Who We Are - Youth Action YouthBuild YAYB

Our History

In 1978, Dorothy Stoneman, current president of Opportunity Youth United and our founder, asked neighborhood teens in East Harlem how they would like to improve their community. They answered, “We’d rebuild the houses. We’d take empty buildings back from the drug dealers and eliminate crime.”

And so, they did. Those young people went on to complete the gut rehabilitation of an abandoned 4-story tenement building, which today serves as low income apartments and the site of our administrative offices and program space today.

They saw a problem and acted!

This was the genesis of the YouthBuild program, which later expanded its program offerings and became a non-profit organization incorporated as Youth Action Programs and Homes, Inc., in 1984, but today is better known as Youth Action YouthBuild. YAYB for short.

Following the first building rehabilitation project completed by young people in East Harlem, the YouthBuild program was replicated in five more New York City communities, and began an ongoing dissemination of its program model. In 1990, YouthBuild USA was founded to scale-up YouthBuild as a proven social innovation to widely break the cycle of poverty.

Two years later, the program was replicated nationally, starting up in 20 additional cities. There are now 260 US-based YouthBuild programs in 48 states, Washington, DC, and the Virgin Islands, engaging nearly 10,000 YouthBuild students each year, as well as international programs located in 15 countries, including South Africa, Mexico, and Haiti. Since 1994, YouthBuild students across the US have produced 28,000 units of affordable, increasingly green, housing.

As the YouthBuild movement has expanded from its birthplace in East Harlem, YAYB, the organization that started it all, has continued to serve the local community and has itself expanded to serve opportunity youth from all over New York City and the greater metropolitan area. The vision of the agency continues to grow and evolve to best serve the needs of the community, yet maintains the core values of affirming and educating young people, and cultivating in them the tools to self-empowerment. We are all one community, with many voices. Won’t you add yours to theirs?