About

MISSION

Union Settlement creates opportunity in East Harlem by offering comprehensive programs that help underserved residents improve their skills and build better lives for themselves and their families.

VALUES

• Client and Community Focused: Ensuring that our actions are always guided by how we can best serve our program participants and the East Harlem community.
• Compassion: Understanding and having empathy for those we serve.
• Diversity: Embracing and celebrating our different backgrounds and viewpoints, and recognizing that those difference strengthen our organization.
• Excellence: Ensuring that our programs and services are of the highest quality.
• Integrity: Maintaining the highest moral and ethical values.
• Respect: Treating everyone as you would want to be treated – with kindness, care, fairness and humanity.

Union Settlement began in 1895 in East Harlem, an area rich in culture and diverse in immigrant identity but also one of the lowest-income communities in New York City.

Together, our 450 employees and the 10,000 residents who participate in our programs work to make East Harlem a strong, supportive and proud community where dreams are born and achieved every day. We’re working side-by-side with community members to tackle the issues that are important to the vitality of the neighborhood, and to advocate with them on behalf of all East Harlem residents, and underserved communities across our city, state and nation.

Union Settlement helps to realize the promise of this singular neighborhood and contributes to the vitality, diversity and stability of the larger urban community that we all share. We accomplish this work both through providing quality services and coming together to advocate for changes that will make East Harlem even more vibrant.

Union Settlement’s programs provide education, wellness and community-building to East Harlem residents of all ages. Our offerings—from youth and adult education classes, to Meals-on-Wheels, mental health services and programs for senior citizens—span more than a dozen locations across the neighborhood. They are designed to touch every member of a family and support the interdependent needs of every generation and culture in our neighborhood.

Union Settlement equips our neighbors—from babies and teens to adults and grandparents—with connected programs that provide opportunities, tools and support for the whole family, at every stage of life. A Union Settlement family might have a toddler enrolled in childcare, a pre-teen in an after-school program, a teen coping with depression, a working parent in a computer, ESL or job training course, or a grandparent in a seniors’ exercise program. This approach has empowered our neighbors generation-by-generation in ways that demonstrably improve our community.

Together, we are making a real difference. Join us as we work to transform East Harlem, help our neighbors thrive and connect them to the opportunities that change lives.