive politician.

So, for someone to earn their chops as a legendary activist in these parts is no small feat.

After a quarter-century of hard work, though, Susan Worgaftik has earned just such a reputation....and she doesn't even live here. Normally, that's a knock that puts anyone out of the running for hall of fame status. Not so with Worgaftik, though, whose 26-year career with Federated Dorchester Neighborhood Houses has been stellar.

"It's extraordinary," says Worgaftik's longtime co-worker and friend, Sandra Albright, the executive director of FDNH. "The difference with Susan is that she has this incredible connection to the community. Her outreach and organizational skills will be the hardest thing to replace.

"She just had it in her bones."

Worgaftik cut her teeth as an organizer for FDNH in 1977, fresh off a move north from Connecticut, where she was raised. Over the next two-and-a-half decades, Susan has become a staple of the civic scene, particularly in more challenged sections of the neighborhood that have needed extra help occasionally with rallying the troops. Worgaftik pioneered the Dorchester Media Project, an effort spawned by the blood-laden headlines of the early '90s, when the city's daily papers and tabloid TV pounced on Dorchester, often erroneously. Worgaftik brought activists and reporters together for roundtable talks in an attempt to bridge the divide and make local folks a bit more media savvy. Worgaftik admits to mixed results, mainly because few among the Boston reporting corps stick around long enough to really know the neighborhoods.

"It's certainly better than it was, though," she says. "You find more articles that talk about positive things and Dorchester's not just a black hole to the media, which was certainly true in early '90s. I think there's still some endemic problems that media have that aren't going to change. There will always be inaccuracies. The classic is that when something good happens, it's Boston, and when something bad happens, it's Dorchester."

Worgaftik is best known, however, for her work as the founder and director of the Dorchester Center for Adult Education, the 11-year-old outfit that organizes quarterly classes on everything from Beginner's Vietnamese to Wine Tasting 101. Based next to the Little House on East Cottage Street, the Dot Center for Adult Ed has a dozen satellite locations across the neighborhood. It's Worgaftik's baby &emdash; and it's grown up, along with the Dorchester we know today.

"I think what we've done at the DCAE is some self-image changing for Dorchester," Worgaftik said this week. "Our teachers are local , and so are our students, so that has really brought about a different sense of who the community is."

That identity has changed dramatically, and for the better, according to Worgaftik, who encountered a far more divided and depressed community in the late 1970s.

"It's amazing. The most obvious thing has been the change in ethnicity. Dorchester is much more cosmopolitan and multicultural than it was in 1977."

"It also is a much more open community," says Worgaftik. "You can be different here in a way that you couldn't be before. I mean that in a very, very broad sense. Kids who were artistic and weren't interested in basketball had a hard time here before. Nowadays kids, and adults too for that matter, can be who they are."

Helping the neighborhood "be comfortable in its own skin" has been the root mission of Susan Worgaftik for 26 years. Now, she says, it's time for her to try a dose of that same medicine. The 57-year-old Jamaica Plain woman is moving to what may be Dot's polar opposite: Greenfield, a sleepy hamlet in Western Mass.

"It'll be a great adventure. I wanted to do some challenging of myself, so I decided to find a small town and see who I am in that kind of environment. I have no job yet and so it's all kind of a big mystery."

Lew Finfer, another longtime Dot activist whose followed Worgaftik's career with interest, says she will be missed.

"It's definitely a loss. Susan's part of the fabric of the community and she's played a role in weaving pieces of Dorchester together to make it stronger," says Finfer. "But, she's leaving behind some really intact projects and she's taught many people to carry them on."

Albright is also confident that Susan's work will be carried on well by her staff. But, no doubt, it will be different.

"I don't know what it was," says Albright, "but she just didn't worry about the hierarchy. Susan went right to the families and listened. She worked right with the community and let them push the agenda. You would never know that she didn't grow up here."

Breakthrough Near on Seton Academy

The grassroots committee working to reincarnate the old Monsignor Ryan Memorial High School through a new all-girls Catholic school continues to take applications for the fall, even though they have not yet got the final okay from the Archdiocese of Boston. There is a buzz this week, however, that a deal is at hand that would allow the fledgling Elizabeth Seton Academy to set up shop in the old St. Gregory's High School building in Lower Mills.

As the Reporter first reported here a few weeks ago, a committee of MRM alums and friends identified St. Greg's as a perfect spot to launch the new school, but ran into some initial resistance from Church officials. Skeptics within the Archdiocese think the school is a long-shot to survive financially. Still, other clergy I've talked to say the Elizabeth Seton experiment is a win-win for the Church, since there's no money on the line for the cash-strapped Archdiocese. All the funds are being raised privately &emdash; and St. Greg's would simply surrender space that's vacant now anyway.

Word from the group this week is that the leadership on Lake Street has bought into the idea &emdash; and a breakthrough is expected at any hour. Watch next week's Reporter for details.