Highlights and Achievements

Building Community. Growing Leaders.

Since 1983, we have been working to make Cypress Hills a strong, vibrant community. We provide comprehensive services for the Cypress Hills community. Together, our programs strengthen the area’s physical and economic infrastructure, provide quality educational and social services, and foster local leaders.

We are proud of our many successes.

Community Development

We are making Cypress Hills a greener, healthier, more sustainable place to live
We are leading Cypress Hills Verde, a long-term plan for a green and healthy neighborhood. Through two initiatives - Communities for Healthy Food and Two Shades of Green - we sponsor two farmers markets, help residents enroll in SNAP, retrofit residential housing to make them more sustainable and environmentally friendly, and pilot programs to educate the neighborhood about healthy eating and exercise. These initiatives were developed in partnership with the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC).
We run nutrition education workshops and healthy eating demonstrations at our two neighborhood farmers markets, in our youth employment programs and at other neighborhood events, educating over 1,400 community residents about the benefits of healthy living.
We developed and built Cypress Hills Community School, Brooklyn’s first green school building.

We provide vital career and education services to Cypress Hills’ residents, helping them develop and reach their educational and employment goals.

Youth Development

Our after-school programs, which serve 1,700 students a year, have been recognized for excellence through an Afterschool Innovator Award and have been selected to participate in the highly competitive city-funded NYC Summer Quest program and TASC’s ExpandED program. These model programs are designed to give students from low income communities an academic edge through extra school instruction.
We are pioneering a peer counseling model for college access and persistence programs which help over 1,600 young people a year. This innovative model for Student Success Centers was developed in the Franklin K. Lane High School campus through work with College Access: Research and Action (CARA), Youth Development Institute and the Urban Youth Collaborative. We recently established another similar Student Success Center on the Thomas Jefferson High School campus. Now, we are replicating those models with our first Middle School Student Success Center at IS 171, to help younger students navigate the complex high school choice process in New York City.
We started the Cypress Hills Child Care Corporation (CHCCC), which provides high-quality early childhood education to 500 children a year and has received accreditation from the prestigious National Association for the Education of Young Children and the National Association for Family Child Care. These accreditations are given selectively to child care programs of demonstrably high quality.

We work with children, teenagers and families to help young people to succeed in high school, college and the workforce.

Affordable Housing

We have developed 550 units of affordable housing in the community, creating homes for both renters and owners. Some affordable housing highlights include: Senior Housing, completed in early 2018, provides 54 units of affordable housing for an estimated 81 local seniors; Pitkin-Berriman Housing provides 60 units of affordable housing for up to 158 residents and contains a ground floor supermarket; and, rehabilitating and retrofitting 9 small homes (19 units) with grant funds from the NYS Affordable Housing Corporation.
With our partners MHANY Management Inc. and Urban Builders LLC, we will be bringing 274 new affordable rental apartments, a community center, and a performing arts center through the construction of Chestnut Commons, scheduled for completion in 2022.
We are members of the New York Mortgage Coalition and have helped over 750 families attain the dream of homeownership.
We won a Building Brooklyn Award in 2015 for our affordable housing complex, Cypress Hills Village.
We helped over 600 homeowners save their homes from foreclosure through our Foreclosure Prevention Counseling.

We help residents of Cypress Hills to have access to high-quality affordable housing.

Leadership and Advocacy

We won the creation of three new school buildings in our community through advocacy, organizing, and planning.
We have established tenant organizing and advocacy services to help neighborhood residents make positive changes through collective action.
We won commitments to implement restorative justice practices in two local high schools, Academy of Innovative Technology (AoIT) and Cypress Hills Collegiate Prep (CHCP) through Future of Tomorrow (FOT), our youth organizing initiative.