Service Learning

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Neighborhood Education And Training Program or The NEAT Program is our ‘Green’ partnership with: NYC community residents, NY Courts, The District Attorney’s Offices for each of the 5 boroughs and local colleges.

NEAT is designed to address both the causes and effects of low level, quality of life offenses. When low level offenders are arrested and assigned community service, NEAT accepts those offenders (from the DA’s offices) and allows them to satisfy their obligations to their sentence (with us) by working in communities around the city doing things like: cleaning up the streets, painting over graffiti, cleaning up vacant lots, cleaning up city parks, and volunteering with churches and other nonprofit organizations.    

NEAT has three principal components:

• Accountability: Connecting crimes to consequences and ensuring high compliance rates
• Visibility & Transparency: Showing New Yorkers that the justice system is responding to neighborhood concerns.
• Education & Empowerment: Using all available resources to train community residents and students on the effects and management of public disorder; and empowering offenders with alternatives to crime.  

The goal of the NEAT program is to address low level public disarray by partnering with city and community based organizations to target, address and control that disorder by educating community residents on efficient and effective aftercare.

NEAT empowers neighborhoods not only by addressing conditions of public disarray, but also by allowing community residents to actively participate in certain cleanup projects and by training them on effective and efficient ways to maintain that cleanliness upon project completion. NEAT supports and empowers youth by accepting interns from local colleges and allowing them to work with staffs on day-to-day projects.