News and Resources

Jackie Robinson once said, “A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.” That same spirit is true for the Citi Field Kids Program, a youth organization committed to making a positive impact on their communities.

Over 200 enthusiastic teenagers filed into the Jackie Robinson Rotunda at Citi Field – home to the Mets Hall of Fame and Museum – ready for a morning brimming with inspiration and an afternoon of Mets baseball on Thursday, August 12. As part of the Citi Field Kids Program, four of New York’s 38 settlement houses – Henry Street Settlement, Chinese-American Planning Council, Goddard Riverside Community Center, Center for Family Life in Sunset Park – enjoyed taking a tour of the rotunda and a program hosted by SNY anchor Michelle Yu.

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Nancy Wackstein, Executive Director of United Neighborhood Houses, responds to an NY Times article about the elderly in the City.

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 The Myrtle Avenue Revitalization Project LDC (MARP) received a three-year grant through the Community Experience Partnership to support and expand its Food Access Initiative.

The $210,000 grant over three years will support projects under MARP’s new Myrtle Eats Fresh program, which aims to engage community members of all ages in activities to improve access to healthy, affordable food on Myrtle Avenue, and in the surrounding neighborhoods of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.Projects include a community-run farm stand, creating and expanding community gardens on public housing grounds, a community chef program, and the formation of a hyper-local food policy task force.

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 City Council Speaker Christine Quinn explains the budget before yesterday's vote.

"This is a responsible, recession based budget," said Council Speaker Christine Quinn. "We had a couple of goals. We wanted to pass a budget that didn’t raise taxes, that didn't expand borrowing, that protected core services."

All that was accomplished, Quinn said.

 Nonetheless, some advocates say the neediest New Yorkers will bear the burden of these cuts. The effects of that, they claim, will reverberate for years.

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“Save our program, save our future,” they chanted. “No justice, no future.”

 To save money, the city slashed the $120,000 grant that funds the popular program at I.S. 289, a middle school in Battery Park City. Thirty-two other middle schools around the city also lost their after-school funding.

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More than 50 I.S. 89 students rallied on Greenwich Street in Tribeca before marching up to City Hall Park earlier this week, hoping to convince city officials to restore funding for after-school programs.

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"Under Bloomberg's grim plan to close at least 50 senior centers by July 1, thousands of seniors will not have a place to eat Thanksgiving this year.

Some of my older neighbors, many of whom live alone, spent last Thanksgiving at our local senior center, where they can find a hot, nutritious meal and perhaps more importantly, company. While the city spared this center, it could still lose a third of its funding. A glance at their monthly calendar of activities, which includes movies, blood pressure screenings, AARP tax assistance, computer and tai-chi classes, gives you a hint of the lifeline centers like these offer to older New Yorkers"

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Clients, providers and advocates from a variety of programmatic sectors came together at City Hall yesterday to oppose proposed budget cuts to a broad range of “core” human services for children, families and seniors. Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed Executive Budget for FY2011 includes millions of dollars in cuts to child care, after school programs, adult literacy programs, and senior centers.

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The Adult Literacy Education program will be taking a big hit due to drastic budget cuts proposed by lawmakers, according to a coalition of adult literacy advocates, teachers, students, and City Council members. Cuts were also proposed for GED (General Education Development) testing sites across New York.

 The program would lose approximately $2.6 million during the next fiscal year on top of a $612,000 cut during the 2009-2010 Fiscal Year. GED testing sites would suffer a $1.15 million cut.

 

 Anthony Ng, deputy director of Policy and Advocacy at the New York Coalition for Adult Literacy, stands in front of city hall on Tuesday in opposition to cuts proposed by lawmakers that would remove $2.6 million from the state's Adult Literacy Education p (Aloysio Santos/The Epoch Times)

 “Education is a right,” said Antony Ng, the deputy director of Policy and Advocacy at the New York Coalition for Adult Literacy. He added that the cuts would deprive people seeking to take the GED test throughout New York City and will negatively impact the local economy.