Red Hook Justice - Your Community. Your Court.

The Justice Center played host yesterday to two celebrations of the amazing young people that we have worked with this summer. Our first event was the graduation of sixteen interns from our High School Summer Internship Program.  The seven-week program involved two weeks of training at the Justice Center in skills like resume and cover letter writing, interviewing, and other skills necessary to succeed in the working world. For the following five weeks, interns were placed in a variety of sites throughout our catchment area including the Groundswell Community Mural Project , Community Board 7 , The Diamond Law Firm, The Red Hook Star Revue , Youth Made Media , the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation , Fireflies New York, Caselnova Restaurant , Beth Elohim Summer Camp , and SUNY Downstate Medical Center . Family, friends, internship supervisors, and Justice Center staff all came together to congratulate the interns on their hard work. A highlight of the event was hear...

Thanks to a partnership with the Groundswell Community Mural Project  and the hard work of a group of dedicated youth artists, Red Hook's Youth Justice Programs room now has a beautiful new mural, "Transform." To read the story of a teen who became involved in the mural project as a result of a community service requirement assigned to him by the Red Hook Youth Court , click here . Take a look below at photos of the final product as well as the work in progress.

At the Red Hook Community Justice Center, we are always working to identify meaningful community service projects for young people – mandatory and voluntary. This is often easier said than done, with a lot of false starts and hiccups along the way.   However, we are fortunate to have some incredible community-based organizations to assist us in this endeavor. Our longstanding collaboration with one such partner, Groundswell Community Mural Project , is featured this week in a local arts-oriented paper, the Brooklyn Rail. The article traces the story of a high school sophomore who was connected to Groundswell to fulfill the community service requirement assigned to him by the Red Hook Youth Court , after a conversation during his hearing about his interest in art. We also hear from a teen artist about the process that goes into designing and creating the mural that will soon go up on a wall in the youth programs space at the Justice Center: “We started ...