Taft Houses Children Reach New Heights Off the Block 

Earlier this year, a group of children from Taft Houses became scientists for a day when they traveled to Westchester County, New York, to launch a weather balloon filled with gummy bears and marshmallows nearly 95,000 feet into the atmosphere to see how altitude affected the items. 

This type of hands-on, fun learning experience is at the core of Off the Block (formerly Solutions Now), a nonprofit organization that provides young people ages 4 to 14 the opportunity to leave their neighborhoods to participate in arts and culture, STEM, nature, and outdoor activities to help build their skills and character. The organization’s motto is “see it to be it.” 

“If we can get kids to see outside of their own environment, maybe we can transcend things like generational poverty,” said Richard Habersham, Founder of Off the Block. “A lot of these kids need to see why it’s important to get an education, not just hear about it.” 

Mr. Habersham founded Off the Block as Solutions Now in 2020. When the pandemic hit, the organization spent most of its time working with World Central Kitchen to assist people experiencing food insecurity by distributing almost a million meals. After nine months, when the city adapted to the new normal of the pandemic, Mr. Habersham wanted to shift gears. 

“I saw an Adopt-a-Highway sign with a company that adopted that part of the highway to help with the upkeep for it,” Mr. Habersham said. “I thought if I could adopt a NYCHA development and run programs specifically tailored to the children of that development, I could create a think tank to figure out what programs are successful and then try to get other folks and businesses to sponsor other NYCHA developments.” 

In 2019, when Mr. Habersham ran for office in the 13th Congressional District, he met Taft Houses Resident Association President Beverly MacFarlane and was impressed by her passion for her development and its residents. After he launched Off the Block, he reached out to Ms. MacFarlane about bringing the organization’s programming to the more than 400 young residents of her development. 

“It’s a blessing to have a program targeting underserved children of Taft Houses, where some parents would not ordinarily have the resources to pay for these opportunities for their children to come off their block and dream big,” Ms. MacFarlane said. “These trips are highly educational and give the children a chance to think outside the box. Especially after COVID, giving the children the chance to get away from their five-block radius is a blessing. I highly appreciate that we were selected to be the first development and act as a pilot program, and I’m happy to work in collaboration with them.” 

Mr. Habersham believes many institutions want to give back and spends a lot of his day contacting corporate, cultural, and educational organizations to ask if they can provide programs to Taft Houses children; many of those institutions say yes. 

City College helped fund the weather balloon project, and City Pickle and the Central Park Conservancy provided children with four weeks of pickleball lessons. The children recently attended Bronx Zoo’s “Boo at the Zoo” event and received a curated personal experience with a few of the zoo’s animals, and West Point will provide a STEM activity about how bridges are built for the children during Veteran’s Day weekend. 

The children have been enjoying the experiences. Jasmine, 11, attended a recent outing at Holiday Hill in Connecticut and said, “Eating all the ice cream, swimming in the pool, and eating pie in the pie-eating contest was fun.”  Watch the video below to see more about the Holiday Hill excursion and hear from more Taft Houses children about the experience.

“We’re not an afterschool program,” Mr. Habersham said. “We want to be a place where kids can come on weekends and experience a program every weekend that would take them out of their neighborhood and introduce them to something educational and fun. If the kids look at it as school on a Saturday, they won’t be into it. But we want them to see what’s outside of their development, help them dream more.” 

Mr. Habersham’s hope is that Off the Block will discover the most successful and meaningful activities for young people, so that they can then be replicated at other NYCHA developments by public figures; people who have achieved success having grown up in NYCHA developments, like Jay Z; and companies and cultural institutions that have an interest in changing the trajectory of children being raised in underserved communities.