Roxanne Hood Lyons, a former schoolteacher in Washington State, had succeeded too quickly. New Futures, a charity she founded in 1991 in one of Seattle's poorest and most violent neighborhoods, was attracting so many donations that she could barely manage the budget. Needy families flocked to New Futures' offices in a run-down apartment building for after-school tutoring and child-rearing classes, but sewage leaked from the walls and cockroaches darted out of the cupboards. Then there were the finances. "Our accounting was a mess. I would sit at night at my dining table, trying to figure out where this money was coming from," recalls the 47-year-old Hood Lyons, who initially managed New Futures on a $250,000 budget, with six employees serving about 100 families at three different sites.
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