Community Life & Education
Building on 50 years of experience providing services to East Harlem families, LSA’s center-based Community Life Program serves over 500 children and 250 adults annually with classes, group activities and trips aimed at education, socialization, employment and recreation. The building of friendships and self-esteem is an essential facet of program activities.
The Community Life Program works with the very poorest, most socially isolated immigrant families in East Harlem; most are from Mexico. They have received limited education in their native country and know little if any English. Being from rural communities leaves them unprepared to negotiate the systems and bureaucracies of a big city like New York. Their cultural attitudes toward childrearing can make their children unprepared to succeed in the schools. They tend to keep to themselves, not even reaching out to other families like their own.
Thanks to the much larger space provided in our new building, the Community Life Program expanded significantly, and now offers multiple levels of ESL, computer classes and labs, nutrition classes, three different mothers’ groups, exercise groups, basic Spanish education, art classes, and special groups for children with asthma, grandparents and preadolescent girls.
Another core feature of LSA’s Community Life Program is its annual series of free summer trips for underprivileged families. For over 20 years, LSA has brought families by the busload to beautiful parks, lakes and beaches just outside of the city. Today, we serve nearly 1,500 community members -- 2/3rds of whom are children -- with our trips, which are often the only way most of these families have any recreation/socialization away from the city during the summer.
There is a very high level of interactivity between the Community Life Program and other LSA services. Clients participating in the Community Life Program gained immediate entry to LSA’s Advocacy Program, Food Pantry, Home Based Child Development Program, Toddler Nursery and Family Support (Preventive Services) Program.
The growth of our Community Life Program has greatly enhanced LSA’s holistic approach to empowering the families it serves, in particular through the program’s ability to draw participants out of the isolation of culture and language, and toward a new place in a larger community.
Community Life class photo gallery
Community Life summer trips photo gallery
