EL PUENTE DE WILLIAMSBURG INC
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Mission Statement
To inspire and nurture leaders for peace and justice.
About This Cause
El Puente is a community based human rights institution founded in1982, by Luis Garden Acosta with the lead support of Eugenio Maldonado, Frances Lucerna, and Reverend Father Steve Lynch to stop the epidemic wave of violence in the Southside community of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Today, El Puente integrates the diverse activities and community leads campaigns of it's Center Arts and Culture, Green Light District Initiative, Community Wellness Program and Global Justice Institute throughout the El Puente Universe: • 6 neighborhood Leadership Centers in Williamsburg and Bushwick • MS 50/El Puente Community School Partnership • El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice • El Puente Puerto Rico’s Latino Climate Action Network (LCAN) In over three decades, El Puente has accomplished numerous groundbreaking and nationally recognized achievements, while pioneering a national model for youth/community development. Grounded in a holistic approach to leadership development for young people and their families, El Puente bridges the worlds of health, education, and the arts with activism and community empowerment. El Puente’s central focus, “see, judge and act”, adapted from the Young Christian Worker movement as well as the legacy of the Young Lords Party have galvanized a human rights movement that has inspired community-driven campaigns and initiatives, including: • Organizing the community to dissolve youth gangs and stop street violence. • Founding the Community Alliance For the Environment (CAFE), in partnership with UJO and NYPRG that stopped the development of a legislated, 55-story incinerator in Williamsburg. • Co-founding the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance. • Shutting down New York City’s least performing and most violent high school (and writing the RFP that led to the creation of four smaller schools that replaced it). • Tearing down a wall that segregated children in a Brooklyn public school (P.S. 16) by leading a month-long, total student boycott. • Creating the nation’s first public high school for Human Rights, the “A” rated El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice. • Creating Brooklyn’s most comprehensive Latino Center for Art and Culture. • Co-founding the Latino Commission on AIDS. • Creating the first continuously running HIV/AIDS Adolescent Drama Company, Teatro El Puente in America • Leading New York State’s most successful childhood immunization campaign. • Leading a diverse community coalition in a successful campaign to limit the activities of a radioactive and hazardous waste storage facility RADIAC located in Williamsburg. • Reaching out to 5,000 of its Southside neighbors in a three-year asthma study that resulted in the first scientific, peer-reviewed article written by a community organization ever published by The American Journal of Public Health. • Co-founding the U.S. non-violent resistance movement (principally, with direct action at the United Nations) that helped bring an end to the bombing of Vieques, Puerto Rico. • Convening and facilitating Puerto Rico’s first Leadership Summit on Climate Change in 2013 fostering the Governor’s signature on five Executive Orders in support of climate change mitigation, adaptation, and resiliency. • Organizing Puerto Rico’s first annual Climate March “La Caminata” lead by El Puente Puerto Rico’s Latino Climate Action Network (LCAN).