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Founded in 1979, the Andrew Glover Youth Program finds kids in New York City courtrooms who “might turn their lives around if they had a chance.”AGYP gives these kids counseling, training, education, and employment assistance. By “[keeping] them in school and working and engaged in positive things, [they] keep them out of prison.” The Glover program has three main goals. First, they want to “intervene and reclaim young people from lives of crime.” Second, “give the overloaded court system a reliable alternative to incarceration,” and lastly, “make the Lower East Side and East Harlem communities safer for everyone.” These goals are all a part of the program’s main goal of stopping crime without prison.
The Andrew Glover Youth Program’s central challenge is to halt this cycle of incarceration and poverty for the youth in two neighborhoods: East Harlem and the Lower East Side. Problems that are faced by these areas are: concentrated poverty, broken families, failing education and drugs. The Lower East Side contains one of the country’s most concentrated areas of public housing, high percentages of children born to single, young mothers, an high school 50% graduation rate, and an abundance of drugs. The program has helped thousands of kids overcome these factors and turn their lives around and will help many more in the future.2
Executive Director Angel Rodriguez with AGYP participants3 Andrew Glover Youth Program4
Click here to learn more about the Andrew Glover Youth Program
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Founded in 1889, the Educational Alliance serves more than 50,000 New Yorkers a year through 39 programs such as preschools, camps, after school programs, senior centers, and more. All of the programs feature intergenerational and cross-cultural activities that bring together many different types of people so that they can learn from each other and with each other. When it was first founded, the program was for Eastern European Jews. The history of the Lower East Side and that of Education Alliance are deeply intertwined for this reason. As the population changed, so did the program. The program went from being volunteer based to having social service programs run by trained officials. Although the organization is a Jewish organization, they help people from all religions and ethnic backgrounds.6
Click here to learn more about the Educational Alliance
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1. http://www.nycharities.org/images/misclogos/bysupport/1179.jpg
2. Andrew Glover Youth Program, http://agyp.org/about/who-we-are
4. http://agyp.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/photos/donate_01_ag_group.jpg?itok=65AXfOy8
5. http://lmcc.net/uploads/blog_archive/edalliance.jpg
6. “About Us,” Educational Alliance, http://www.edalliance.org/index.php?submenu=AboutUs&src=gendocs&ref=AboutUs&category=Main
