Red Hook Initiative

Community building: advocacy and organizing has always been a key element of our work at rhi, recognizing the need to address systemic issues facing the neighborhood alongside our youth development approach. Our programs work toward two goals: to improve the health of residents of public housing in Red Hook and to strengthen the resiliency of the Red Hook community. The work of this program seeks to address the root causes of the issues residents face, positively impacting the lives of over 6,500 Red Hook houses residents each year.through our benefits access work, we served nearly 600 residents in benefits access including: housing repair support and advocacy, snap and one shot deal enrollment, translation services, and referrals to community partners for additional support.

Adolescent youth: rhi provides comprehensive after school programming for almost 200 middle and high school students. We offer 40 middle school aged youth each academic year and 20 during the summertime. Middle school scholars use support to work toward academic success, begin career and college exploration, develop life skills, strengthen social supports and exercise their leadership in Red Hook. Rhi provides comprehensive programming for 120 Red Hook youth attending high school, as they work toward their high school diploma, develop a post-secondary plan, gain paid job training and work experience, strengthen their social supports and exercise their leadership in the community. Approximately 20 of these high school-aged youth receive college access support.

Young adult programs: we engage and support nearly 200 young adults to set individualized goals around furthering their education (high school diploma, hse or college degree), obtaining employment and growing professionally and gaining and strengthening social supports. Our dedicated team provides comprehensive, personalized supports for young adults from a strengths-based, trauma-informed approach while intentionally addressing systemic injustice through education, advocacy and opportunities for young adult participation.

Red Hook farms: we harvested nearly 20,000 pounds of produce--increasing access to fresh, affordable produce and providing nutrition education that introduces vegetables, fruit and healthy, delicious ways to prepare them, are concrete ways we are meeting the basic needs of Red Hook's public housing residents and combating the public health crisis.

Health and wellness: through a partnership with the silberman school of social work at hunter college, we continued to build the capacity of rhi staff to develop culturally-responsive, trauma-informed healing services and create safe spaces and opportunities for young people to heal from the trauma of the moment and the impacts of systemic racism and lack of public investment in our community. In addition we have a three-tiered model to provide direct counseling support through: individual wellness check-ins and counseling sessions; group healing work, which offers both healing and peer support training; and community-wide healing events and workshops.