Empowerment Center

The RBSCC Community Empowerment Center seeks to address long standing social issues including homelessness, unemployment, and lack of education in the communities of Bushwick, Brownsville, and Williamsburg. We strive to develop and continually improve our programs and services in collaboration with residents, funding sources, and researchers in order to offer more empowering and sustainable solutions for the community residents who visit our centers.

We assist families who are losing their apartments so they don’t have to be homeless; we develop long-term job training and education programs that lead to higher paying jobs; we help homeless families relocate back into the community quickly, reducing their stay in shelter; we combine intensive GED preparation with individualized tutoring so students can achieve results more quickly; we developed an early warning system with the Brooklyn housing court to inform residents of pending evictions; we developed a pilot program to assist homeless families with heads of households who recently “aged out” of the foster care system; we provide the only regularly scheduled tenants rights training in North Brooklyn so anyone with a question on their housing can receive a professional response. The RBSCC Empowerment Center also participates in national studies that measure the effectiveness of our programs so we can assimilate best practices from researchers and other programs across the country and continue to improve our services to the community.