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THE BRONX HAS LONG BEEN NOTORIOUS as one of the poorest, most desperate neighborhoods in the U.S. So perhaps it wasn’t surprising that when Don Bluestone came to the Mosholu Montefiore Community Center in 1989 to take over as Executive Director, there were fears the Center might soon close. Its longtime Jewish clientele was dwindling; it had run a deficit the previous year; programs were confined to a single building on DeKalb Avenue, in the North Bronx.
To Don—city-born, city-educated, and a Bronx resident himself—the solutions were obvious. The Center, familiarly known as MMCC, needed to serve more residents and more youth; to seek out money from government and foundations; and most important, to shake itself awake and go forth into the community.
“When I came here, the agency wasn’t doing much, just keeping to itself,” Bluestone recalls. “But the board was committed to finding a way to serve the neighborhood. At my interview I pulled out like five pages of plans. I told them we had to move fast, we had to stay in the building but also get out of the building. They loved it. And that’s been our success.”
If once MMCC kept to itself, now it bustles. In 1989 it served 3,500 people, of whom 500 were youth, on a budget of $1.5 million; today, it serves 25,000 people, 20,000 of whom are youth, on a budget of $18 million. Programs operate not only on DeKalb Avenue, but in 16 public schools and more than seven other locations. Youth can take advantage not only of sports, recreation, and arts classes, but education and job training. Acclaimed intergenerational programs help bridge racial, generational, ethnic, and religious divides. The Center is routinely sought out by the city as the sponsor of choice for school-based youth programs; and when gang violence took the lives of four young men at the Tracey Towers apartment complex in May of last year, it was the Center that officials asked to help ease tensions and reach out to gang-involved youth. In fact, MMCC operates teen centers not only in Tracey Towers, but in other critical neighborhoods as well, including one recently opened in the poorest part of the vast Co-Op City housing development.
With all the changes, Don continues to make his home in the Bronx, not just work here. It’s the best way to keep connected, he says: “I’ve always got a pulse on what’s needed—and if not, my neighbors tell me.”
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