Our Mission
The Open Hearts Initiative builds community support for housing and services for homeless New Yorkers by organizing housed community residents to advocate for housing justice in their own backyards. We connect communities, homeless New Yorkers, and service providers to create welcoming environments rooted in empathy, compassion, and respect in order to build strong and integrated neighborhoods.
Our Values
Elevate the voices of individuals directly impacted by homelessness. We speak with those experiencing homelessness, not for them, and we build our advocacy and activities around their needs.
Advocate for permanent housing as the ultimate solution even as we promote welcoming homeless New Yorkers as neighbors in any form. We recognize that homelessness is fundamentally a housing problem, and our ultimate goal is permanent housing accessible to all, with shelters as an emergency backstop. As we advocate for better services for homeless New Yorkers and work to provide support in our own communities, we also advocate that access to housing should never be conditional: everyone deserves--and benefits from--a stable place to live.
Our power is in doing this work in our own “backyard.” As we push for policy solutions on the city, state, and national levels to meet the needs of our homeless neighbors, we always stay focused on what we can do in our own neighborhoods to create the world we want to see. We know that we are most effective when our advocacy is grounded in real, person-to-person connections with our homeless neighbors, and we know that our voices hold the most weight in our own communities.
Infuse the values of antiracism and desegregation into all activities. New York is one of the most segregated cities in the nation, and Black and Latinx New Yorkers make up 88% of people sleeping in DHS shelters. This did not happen by accident, but rather was the deliberate result of choices by white New Yorkers to exclude others. Thus, in order to reverse the forces that have produced the housing crisis, we must focus on anti-racism. Welcoming homeless New Yorkers as neighbors in all communities requires us to question the narratives, policies, and tactics that created segregation in the first place.
Build relationships that help us support our homeless neighbors, but always hold privileged people accountable, and never put access above our values. Partnerships with non-profit providers and elected officials are a key part of why neighborhood organizing is so critical, and can enable us to do this work sustainably and with long-term impact. At the same time, we must be accountable to the needs of the most vulnerable in our communities, and we must be disruptive when those needs are not being met. We must use our privilege to “call in” our own neighbors and hold elected officials, government agencies, and service providers accountable when they fall short. We learn from others who have been doing this work, and we remember that those closest to the problem have the most expertise.
Give without expectations, in a way that includes as many people as possible. We reject harmful assumptions about “deservingness,” and we give simply because we can. We assume people know their own needs, and we donate and share in a way that gives everyone equal access. For people who need more than what we can offer as neighbors, we facilitate connections to services or other resources. We focus on community building, human connection, and empowerment, not just material donations.