Hub Built To Help Survivors Of Crime Rebuild Their Lives Opens In Brooklyn

By Reuven Blau, The City

Dec. 17, 2025

For thousands of New Yorkers who survive shootings, assaults or domestic violence, the hardest part often begins after the crime scene tape comes down or once they are discharged from the hospital.

To help them in that next phase, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams on Tuesday cut the ribbon on a new Downtown Brooklyn trauma recovery center aimed at assisting survivors navigate the psychological, legal and financial wreckage that can linger long after an arrest is made.

The center will be run by the nonprofit Center for Community Alternatives and bankrolled with $1.2 million in discretionary funds from the City Council. It’s the fourth such site the Council has launched since Adams became speaker in 2022.

At a time when city leaders routinely frame public safety almost exclusively around policing and prosecution, Speaker Adams said the expansion of trauma recovery centers reflects a broader understanding of how violence reverberates through communities.

“As speaker, I have prioritized the Council being an incubator of innovative programs and solutions that confront longstanding inequities while meeting the needs of our communities,” she said at the opening ceremony. “Here is no greater example than trauma recovery centers.”

The Brooklyn site will provide what providers describe as wraparound services for each client. Staff at the trauma recovery centers — known as TRCs — begin with an individual case-management assessment. That often leads to helping people with basic needs such as finding safer or more stable housing, food and seeking legal assistance or job training.

The centers are staffed by psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and community outreach staff. All of the services offered there are free of charge.

Built on a model developed in 2001 at the University of California, San Francisco, trauma recovery centers have been shown to improve economic stability, mental health and social functioning among survivors, while also helping to interrupt cycles of violence and increasing participation in the legal process.

All told, in 2024, New York City’s three trauma centers served 1,197 survivors, with 81% identifying as people of color, according to a new report by the National Alliance of Trauma Recovery Centers.

The majority of people were victims of domestic violence (40%), gun violence (21%) and physical assault (19%), the report noted.

“Crime victims, in Black communities, have historically not been recognized as victims,” Speaker Adams said. “Many survivors are blamed for their own victimization.”

Overall, trauma recovery center clients showed marked improvements, with roughly seven in 10 experiencing fewer PTSD symptoms and nearly two-thirds reporting reduced depression, the report concluded.

The idea is the brainchild of Dr. Alicia Boccellari, who worked as a psychologist in San Francisco in the 1990s while consulting on a medical-surgical unit.

She said Dr. Bill Schecter, the hospital’s head of surgery, told her, “We can sew them up, but we can’t make them well.”

Patients who survived shootings, assaults and severe domestic violence were often discharged but returned to lives that had been fundamentally destabilized by trauma, poverty and a lack of support.

“Their lives were shattered,” Boccellari told THE CITY in June. “We began looking at them and what was going on.”

Some were afraid to leave their homes, spiraling into bankruptcy or homelessness, she said.

“So we decided to try to figure out what we could do about it,” Boccellari said.

Many victims are given a business card with a number for the local mental health clinic, she added.

“That approach doesn’t work,” she said.

Initially, Boccellari began an initiative to offer crime victims bedside mental health treatment while they were recovering from their injuries.

Most of the people would say “I’m not crazy,” she recalled, citingstigma around psychological care.

Making things more challenging, one of the symptoms of PTSD is that people want to avoid talking about what happened — because it overwhelms them and sometimes triggers panic attacks, she said.

So she expanded the approach by meeting with people and asking what they needed.

“They wanted help in filing a police report or talking to the district attorney or basic things like safe housing or with childcare,” she recalled.

Council Speaker Adrienne Adams speaks at the opening of a new trauma recovery center in Downtown Brooklyn, Dec. 16, 2025. Credit: Alex Krales/THE CITY

In New York City, Speaker Adams, whose time in office is waning, wants her successor to keep the hubs open and expand the initiative.

The City Council has already committed to opening a fifth trauma recovery center in Jamaica, Queens, as part of the recently approved Jamaica Neighborhood Plan.

But the National Alliance report urges city and state leaders to go further, calling for permanent baseline funding of at least $1.4 million per center and expanded sites in neighborhoods with high rates of violence — including areas in Manhattan that currently lack any trauma recovery center.

The report notes that 67% of the city’s TRCs currently have 10 to 20 people on waitlists

“When we address the unresolved trauma left behind by violence, we can improve safety in our communities and throughout our entire city,” Adams said. “That is why TRCs must be a pillar of our essential public safety infrastructure.”

“This is only possible,” she added, “if leaders in our city and state commit, as this City Council has, to deeper and sustained investment in these centers and their life-saving services.”

This press release was produced by The City. The views expressed here are the author’s own.