St Nicks Alliance
- Location : Brooklyn, NY
- Community Served: Children
- Focus: Education
Organization background
St. Nicks Alliance (SNA) is a north-Brooklyn based organization that
seeks to transform lives of low and moderate-income people by
providing opportunities for
employment, education, housing, and health care.
SNA impacts the lives of 17,000 residents annually through a
comprehensive network of services.
Their ‘Youth and Education’ program serves nearly 6000 young
people each year, supporting children from their early years right through
to providing college and career readiness programs.
SNA is North Brooklyn‘s largest youth services provider, and operates in
an early childhood center, 16 afterschool centers, 3 DOE community schools, and 3
community centers.
SNA also runs an
‘Affordable Housing’ program which manages more
than 1,400 units for low- and moderate- income families and special needs populations.
In addition, their ‘Elder Care’ program
provides senior housing, assisted living, home care services for
around 350 low-income elderly people in North Brooklyn and senior care services
for more than 800 people.
Finally, in their ‘Workforce Development’ program,
they train and empower people to move from unemployment to work and jobs with
living wages.
Project background
SNA's Youth and Education Programs serve youth in grades K-12.
For elementary age children, they have developed a
'School Success Model' which incorporates a number of strategies to support
student learning:
- After-school programs and summer camps, developed in
collaboration with the classroom teachers
combine intensive literacy
immersion with youth development enrichment.
- Peer Mentoring pairs older elementary school children with children in the
earlier grades to improve literacy for all involved.
- Family Literacy Plus
offers caregivers and students hands-on literacy activities, supper and
resources to foster literacy at home.
- Transformational Practice provides
students who struggle the most academically and behaviourally, with
Transformational Coaches who work 1:1 with
children.
- Interdisciplinary Thematic Units are developed by SNA educators and
allow children to explore content through literacy, STEM and arts instruction.
The Thematic Units feature two hours per week of Literacy Instruction
complemented by two hours/week of Arts Education in visual,
performing and digital arts.
- BK Story Voyager:
The BK Story Voyager is a unique mobile library,
that serves 2000+ children and houses 15,000+ titles.
The library is staffed by a full-time educator, and
travels daily to after-school centers to offer a rich and alternative
learning environment for children.
Due to COVID,
SNA is currently in the process of converting all its in-person programs
into completely or partially remote programs.
The BKSV will not accomodate groups of kids, but instead will
become a sanctuary for struggling readers to
receive 1:1 instruction. Sharing books will also continue through
creative strategies.
GKF contributions to SNA
- 2018,2019: partial support for the BK Story Voyager
- 2020: tailor the BK Story Voyager and
design Interdisciplinary Thematic Units
to accomodate a blended learning environment (partially or entirely remote)
- 2021-2024: support for the BK Story Voyager