Annual Report
2024

Yvonne Gala, 39, never expected to have Thanksgiving dinner in a shelter. The eldest of three girls, the Brooklyn native had grown up with two parents and her sisters in East Flatbush, where her basic needs were met. But Yvonne and her mother had an incendiary relationship, and conflict was a constant in her home. When Yvonne moved back in at the age of 37, these conflicts escalated to the point where there were calls to the police, one of them resulting in a psychiatric evaluation and her decision to go to a shelter.

After a stay in an assessment shelter, Yvonne came to Henry Street’s Third Street Women’s Residence—a site that provides transitional shelter and compassionate supportive services to 79 homeless women with mental health challenges. Yvonne arrived in October 2022, bringing with her only her I.D. and essential belongings.

At the shelter, a multidisciplinary team helps residents manage their conditions, achieve stability, and find housing. When possible, they also help residents look for work, and Yvonne was single-mindedly focused on finding a job. She got career help and applied for jobs at the computer lounge of Henry Street’s Urban Family Center shelter, and by November 2022, Yvonne was hired by the Bowery Resident Committee as an independent living specialist.

Case manager Fatima Sial then submitted an application for her to move into supportive housing. Just five weeks after Yvonne started her job, she was able to move into her own apartment in Bay Ridge—the first time she had lived completely on her own. There, Yvonne is able to live independently, while still receiving supportive services.

“Henry Street was a pivoting part of my life,” Yvonne says. “I’d been going counterclockwise, and Henry Street helped me pivot to a clockwise direction. It feels like an accomplishment.”

“I’ve been with Henry Street since Bethany was two,” says Bethania Guzman, 48.

Born in the Dominican Republic, Bethania had come to the United States at 16, with her father. Having endured a difficult home life in the DR, she found that her troubles continued, and she left home at 19. For years, Bethania scraped by as a home health aide and security guard before becoming certified as a nurse technician. It was a step toward fulfilling her childhood dream of becoming a nurse. 

In 2018, Bethania was working at Gouverneur Hospital, two blocks south of Henry Street’s headquarters, and having a hard time finding babysitters for her toddler. “But thank God I found 301 Henry Street”—the Settlement's Early Childhood Education Center —and enrolled Bethany. “The curriculum was amazing. I loved the playing time, exercise time, meals—it was very organized.” 

In 2020, however, the pandemic changed Bethania’s plans. Henry Street’s early childhood teachers set up virtual classrooms and checked in every day—a level of support that Bethania says was profound. However, with a preschooler at home, she made the difficult choice to resign from her job at Gouverneur. 

Bethania used this time to focus on her dream career, enrolling in an associate degree program in nursing. Despite having “zero income with a small child,” she committed herself to finishing school. Henry Street helped by enrolling Bethany in its free afterschool program at P.S. 134—one of six afterschool programs the Settlement operates in public schools.

Bethania passed the notoriously difficult NYCLEX nursing exam in May 2024. “You don’t know how much I cried when I graduated,” she says. “It was the help of heaven to have this program while I was going to school.”

Now, Bethania is back at Gouverneur on weekends and is a supervisor with a private visiting nurse company. 

“It’s a game changer,” she says. “I can give my daughter an education and save for her college. The support I didn’t receive as a child I want to ensure she gets.”

Scott Jones, 54, lives in Fresh Meadows, Queens, with his 15-year-old son, Corey, and his 82-year-old mother, in an apartment he has rented for 33 years. His son, a 10th grade basketball player and budding chef, plans to go to college to study engineering. But in 2023, the family was facing eviction as a result of medical issues that had kept Scott out of work for several years.

Since his early 20s, Scott has struggled with ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, and Crohn’s-related blood clots. “When I got sick, I tried to push through it. Sometimes my employer understood and sometimes they didn’t,” he says.

In about 2010, Scott was working in the facilities department of a major health care network when his symptoms flared up. At first, he missed days here and there due to pain or doctor’s appointments. But, as time went on, longer exacerbations of his illness landed him in the hospital for weeks and even months at a time and wiped out his savings. Short-term disability covered only a fraction of the $1,800 monthly rent. Scott fell about five months behind in rent, and the worry only exacerbated his symptoms.  

By fall 2023, with a new job at an international corporation, Scott started paying rent again. But he still owed arrears, and his landlord was threatening to evict the family. He learned about Henry Street’s Dale Jones Burch Neighborhood Center from a flyer he picked up, and by April 2024, Financial Case Manager Jose Acosta Tejada had helped him secure more than $11,000 through a combination of Henry Street’s and other organization’s resources.

“The cash was absolutely the bridge we needed,” Scott says. “If we had to leave the apartment, I have no idea where we would have gone. Probably a shelter or into my brother’s home.” 

Scott was one of more than 50 people Henry Street helped in the face of eviction in 2024. “He shows how an illness can push a person, especially a parent, into poverty, debt, and homelessness,” Jose says.

“Jose was fantastic,” Scott says. “I didn’t expect he would be able to help me get out of this situation.”

Yuki Liang came to the United States from Kaiping, a village in southern China, and she soon found work as a manicurist. But as a high school student in China, she had studied accounting, and she was quickly frustrated by her limited options in the United States.

Yuki joined Henry Street’s ESOL-Job Readiness program in December 2010. Her goal was to work where she would have to speak a lot of English in preparation eventually to go to college and become an accountant. After three months in class, she had made so much progress that the team was able to help her secure a position as a stocker at a Duane Reade drugstore in Chinatown.

Still, Yuki’s English was not fluent yet, and she started to endure harassment from her supervisor, who insulted her and made fun of her speech. “I wanted to run away and quit the job,” she recalls.

Facing a seemingly unbridgeable cultural divide, Yuki came to the ESOL team for advice, sharing the details of what was happening. Together they coached her to talk with the supervisor about his behavior—even though this was a difficult thing for her to do. She was delighted that, once confronted, he apologized and changed his behavior. Her teachers believe that her ability to address the harassment and remain in that job was a key moment that helped lead to her success today.

In the ensuing years, Yuki has earned her associate and bachelor’s degrees in accounting and business management while working in a variety of accounting offices. Happily self-sufficient, she is studying for her master’s degree and taking the multi-part exam to become a certified public accountant, conferring with the ESOL Job-Readiness team every step of the way. “Today, she has a great job at an accounting firm and bought an apartment in Brooklyn!” says Carol Ng, ESOL program associate.  

Adds Carol, “She really shows how, for immigrants, it can take so long to get ahead, but with passion and commitment like hers, it is possible.”  

“I didn’t know my son could act. I didn’t know he could dance,” says Clarissa Ramos. “Abrons was the foundation that helped him explore his talents.” 

Born and raised on the Lower East Side, Clarissa remembers having a plethora of arts opportunities in public school. But for her son, Joseph, who sings on the way to school every day, school-based arts programs have not been as plentiful, especially when he was in elementary school, and she found few options to bridge the gap.  

“Abrons fills in the arts for us,” Clarissa says.

Now 11, Joseph is an Abrons Arts Center regular, having fallen in love with performing during the center’s summer arts program at age 8. He has learned piano, played in a band, begun digital music production, explored breaking and other dance forms, studied 3D art-making, and performed several parts in the 2023 production of Sleeping Beauty.

He takes these classes at no cost through the NYCHA Arts Initiative, Henry Street’s tuition-free arts program that ensures residents of New York City public housing have equal opportunities for self-expression. For the first time, in 2024, the family found an artistic outlet that they could experience together, in Abrons’s multigenerational ceramics class. Now, every Wednesday, Clarissa and Joseph build and sculpt together, offering suggestions on glaze options for one another’s pieces and making plans to display the mugs and statues they pull from the kiln.

“Ceramics is so fun; I’d never done it before,” Clarissa says. “It’s therapeutic.”

For Joseph’s parents, Henry Street was such an integral presence in the neighborhood that they can hardly pinpoint their first interactions with the organization. “Henry Street is a positive place for kids and families to spend time,” says Clarissa, “especially for parents who work. We rely on community resources. It’s a safe haven for the kids, and at the same time they’re learning.”

As one of the younger members of Henry Street’s Older Adult Center, Ellen Yen, practically a Gen Xer at 64, wanted to find a way to serve the center’s older members. Once a month, she offers free manicures to participants there. Ellen and her friends Ada Chik and Ann Cheong also volunteer as translators, enrolling older adults in Chinatown in an MTA discount program. “When we make other people happy, we are happy,” Ellen says. “It’s good to share the love!”

The three friends were not always so confident in their English skills. Ellen came to New York from Taiwan in 1986 and picked up English while working as a nail salon technician. Ada, 66, who arrived from Hong Kong in 2002, took on jobs like babysitting, home health care, and factory work. Though she had been a senior accountant in Hong Kong, Ada was too intimidated to find a job in her field and chose to work where most people spoke Chinese. 

Ann, 64, had come to New York from Malaysia around the same time as Ellen. She supported herself for more than 30 years, working in restaurants all over Manhattan. Still, cashiering and speaking with customers was frustrating at times due to the slang people used and speed with which they talked. “I couldn’t understand at all,” she says. 

In 2020, at the start of the pandemic, Ellen and Ada were feeling restless at home, and together they signed up for online ESOL classes at Henry Street. It was during breakout groups in their class that they met Ann. The three women leaned on one another for support in reading, writing, and speaking English. After finishing Henry Street’s highest level English class, the friends wanted to continue practicing what they had learned. Since they had all recently entered their 60s, the Older Adult Center presented the perfect meeting place. They have become avid participants, taking advantage of exercise classes, meals, parties, and trips, and started their own Chinese karaoke group.

“That’s what we strive to be, a safe—and free—place where older adults can come together, relax, and foster connection,” says Jasmine Corchado, director of the Older Adult Center.