John A. Sanchez, MSW, East Side House Settlement House October 2003
John A. Sanchez, MSW, East Side House Settlement House
East Side House Settlement, Inc. is located in the Mott Haven section of the South Bronx and operates from sixteen separate locations. It is within the poorest Congressional District in the United States. Our services impact the lives of close to 10,000 persons annually. Sixty percent of those employed at the agency live or have lived in the community. Services are highly effective, for example, 95% of the participants in our Mott Haven Village Preparatory School (sponsored by East Side House) have gone on to attend college. The average daily attendance of students this past year was nearly 94%. Our recently expanded technology center puts personal computers and the Internet at the fingertips of 2000 people a month.
Adults and families participate in a variety of recreational and cultural programs. For the elderly, East Side House provides telephone reassurance, hot meals for more than 300 people daily, a senior citizen's club and a senior companion club.
My training and experience as a social worker have reinforced my faith in the ability of people to overcome seemingly impossible odds if they receive the proper supports. Our staff, MSWs and non-MSWs alike, share this outlook and I believe is a major reason for our effectiveness.
Ellen P. Simon, DSW, Union Settlement Association
Members of the Alumni Club of Union Theological Seminary who had visited Toynbee Hall in England founded Union Settlement Association in 1895. As a mark of their interest in social problems, they wanted to establish a settlement of their own. From 1895 until 1977, the Settlement was lead by ministers. I think that was not traditional among settlements. Also within a year of its founding, Union Settlement was located on 104 th Street in East Harlem and we have remained here for 107 of our 108 years. We have served all of the immigrants who have lived here from the Irish, including Burt Lancaster, to Italians, Jews, Puerto Ricans, to our current population of Mexicans and Africans. Union Settlement has not moved or changed its mission in all those years. The only change has been in the languages spoken by staff and participants. The settlement provides one-sixth of all childcare services in East Harlem. The settlement also offers a comprehensive adult education program and extensive youth services.
I bring to my work the ability to be both compassionate yet clear thinking. Social Workers learn how to set boundaries/limits and to set priorities despite problems and emotional pain. These are invaluable assets in a non-profit leader who must constantly make do with less and still provide good service that is effective, quantifiable and responsive to community needs.
Stephan Russo, MSW, Goddard Riverside Community Center
Goddard Riverside Community Center is the merger of two, century old, settlement houses, Goddard Neighborhood Center and Riverside Community House. Over the years it has become one of the preeminent community institutions on Manhattan's West Side.
The agency is based on a strong value system and philosophy of citizen participation. Our programs, which cover a range of ages and populations, are catalysts for social change and promote bonds of compassion and concern. The agency is strongly committed to bringing people together despite barriers of culture, ethnicity, race, class, age and personal circumstances.
Every one of our programs from early childhood education to services for seniors has at its core the group modality practice. We emphasize the “taking of responsibility” by program participants under the staff's guidance rather than seeing our members as simply “clients” or recipients of service.
The settlements are deeply rooted in the practice of group work which focuses on the strength of the “collective.” I was trained in this practice and have brought this orientation to my work at Goddard Riverside. After 30 years as a community worker, I believe that the ultimate measure of success is our long-term impact on neighborhoods. As the “Head Worker” of Goddard Riverside, I see my role as providing the vision and leadership that allows the staff to develop programs, which are creative, life sustaining and enable the voices of our neighbors to be heard.
Carolyn McLaughlin, CSW, The Citizen's Advice Bureau, Inc., Bronx
The Citizens Advice Bureau, Inc. (CAB) is a settlement house that opened as a walk-in information and referral service in the Bronx in 1972. In 1995, CAB merged with the Girls Club. As a result of this merger CAB was able to expand its services and currently serves or involves over 2,000 people daily. Its budget has grown along with its services- presently $17 million.Among its programs are: two, Tier II family shelters, a number of homelessness prevention programs; HIV/AIDS case management and family services; a family childcare network; workforce development programs; ESL classes and citizenship services; and three seniors centers. CAB has expanded its children's and youth programs to include an array of early childhood education, after-school, summer camp, and adolescent development programs. In 2002, CAB was granted a contract to sponsor the New Visions High School.
One of the unique aspects of CAB is its ability to retain good quality staff. Staff and interns alike are encouraged by the social work culture of the agency and the nature of its programs. The mission of the agency is influenced by my own social work orientation. CAB offers many placements, supports staff as OYR students, while maintaining their current positions, and advances many into leadership positions within the agency. This results in a staff with considerable longevity and job satisfaction.
Stephanie
S. Pinder, MSW, Lincoln Square Neighborhood Center
What makes Lincoln Square Neighborhood Center unique is its location. Our immediate neighborhood is comprised of the 14 buildings which is made up of Amsterdam Houses, a NYC Housing Authority-sponsored public housing development, home to 2300 individuals, primarily low income, African-American and Latino. However, a contrasting community surrounds us, home to Lincoln Center, ABC-TV, Fordham University, the American Red Cross, Roosevelt Hospital and Trump International. Therefore the focus of our work has aimed at building partnerships that have enabled us to bring cultural arts, health care and a range of services, volunteers and financial support into our house.
I majored in community organization and bring the perspective of community building and empowerment to this work. I have a broader perspective than casework or group work might support. My work focuses on engaging the staff and community members in advocacy and community change.
Donald
Bluestone, MSW, Executive Director, Mosholu Montefiore Community Center, Bronx
The Mosholu Montefiore Community Center started in 1942 in the Norwood Section of the North West Bronx – then an overwhelming Jewish community. With a land donation from Montefiore Hospital in 1959 a new site was built with YM-YWHA at Gun Hill Road.
When the Jewish community dwindled in the 1970s, the Center's Board renewed its commitment to the community, extending its services to the Puerto Rican community. On becoming the Center director in 1989 I inherited a budget of 1.5 million, served about 4500 persons and run in the red. Now, a budget of 14 million serves 20,000 people from all walks of life, religions, races, ethnicities and economic groups.
The Center provides day-care, a Head Start program, and universal pre-kindergarten.
An array of educational programs for youth includes the Family Choice Alternative High School. Our premier recreational program is our extensive baseball league: 64 teams and over a 1000 youngsters!
The frail and the elderly have not been forgotten – “meals-on- wheels”, home-care, and center and home based-programs – are available.
To me, Jane Addams was the role model of what a true activist and visionary is about. I have modeled my professional life after her. For 14 years my children have grown up at the Center, along with those of friends and neighbors. Currently I service on the Executive Board of Community Board #7 and three other school Boards and as the chair of the youth services community. Joining the United Neighborhood Houses of Greater New York in l990 confirmed the reality that we are “truly” a Settlement House.
Sister Mary Paul Jancill, DSW, Director with Julia Jean-Francois, CSW &
Julie Stein Brockway, CSW, The Center forFamily Life
The Center for Family Life, now in its 25 th year, is a neighborhood-based social service center offering support to youth and families in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The Center operates in a densely populated, multi-ethnic and low-income area with a large number of recent immigrants. Nearly one-third of the community's residents are under 18.
The Center's mission is to provide the comprehensive range of preventive family services necessary to support and nurture the family and to insure the well being of the community's children. It is important to staff at the Center to see human needs holistically; to view remediation of problems as coming through healthy experiences and normalization; and to foster the community's embrace of and responsibility for its children and families.
The hallmark of the Center's work is the variety of access points to our services, their inclusiveness and their relevance to the primary needs of families with children.
Our programs include after school, evening and summer programs in three community public schools, individual and family counseling, adult and youth employment services, a thrift shop/emergency food program, and neighborhood foster care.
Social work practice, in the Center's perspective, is anchored in strong collaborations with families and children, and is respectful of the culture, language and self-determination of the individual, family and community. The Center emphasizes the importance of work that moves from “case to cause,” connecting individual needs to implications for social policy. The Center's multi-method social work staff is committed to using a strength-based relational frame to understand the interaction between the individual and the social environment.
Lewis Zuckman, CSW, SCAN—Supportive Children's Advocacy Network
When I arrived at SCAN in 1987, we were neither a Settlement House, nor an agency rooted in the Social Group Work tradition. Sixteen years later, we have purposefully evolved from a pathology based program focusing on affording social work, advocacy and counseling services to high-risk families in East Harlem and Morrisania, to a holistic, therapeutic milieu , activity based Settlement House service provider.
SCAN is heavily involved in providing educational programs—La Isla del Barrio Beacon at JHS 99, a settlement within a school at Park East High School, the Mullaly Academy in Bronx CB 4 and, three, Violence Prevention programs in junior high schools. SCAN also runs the largest ACS, Bronx–based, preventive service, the Family Renewal Center, and a service for substance abusing parents and their “high” risk children.
I can vividly remember my excitement reading Ohlin and Cloward's, Delinquency and Opportunity , and sharing my thoughts with Richard Cloward at Columbia. His powerful feedback helped shape my earliest notions of how to support and positively direct inner-city youth. As did, Dr. Gitterman's tales of his Claremont Settlement House days and Dr. Goldson's formulations of the therapeutic power of social groupwork - which structured my notions of helping in an asset based, social group work context. A testimonial to all I learned, in the footsteps of Drs. Cloward, Goldson and Gitterman, “Reach for the Stars” upward bound program, shows that “high risk” youngsters rise despite obstacles!