About

The Center teams up with low-income, of color, and immigrant communities to solve current legal, social, economic, health, and political problems and to improve our capacity to solve such problems. Along the way, we strive towards our dream of an accountable and equitable democracy – one where equal citizenship is a concrete everyday reality, not just a vague constitutional promise.

To meet these bold aspirations, the Center puts into action our comprehensive and innovative “rebellious vision of problem solving.” Through this vision, we meld street savvy, technical sophistication, and collective ingenuity into a compelling practical force. The power of our rebellious vision lies in extraordinary teamwork – teamwork in fact and not in name only. The Center never works alone. We regularly work with problem solvers of all sorts – including residents, merchants, ministers, organizers, researchers, funders, service providers, artists, rabbis, teachers, corporate executives, journalists, public officials, doctors, lawyers, bankers, priests, and policy makers. Only by routinely partnering with absolutely anyone who might in any imaginable way contribute can we get to where together we hope to go in the future.

Our vision of community problem solving unites certain key fundamentals:

1. We collaborate with those who live and work in low-income, of color, and immigrant communities. We seek out and share knowledge about existing problems, available resources, and useful strategies.

2. Drawing upon this knowledge, we connect those who face problems with those in public, private, and civic realms who help address them. We build networks of valuable know-how among diverse problem solvers and help shape and meet common goals.

3. Where problems remain unaddressed even after making such connections, we help fill those voids by scavenging around for resources (in NYC, across the US, across the globe). We leverage what’s available with what may never have been tried, taking on apparently insoluble problems through everything from one-time trouble-shooting squads to more-permanent full-fledged partnerships.

4. All the while, we vigilantly monitor how strategies get implemented and candidly evaluate what works and what doesn’t. Together with others, we develop and enforce standards by which to measure effectiveness, raising those standards as we increase our collective problem-solving power.

5. By sharing widely and regularly all that can be learned through formal research and informal exchange, the Center aims to improve our problem solving capacity. We work to convince all involved (individuals, offices, organizations, institutions, coalitions, and networks) that we can and must always together get better at meeting head-on life’s evolving challenges.