This year, second year volunteer Erica Sage is the Senior Citizen Outreach Coordinator and provides after school tutoring, team building activities, and parenting workshops. First year volunteer Janet Solis works with parents who are in danger of losing their children to the foster care system. She helps residents of Highbridge build personal and family skills that will help them become employed, assist their children to be more successful in school, manage their finances, and know where to look for help when it is needed.
Highbridge Community Life Center (HCLC) is a not-for-profit, community-based organization providing a wide range of educational and social service programs to the poor. Those served are mostly minority, single-parent families living in an area rampant with unemployment, illiteracy, drug abuse, crime, and AIDS.
Since the agency was incorporated in 1979 by two Dominican Sisters, HCLC has grown to a non-sectarian, multi-service agency of 78 staff, utilizing six locations and $2.5 million in federal, state, city, private, corporate, and foundation funds. Throughout over 20 years of service, HCLC’s basic mission has remained the same: to enable the residents of the Highbridge Community to take complete charge of their own lives and to empower them to use their new-found strength to improve the lives of their families and neighbors.
Lasallian Volunteers have been part of the staff of HCLC for 18 years. They have held positions as English as a secondary language (ESL) teachers, social workers, newspaper writers, children’s service providers, and after-school tutors. In recent years, they have staffed family and community retreats at the rural Empowerment Center in Goshen, NY.
