NYC Businesses Serving Social Justice Get Grants From Manhattan DA

NEW YORK CITY — The Manhattan district attorney's office has a sweet deal for businesses putting at-risk youth. Three nonprofits that aim to create jobs for people from poor neighborhoods and those who have been in jail won $7.1 million in grants from the office's Criminal Justice Investment Initiative, DA Cyrus Vance Jr. announced Monday.

The organizations include Drive Change, a Bed-Stuy-based food truck that offers fellowships to formerly incarcerated youth; the East Village's Sweet Generation Bakery, which teaches artisan baking techniques and job skills to at-risk youth; and the Downtown Brooklyn-based HOPE Program, which trains young adults on how to install solar panels and other green technologies.

"Poverty and unemployment are criminal justice issues, and we need as prosecutors ... to keep people employed, moving forward with their lives and out of the criminal justice system," Vance said at a news conference Monday.

The money will help the groups expand to serve more people, letting them build new facilities and grow their training programs, their leaders said. The grants come from the Criminal Justice Investment Initiative, a $250 million pot of money Vance's office seized from white-collar criminals and uses to fund various projects.

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Founded in 2012, Drive Change offers yearlong culinary fellowships to young people looking for work after getting out of jail. Some 90 percent of those fellows get full-time jobs after working on Drive Change's award-winning food

Drive Change will use its $3 million grant to build a "co-working" space for other food trucks and restaurants that have a social-justice mission, founder and CEO Jordyn Lexton said.

"We’ve seen businesses, food trucks and small food businesses, reach out to us asking for talent, asking how do we utilize our own business as a platform to invest in young adults coming home?" Lexton said.

Sweet Generation Bakery won a $2.1 million grant to support its RISE program, an eight-week internship that helps prepare at-risk young people for jobs in the food industry and other fields. The bakery plans to build a new teaching kitchen, counseling space and production facility to help the program grow, executive director Amy Chasan said.

Lisbeth De Leon-Pichardo said she was shy and lacked confidence when she started as a Sweet Generation intern. But the staff there helped erase her self-doubt, leading her to a full-time job as a pastry cook and now an internship at JP Morgan Chase.

"They helped me understand that I did have the ability, but I was constantly doubting myself which was holding me back," De Leon-Pichardo said Monday. "Once I understood that, I started to do so much more, like baking thousands of pastries at night by myself and running six conventional ovens by myself at the same time."

The HOPE Program's $1.8 million grant will help grow its Intervine program, which trains low-income New Yorkers to install "green roofs" and other environmentally sustainable infrastructure around the city. HOPE's students go through months of skills training and hands-on work before getting help finding jobs elsewhere.

Some 74 percent of HOPE's graduates secure jobs in various industries, and 76 percent of those keep their jobs for at least one year.

"It’s an innovative approach to fighting poverty and keeping New Yorkers like my HOPE classmates out of the criminal justice system," Revina Moore, a HOPE building coordinator and a graduate of its Sustainable South Bronx program, said Monday.

(Lead image from Arup Doggerel via YouTube)