The Greater Hudson Promise Neighborhood (GHPN) works to help children and families reach their full potential through cradle-to-career programming. Based on the highly successful Harlem Children’s Zone model, Greater Hudson Promise Neighborhood improves outcomes for students by identifying unmet needs in the community and working to meet them through direct service, collaboration, community building, and/or systems change work.
GHPN’s programming is focused primarily on four areas: early education, out-of-school time programming, services for justice-impacted children and families, and supports for low-income families. Out-of-school time programming includes GHPN’s own after-school program and the organization’s coordination of the Hudson Out-of-School Time Collaborative, which is a group of approximately 25 youth-serving programs in the Hudson area that meet monthly to share data and resources, and to address service gaps. This group’s efforts previously resulted in the launch of an after-school bussing system that transports youth from school to their after-school programs of choice and then home at the end of the day.
Services for justice-impacted children and families include the highly successful Greater Hudson Initiative for Children of Incarcerated Parents. This program’s signature achievement was the introduction of an “Enhanced Child Visiting” policy at the Columbia County Jail, where incarcerated parents and their children spend quality time together during which parents can hold, hug, read to, and otherwise interact more fully with their children. This program was able to document such significant improvements in outcomes for both children and the incarcerated adults that GHPN was awarded federal funding to enhance this program and help replicate it around New York State.
GHPN has been operating in Hudson since 2011 and was funded by the Dyson Foundation from 2014-2020 under the umbrella of the Mental Health Association of Columbia-Greene Counties. Since it became an independent organization at the beginning of 2021, the Dyson Foundation has provided GHPN with general operating support as well as Management Assistance Program mini-grant support for strategic planning.