An item in this morning’s Daily News says that the four New York schools participating in the Experience Corps program will likely lose city funding to renew it this year.  The program places people over age 55 in schools to tutor children with reading. Apparently private money has been hard to get as well, so the New York schools will probably lose their tutors soon. According to the Daily News article,...

Leah Todd of SafeWalk is ready to walk you home. Photo: J. Flood If you feel sketchy walking home in Brooklyn late at night and you don’t want to spring for a cab, there’s someone you can call. Starting in May, SafeWalk, a burgeoning volunteer program, will see people home on Friday nights from 11 p.m. to 2 a.m., serving Greenpoint, Williamsburg, Bed-Stuy, Bushwick, Clinton Hill and Fort Greene. At...

Books Through Bars volunteers Jess Ross and Natsumi Paxton at work on a recent Sunday. In a tiny basement room on 4th Ave in Brooklyn, bibliophiles gather to sort and package books to send to prisons all over the country. This is the home of Books Through Bars, a non-profit, volunteer-run organization designed to provide books that incarcerated people can’t get in their limited or nonexistent libraries. Jess...

If you ride a bicycle in the city but can’t afford to bring it to a bike shop for expensive repairs, you’re in luck. Time’s Up! will teach you how to fix your bike yourself. Mechanic Dustin Wade works on a bike at Time's Up!'s Brooklyn space. On March 1 the volunteer-run environmental action group opened a new space at 99 South Sixth St. in Williamsburg. Time’s Up! offers workshops...

Jeri Barksdale with one of her foster grandchildren at Duffield Children's Center Photo: Jim Flood On Friday Jim and I paid a visit to what may be the oldest human services non-profit in the borough: The Brooklyn Bureau of Community Service. It’s been around since 1866, as a response to the devastation of the Civil War. These days, the BBCS assists over 13,000 people per year with the help of over...

Click here for slideshow I walk down Metropolitan Avenue in Williamsburg frequently, but I’d never ducked into the City Reliquary Museum until last week - something about the window display with pulleys and ropes just sucked me in. When Lulu, the fabulous woman working at the desk, told me what the Museum is all about, I wondered where I’ve BEEN this whole time. Last night, the Museum had a fundraiser...