Westhab serves over 1,200 at-risk youth with over 50 programs. All were designed with age-appropriate curricula, methods, and goals to meet participants’ unique and myriad needs and to prevent a next generation of poverty and homelessness. We foster positive change by seizing every teaching opportunity, maintaining high expectations, and building upon each young person’s strengths. We empower young people by cultivating skills and confidence and challenge them by requiring accountability. Our programs are enhanced by more than 30 diverse service-provider partners, from early childhood speech and language therapists; to conflict resolution specialists for adolescents; to professional arts organizations.
Youth services have long been a vital part of the programming at our Coachman Family Center. In recent years, families who had moved out of the shelter were traveling back to it, in the hope that their children might continue to participate in its youth programs and maintain the relationships they had formed with our youth counselors. What seemed to be a victory for the family – moving out of a homeless shelter – was a loss for the children, as the neighborhoods they now lived in lacked quality youth services. Thus we decided to bring our programs to communities in need.
Cobbling together small grants from banks, foundations and individuals (click here to donate), we launched our Elm Street Neighborhood Center in 2006 in the high-need Nodine Hill neighborhood of southwest Yonkers. The Center currently serves more than 250 school-age youth from Kindergarten to young adults.
Our PEAK (Promoting Excellence and Achievement in Kids) Center opened in 2008 on the south side of Mount Vernon. It serves more than 200 young people, from school-age youth to young adults.
Westhab also developed and operates two intensive case management programs to meet the unique needs of targeted young people in southern Westchester:
Ceasefire deters gang involvement for young adults in Yonkers by offering educational, employment, and housing assistance to young men who are entrenched in the street culture.
Achieve provides guidance and support for re-direction to high school non-completers and unemployed young adults.
An organic garden grows on Elm Street
On April 2, 2010 the third and ongoing phase of Growing Together began. The United Jewish Appeal-funded project began last fall, with an apple- and pumpkin-picking trip for kids from Westhab’s Elm Street Youth Center and families from Bet Am Shalom Synagogue and Congregation Kol Ami. The second phase was an afternoon of learning about organic farming and preparing and sharing a meal all together at Bet Am Shalom. Now the three groups, with the help of Westhab’s facilities crew and Home Depot gardening experts, have planted an organic vegetable garden in what was a garbage-strewn empty lot across the street from the Elm Street Youth Center. “Cold crops” are growing now; the groups will plant “warm crops” later in the spring.
Reel Change
In Reel Change, a Jacob Burns Film Center program, teens at the PEAK Center are creating videos to address issues that are relevant to their lives as they learn about the power of the media to impact social change.
Youth Police Initiative
As part of the federally funded Weed and Seed program, local teens and precinct officers develop understanding, empathy and trust through team building exercises. This provides a solid foundation for the success of community policing initiatives in southwest Yonkers, offers a positive experience for the participants, creates community awareness and helps to reduce crime.
