New York – Brownsville’s long residents, Brooklyn are focused on returning the business to their neighborhood.
A local nonprofit is creating a new center to provide opportunities for property building.
What is Brownsville Hub Cooperative?
La’shawn Allen-Muhammad has lived in Brownsville for almost her entire life. It is passionate about the neighborhood, despite decades of economic downturn.
“What is really unique is that Brownsville has the largest concentration of public housing in the United States,” she told CBS News New York Hannah Cliger, citing a short policy from the chairman’s action plan for neighborhood safety.
As the executive director of the Central Economic Development Corporation in Brooklyn, she is working with a $ 1.3 million grant from the Robin Hood Foundation, a charity that works to address poverty -induced problems. The grant came through the advocacy of Jobsfirst NYC, which creates solutions that promote economic movement.
Their goal is to build the Brownsville Hub cooperative from the ground up. A new building erected to 97 Glenmore Ave. It will serve as the headquarters for the center, and will include more than 200 affordable housing units, along with a commercial school and some local businesses.
“The first spa of the neighborhood, local owned by a group of women, will be in the building. We will have a credit union in the building, as well as another community space in addition to our new headquarters,” Allen said -Muhammad.
Some empty empty shops currently line Belmont Avenue, one of the main arteries through the community. Allen-Muhammad says with the help of its business incubator and a variety of community investments, it hopes the area can become known as the neighborhood’s “Row Rown Row” in the coming years.
“Growing up here, the only place where you can go and sit down to eat a meal is McDonald’s or KFC. We always had to leave the community to go and eat a meal as a family or on a date,” said it.
“The fact that you have an entire community where there is no sitting restaurant is a little extraordinary,” said Eda Henries, a resident of Brownsville, an investment banker and partner in Cornbread -move the country here in decades.
Stuart cinemaAn Indie cinema, owned by women, is also moving.
Nonprofit helps Brownsville residents find work in construction
Meanwhile, the organization is intercepting other local talent. Jeel Norman runs at Power Inc., a nonprofit that helps people find work in construction. He is training OSHA for new professionals through the center.
“People in Brownsville simply needed a tradeable skill, which was construction, health and safety training. And I realized being a contracting, I had connections with developers and work. So if I were able to ‘I trained them, then we could create that pipeline from training directly to work,’ Norman said.
Will Matthews passed through one of those training eight months ago, and now works as a SIT SIV supervisor at NYCHA Developments.
“We come here to get the training, we are here to get the skills we need, the tools, and we bring them to the other person,” Matthews said.
The new Brownsville Hub Cooperative headquarters is set to complete by the end of 2025.
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