United Neighborhood Houses Of New York Inc

Programs: 2017 organizational achievements: budget advocacy achievements with a combined budget of nearly $1 billion, the unh settlement house network operates nearly 1,500 government contracts that account for approximately 80% of their total budget. Therefore, budget advocacy is a significant portion of unhs policy work. Through meetings with policymakers, testifying at budget hearings, and organizing news conferences and rallies, unh led and participated in many successful campaigns in both the city and state fy2018 budgets. Policy and practice briefs unh produces policy briefs and educational reports to inform lawmakers and the field, and to promote the settlement house model as a community asset and settlement houses as places where promising practices are developed and offered. These briefs and reports are distributed to unhs advocacy partners and allies, key influencers and organizations in the health and human services community, elected officials, city and state administrations, throughout new york citys settlement house network, and nonprofits more generally. Civic engagement work in 2017, unh hired a civic engagement associate to enhance its capacity to mobilize settlement houses and their communities to address issues of declining civic participation across new york city, and to support the training of settlement houses to lead civic engagement work in their own organizations and communities. The associate works closely with unh members to leverage their community reach, employees, and volunteers to inform policymakers across all levels of government, ultimately leading to strengthened services and empowered communities that help new york citys neighborhoods thrive. The addition of the civic engagement associate enabled unh to broaden its state budget and policy priorities this past year to include: advocacy for modernizing election laws in new york state to include early elections, automatic voter registration, flexibility to change parties close to election day, electronic poll books, and parolee voting rights; supporting the human services federal budget response group by hosting forums, social media lobby days, and media events that connect unh members to sector-wide advocacy for safety net programs happening at the federal level. The civic engagement associate has also strengthened the overall capacity of unhs policy and advocacy department and encouraged settlement houses to incorporate this work and inspire their staff to become civically engaged new yorkers. Advocacy institute for the third year in a row, unh partnered with the advocacy institute to provide strengthening advocacy skills training to frontline settlement house staff. This program helps settlement house members learn to use their voices by training them to be advocates for their organizations and communities, providing staff with the tools and information to support movement-building and advocacy within their communities. The most recent training, which took place over three full days in july 2017, included 26 staff participants from 13 settlement houses. Empowering older adults as leaders of community change unh has continued to develop significant expertise around practice development and change when it comes to how organizations like settlement houses work with older adults. Building on its role in national work, unh has shown in nyc that older adults can be positive drivers of change in their neighborhoods when given the chance to do so. Through its pilot project older adults strengthening communities, unh continues to build its practice expertise within the context of senior centers, partnering with dfta and the aging in new york fund. This work includes: - building the capacity of senior centers to support volunteer self-directed project teams of older people working on community service projects. This work is happening in 14 senior centers. Examples include older adults working to improve healthy food options in their communities, address high blood pressure, and improve mail delivery services. There is an initial evaluation of this work and unh has created training manuals for replication. In addition, unh has successfully advocated with dfta to ensure that their reinterpretation of senior center contracts allows the work of self-directed volunteer teams to meet units of service contract requirements. - participating in a national initiative called gen2gen to mobilize older people in ways that benefit children and youth. Unh is training and coaching settlement houses in literacy and career guidance programs and in creating intergenerational community narratives on topics of mutual interest. Unh was selected through a competitive process as one of just 10 organizations across the country to implement gen2gen projects, and the only one selected for new york. - recently partnering with the new york academy of medicine and settlement houses in two brooklyn neighborhoods to use self-directed project teams of older people to support community planning and advocacy as part of the citys age-friendly initiative. The process for participation in this initiative was also through a competitive proposal process, and unh was one of the first two organizations selected. Building healthy nycha communities through food unh continued this project with residents from settlement houses located in nycha housing, with the goal of increasing access to healthy food in these communities. During 2017, unh trained participant volunteers from settlement houses across the city in how to form and lead self-directed project teams. The teams then developed and led projects that address specific healthy food access needs of nycha residents in their individual communities. Unh connected each team to resources that helped the teams successfully implement their healthy food projects in their nycha communities. These healthy food initiatives include cooking skills classes and demonstrations open to the community, pop-up smoothie cafs, building and maintaining community gardens and food pantries, attracting and managing farmers markets and community-supported agriculture (csa) programs, and developing young gardener programs to attract area youth to the issue of healthy food access. The success of these healthy food initiatives has helped to shift the food culture for residents in these housing communities. - promoting family literacy models at the 2016 unh executive directors retreat, settlement house leaders identified the widespread implementation of family literacy programming as an issue fundamental to the success and well-being of families. Based on the input from settlement house program staff, unh devised a two-pronged plan of action to promote family literacy: an internal campaign to raise awareness of the benefits of family literacy, sharing models for how it is being implemented across the settlement house network, and the resources available within settlement houses to establish these programs; and an external campaign to educate policymakers about the efficacy of family literacy and the need for government investment to expand these programs more broadly. Unh has made significant progress in increasing unh membership, and therefore the number of new york city community-based organizations benefitting from unhs customized professional development, advocacy expertise, and innovative programming support. In addition to ocean bay community development corporation, which became a member in march 2017, unh accepted bronx house in the pelham parkway/morris park neighborhood in the bronx, and, in march 2018, red hook initiative in red hook brooklyn. Bronx house is a well-established, century-old community-based organization that sought unh membership for the high-quality professional development and peer learning support and policy and advocacy expertise available to unh members. Red hook initiative (rhi) also reached out to unh for possible membership. Rhi is a neighborhood-embedded organization that has the look and feel of a settlement house, and which met the criteria unh established in its research to identify potential new members. In early 2017, unh took on the leadership of the neighborhood family services coalition now the neighborhood family services (nfs) roundtable - which brings together both unh members and non-members around advocacy for public policies and funding that preserve, strengthen, and ensure high-quality services for children, youth, and families in new york city. The nfs roundtable meets monthly, providing a forum for children and youth serving advocates and providers to share information on current and changing policies that affect new york citys children, youth, and families. Meeting topics include discussions on proposed policies affecting programs that serve children, youth, and families, as well as strategies for advocating for policy shifts and funding to support and strengthen existing programs and for the expansion of services.