Whose priorities are represented in urban plans and projects? Who has a say in the processes that shape the city? The last two decades saw an effervescence and evolution of practices of what we call community planning and engagement. Hester Street, a nonprofit organization that expanded from creative involvement in its Lower East Side neighborhood to providing planning and development assistance and fulfilling public engagement contracts citywide, was both sui generis and vanguard of a nebulous field that spans disciplines and organizations. To many, the announcement of its closure in summer 2024 spelled the end of an era. Hester Street, which had celebrated its twentieth birthday the year prior, had become a New York institution of sorts. But as it struggled with the costs of growth and the indirect impacts of the Covid pandemic, it was unable to establish a more permanent place in the planning landscape. Oscar Perry Abello surveys Hester Street’s unique approach to “people shaping their city,” asking what the city has lost, and what might fill the gap the organization leaves behind.
This story was co-published with Next City, a nonprofit newsroom reporting on solutions for equitable and just cities. Get Next City’s stories in your inbox: nextcity.org/newsletter.
Right where Manhattan’s Chinatown and Lower East Side start fading into each other, the below-grade garden-style storefront that Hester Street Collaborative called home for most of its existence was constantly awash in color. Post-its everywhere. Whiteboards, easel pad paper stuck up on walls, covered in handwritten notes. Giant print-outs summarizing community input for building redesigns or neighborhood rezonings. Artwork made onsite by students from the middle school across the street, who came for workshops or just to hang out.
The people who worked at Hester Street were even more colorful than the space itself. Some were born-and-raised New Yorkers, others came from across the country and beyond. They looked and sounded as diverse as the neighborhoods around them. They were designers and architects, urban planners, data analysts, real estate and finance professionals.
It was a group that the nonprofit’s leadership carefully curated over time. What brought them together was this idea that all of their disciplines — and by extension cities as a whole — suffered when they didn’t listen to and take seriously the ideas, input, and perspectives of historically disenfranchised and marginalized communities.
“We arrived at this same destination through different pathways, but all committed to the vision of New Yorkers shaping their city,” said Cinthia De La Rosa, a former senior project manager at Hester Street. “That was our tagline. As an organization, it’s one of those things that tied the bow. Not once working on a project did I ever feel lost in that mission.”
In some ways, that mission was vague. Hester Street didn’t specialize in any particular type of project or policy area with any specific impact in mind. It developed tools and methodologies to bring voices that were typically left out into a dizzying variety of projects and processes. Supporting students to create temporary or permanent art installations at Sara Roosevelt Park, or local artist installations at the Allen Street Malls and Pier 42 on the Lower East Side waterfront. Engaging communities in a citywide process to address long-standing disparities in cultural spending. Working with residents to shape city-led projects, like redesigning public libraries in Brooklyn or redeveloping the massive Kingsbridge Armory in the Bronx. Helping grassroots organizations acquire property to renovate or build permanent spaces for their work in Corona, Queens or Downtown Brooklyn.
At the same time, Hester Street faced the same constraints and challenges as all nonprofits. Highly motivated by the mission of the organization, Hester Street’s workers often went far above and beyond what its funders were willing or able to pay. The burden of bringing in funding and projects fell largely on the shoulders of executive directors who could only bear that weight for so long. The hustle to get projects done while searching for new opportunities didn’t leave much time or space to reflect on how things might need to work differently as the organization grew from a staff of seven and $700,000-dollar budget in 2015 to around 40 people and more than $5 million in 2022.
In August 2024, Hester Street’s board shocked many by announcing that Hester Street was sunsetting its operations, more than 20 years after the community development luminary was founded by New York architectural practice Leroy Street Studio. “We’ve determined that Hester Street’s financial model has proven unsustainable,” the board said.
Hester Street’s final two years were also marked with internal conflict: The board struggled to find a new executive director to meet the moment, staffers rankled at the new full-time executive director’s management style, board members blamed the new executive director for not providing clear enough financial reports to make better decisions, and the new executive director blamed the board for handing her an unrealistic budget.
I spoke to more than a dozen people, including Hester Street’s founders, former executive directors, former staff, former board members, former partners and former clients, to understand exactly what went wrong. Ultimately, it seems, Hester Street’s financial model was sustainable only as long as the organization could find an executive director who would throw themself into the role in an unsustainable way.
It’s not clear what happens next for the projects in Hester Street’s portfolio at the time of the sunsetting announcement. In any case, now is a moment to understand what exactly the city has lost with the closure of Hester Street, as well as how it came to be what it is, drawing out any lessons for others who might aspire to fill in the gap it’s leaving behind.
“Hester Street brought a track record, experience, a history of doing that work with integrity, with real groundedness, with real professionalism that was welcome in lots of different spaces,” said Sandra Lobo, executive director at the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, which worked with Hester Street on a community-led vision for the Kingsbridge Armory. “They allowed people to engage in a process with confidence that they would be heard, that their input would be taken seriously, not changed to fit an already figured-out outcome. That’s the crux of what we lost.”
Hester Street’s vision of New Yorkers shaping their city was a product of its context.
“So much of the early thinking of Hester Street was really informed by the history of activism in the Lower East Side and Chinatown,” said Anne Frederick, who served from 2002 to 2014 as the founding executive director of Hester Street Collaborative. “There was already this really rich tradition of communities galvanized and organized around land use and decision making, issues that I think informed us and became part of the DNA of the organization.”
Back in 1998, Morgan Hare and Marc Turkel were in the market for a new home for Leroy Street Studio, the architecture firm they’d founded in 1995. A friend owned a former tablecloth factory at 113 Hester Street, which had sat vacant for about ten years. According to Hare, the friend was having trouble renting it out, so the firm was happy to take it off his hands. Though the building was, Hare said, “a mess,” the architects saw potential.
Back at the firm itself, Hare and Turkel had just hired Frederick onto their growing team. Fresh out of the Parsons School of Design, Frederick was impressed by Leroy Street’s work with the East New York Youth Corps. The nonprofit, which already had a portfolio of affordable housing, had acquired a vacant building where it planned to build a community center and new housing for some of its tenants. It brought Leroy Street in as the architect for the project, and East New York Youth Corps’s full-time tenant organizer helped facilitate discussions between the architects and the future tenants of the building to design their new home.
“The future tenants of this building actually existed,” Hare said. “At the time, we didn’t realize how unusual that was for an affordable housing project, but it is very unusual to actually know who your tenants are going to be.”
It was the kind of work that appealed to Frederick as an architect. People who were normally ignored when it came to designing spaces for them actually got to help shape their space. She came to work at Leroy Street Studio in 1998 with every intention to do more projects like that. Instead, she started out on high-end design projects. Frederick pushed Hare and Turkel about wanting to do more of the work she came there to do; in the meantime, she spent nights and weekends on the Lower East Side, helping residents design and build community gardens and outdoor theaters.
Then came 9/11. It ended up being a “big catalyst,” Frederick said. The dust was still settling, literally and emotionally, in Lower Manhattan and across New York. In the summer of 2002, the trio walked across the street from their new studio to M.S. 131. After temporarily closing in the wake of 9/11, the middle school was going to reopen that coming fall. The trio asked the principal how they could support the students, maybe through some public art programming or design education classes.
“Right away she gave us an admonition, a warning that if you’re going to offer up to get involved, lots of people come and go, and it’s almost detrimental to the process,” Turkel said. “If you’re going to do this, she said to us, you need to commit and stay and really be here.”
And stay they did. That conversation flowered into Hester Street’s first program, “Ground Up.” According to Hester Street’s website, from 2002 to 2017, the program supported over a thousand students at M.S. 131 and also the nearby P.S. 134 through design classes and public art projects in the spaces around or near their schools, including an annual lantern installation at Sara Roosevelt Park. Leroy Street converted the ground floor of its storefront into a workshop space for students to make mosaics, sculptures, and screen-printed t-shirts.
“There would be kids who would just show up after school, just really hungry for something different than your traditional, distinct classroom setting,” Frederick said.
It was a small start, but it became an important way to build and maintain relationships with neighbors. Leroy Street officially incorporated Hester Street Collaborative as a nonprofit in 2003. Frederick began splitting her time between the two affiliated organizations, with Hare and Turkel volunteering on Hester Street’s founding board.
By 2004, Frederick was working full-time at the new nonprofit. Branching out into the neighborhood, Frederick encountered base-building groups like Good Old Lower East Side, CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities, University Settlement, Two Bridges Neighborhood Council, and tenant associations in local public housing communities. The Lower East Side helped birth a mass movement of tenants taking over housing from absentee landlords and turning them into income-restricted co-ops across the city. It was also the birthplace of the modern community garden movement. Family associations and family businesses had spent generations building and preserving Chinatown as an affordable immigrant neighborhood.
“I really owe a lot of those early values of the organization to just the relationships in the community,” Frederick said. “Just learning from these long-time organizers and activists who have decades of struggle around land use, and just realizing so often it’s done so poorly and it’s done at the expense of working class communities and working class communities of color in particular.”
As City coffers started filling with post-9/11 reconstruction funds, Hester Street joined the base-building groups to advocate for some of those funds to be spent on public spaces in the neighborhood — underutilized street malls with dangerous crossings and little other than a few benches, a former industrial waterfront inaccessible to the public. Together they arranged community engagement fairs, surveys and focus groups to gather input from the people who had an interest in using these spaces. Hester Street worked with residents, students, and local artists to create temporary installations meant to inspire ideas for how to make better use of them.
Hester Street and the base-building groups formed the OUR Waterfront Coalition in 2007. Under the coalition’s banner, Hester Street facilitated a yearlong community engagement process, conducted in Spanish, Chinese and English. That resulted in “A People’s Plan for the East River Waterfront,” presented as an alternative to NYCEDC’s post-9/11 waterfront plan, which the coalition argued could fuel gentrification and displacement.
One outgrowth of the People’s Plan was Paths to Pier 42, a series of temporary art and design installations that started in 2013, informing and building momentum for the transformation of the derelict space between the East River and the FDR Drive into a new park, for which construction finally broke ground in 2017. The new Pier 42 park finally completed construction and opened to the public in July 2024.
“We started to kind of evolve into these partnerships where we’d work in coalition with base-building groups that represented different facets of the community,” Frederick said. “And then that set the model for other communities who could use this kind of support.”
All along, the base-building groups would steep Frederick and her small crew in that vision of New Yorkers shaping the spaces where they lived, worked, shopped, and played. Hester Street’s focus on its neighborhood became a defining feature of Frederick’s tenure as executive director.
“I just felt this sense [that] we need to give back, we need to focus on this community and build and deepen our relationships with our neighbors here,” Frederick said. “I felt like the place-based nature of the work was really one of our strengths.”
Toward the end of Frederick’s tenure, demand for Hester Street’s services started growing beyond its home in Chinatown and the Lower East Side. It came organically, through Hester Street’s established local networks. CAAAV and Asian Americans for Equality also had close ties through Asian immigrant networks to Chhaya Community Development Corporation, based in Jackson Heights, Queens. That’s how Hester Street Collaborative ended up facilitating a 2013 community visioning process for Chhaya, which wanted to build a new community center to serve the neighborhood’s growing South Asian community.
Chhaya didn’t end up building that center, but the project helped grow Hester Street’s reputation for supporting this kind of work, some of which would later result in actual community facilities for grassroots groups like VOCAL-NY and Make the Road New York.
For better and for worse, maintaining Hester Street’s mission relied on strong, charismatic leadership who could wrangle board members while also attracting staff, partners, and funders who shared its vision.
There were some early moments when Frederick’s co-founders at Leroy Street wondered when the nonprofit might generate meatier design projects where the firm could be involved. Frederick reminded the board that they weren’t there to parachute in with solutions in the form of esthetically pleasing buildings. They were there to listen and put their design expertise behind what their community wanted.
“There was kind of a tension in the early days,” Frederick said. “A lot of those early conversations really set the tone for the values that we were going to embody. We are going to be in service to the community that we’re in and have a meaningful partnership and have our values flow from that. What do the people who live here actually want? What do they actually care about? That’s what we’d lean into.”
During Frederick’s tenure, with her strong commitment to Chinatown and the Lower East Side, Hester Street remained a small team with a modest but growing budget. Over Frederick’s 14-year tenure, Hester Street Collaborative had raised just $3 million, coming from a mix of philanthropy, individual donors, and government contracts or grants. After Frederick’s departure, the 15-member board had a moment to reflect on whether Hester Street should take its model beyond its neighborhood. By bringing in Brooklyn-based community development veteran Betsy MacLean, the board made its decision clear.
In some ways it was a natural passing of the baton. MacLean had come to her own understanding of Hester Street’s vision from a distance, while working in those broader networks of place-based groups in Brooklyn. She’d even tried, unsuccessfully, to partner with Hester Street while she was at Fifth Avenue Committee and Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation.
In a clear departure from Frederick’s vision, MacLean sought to bring Hester Street’s approach to other places across the city, the state, and even the country. She also wanted to bring historically disenfranchised communities into shaping policies and processes like zoning or long-term planning that had long shaped their neighborhoods but without their input. One early example was Hester Street’s work on community engagement around the East Harlem Neighborhood Plan, which informed a rezoning of the neighborhood that came with $222 million in funding for needs identified through community engagement.
“We needed to go big,” MacLean said. “We also needed to think bigger than design alone, we needed to think about all the ways that community members can, and need to, and should be and must be involved in the shaping of the city.”
One of MacLean’s early moves was to bring in a board member who shared that more expansive vision. MacLean and Nisha Baliga first met more than a decade earlier while in graduate school for urban planning. While MacLean went into the world of nonprofit community development, Baliga went into the private sector. Baliga joined the Hester Street board in 2015, but within a year she had taken a massive pay cut to become Hester Street’s director of participatory planning.
“It was still small but it was something with a vision to grow,” Baliga said. “I was compelled by the idea of how to expand the impact by touching more and reaching more places and parts of the system.”
MacLean and Baliga needed to raise the funds to match that vision, and they did. In 2013, Frederick raised $760,877 in revenue — a 62 percent increase from the prior year and the most she had ever raised in one year. Still, by the end of Frederick’s tenure, Hester Street had just six employees and an annual budget of just $562,000. In 2016, Hester Street had its best fundraising year yet, raking in $1.7 million dollars.
In that same year, Hester Street doubled its number of employees, from seven to 14. MacLean, and later Baliga, made it a habit to meet with every new candidate as part of the hiring process, working to bring in a racially and ethnically diverse team.
“You hire extraordinary people who are mission-aligned and, and when you’re interviewing them, you’re unapologetic about exactly what they’re getting themselves into,” MacLean said.
It wasn’t hard for Hester Street to find people of different races, ethnicities, gender identities or sexual orientations who were disillusioned with the state of their various fields — architecture, planning, real estate, and finance. New recruits jumped at the chance to explore new ways of working across all of those fields, often in partnership with base-building groups or other place-based organizations rooted in communities they came from or others like them. Not to mention, Hester Street significantly boosted its healthcare package and added matching contributions for retirement savings.
Hester Street’s rise coincided with — and indeed was fueled by — new political will to address historic inequities across New York City and beyond. A new, more racially diverse City Council and a new mayoral administration were both eager to repair some of the perceived harms of the Bloomberg administration and also meet the challenge of Black Lives Matter.
In July 2015, New York City Council passed legislation mandating the Department of Cultural Affairs to create the city’s first cultural plan. The department put out a request for proposals, seeking a consultant to analyze how the City’s $300 million in cultural spending was serving some neighborhoods better than others and advise the City on how to address those disparities.
It was the kind of project that could have easily gone to a for-profit consultancy. MacLean said a few asked Hester Street if the group would be interested in joining their proposals as a subcontractor to carry out the community engagement component.
“It was like, ‘You go talk to the people and tell us what they think, and here’s $5,000 for your trouble,’ which is ridiculous,” MacLean said. “Why would we do that? When we know we’ll kill it, we know how to do this.”
Hester Street was no stranger to City contracts. Under Frederick’s tenure, the nonprofit regularly earned income from contracts with the Department of Parks or the Department of Youth and Community Development for community engagement work around public spaces or for its Ground Up program — but none of those contracts were ever for more than $5,000. The cultural plan consulting contract’s anticipated budget was $360,000, an amount equal to 52 percent of Hester Street’s entire budget in 2015. Led by Commissioner Tom Finkelpearl at the time, the Department of Cultural Affairs selected Hester Street, taking a chance on a small nonprofit to take a huge step up on the project.
The process ultimately engaged 188,000 New Yorkers, coming from 99 percent of zip codes across all five boroughs. “It was a really big deal for a small organization to win that contract, and we busted our butts to do it in a way that felt authentic to our mission and what we wanted to achieve in terms of community engaged planning,” Baliga said.
It was Hester Street’s first citywide project, and it also heralded the evolution of its business model toward a kind of hybrid: part consulting firm, part nonprofit raising foundation dollars to support its work with partners or clients who weren’t always able to afford the services of a typical consulting firm.
Larger-than-usual contracts for nonprofits started rolling in: hundreds of thousands of dollars to support outreach for the US Census, to do community engagement for the NYC Racial Justice Commission, to facilitate a working group for public housing residents to shape capital improvement programs at three public housing developments in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, and nearly $1 million for equitable stakeholder engagement around state investments in renewable energy and energy efficiency.
Not every client had the kind of dollars that public sources could pay. Nowhere was that more true than in Hester Street’s real estate development practice, which was a top priority for MacLean.
The ethos for Hester Street’s real estate practice went back to that original Leroy Street Studio project that had so impressed Frederick — the future tenants of the building got to help design what it would look like. Having spent a decade in the community development world, MacLean had been part of so many conversations about similar projects that never came to be because of lack of funding or lack of experience in real estate development.
One of those conversations was with Make the Road New York, a grassroots, immigrant-led organization that advocates with and provides a variety of services to immigrant communities across the city, Long Island, and Westchester County. As far back as 2008, MacLean recalls speaking with Make the Road New York’s leadership about acquiring or building a permanent home for the organization.
At Hester Street, MacLean circled back. The need for space had only grown more urgent, as both demand for Make the Road New York’s services and rental costs were increasing. Their collaboration on pre-development and a feasibility study led to the acquisition of a 10,000 square-foot vacant lot in the Corona section of Queens — along the vibrant Roosevelt Avenue corridor and just steps from Corona Plaza, a neighborhood hub for street vendors and culture.
Hester Street helped select an architect and facilitated design workshops with members and staff of Make the Road New York. The project’s total development costs added up to $28.6 million, which Hester Street also helped the group raise — providing key support to navigate the complex underwriting and approval processes for City capital dollars, federal New Markets Tax Credits, and four different Community Development Financial Institutions along the way.
It hasn’t been all hunky-dory. Construction delays, exacerbated by the pandemic, have meant the new facility wasn’t able to open before Hester Street itself closed. But the project still served as a calling card for Hester Street’s real estate development practice.
The real estate consulting work came with some inherent tensions around compensation. Hester Street sometimes found foundation dollars to cover some of the staff time required, but would also charge a fee to the community-based groups that sought this kind of support. Even at a deep discount relative to for-profit consultants, these fees would still be a point of contention for grassroots groups short on resources.
We’ll never know if the real estate development practice could have become a major revenue stream for Hester Street. It would have had to grow much larger and sustained long enough that fees from completed projects would have started coming into the organization’s coffers on a more regular basis. The kinds of real estate projects that Hester Street was interested in taking on were destined to take longer than usual because the grassroots organizations that were its intended clients would always need extra time to cobble together financing.
Between cultivating clients for the real estate development practice or for the consulting work and chasing down foundation dollars, MacLean and Baliga created a high-pressure environment for themselves as leaders.
“This is the challenge of being an executive director,” MacLean said. “All of those balls would kind of be up in the air at the same time. We’re constantly looking for new opportunities, cultivating those relationships. Yeah, it was hard, but anything worth doing is hard and it was really worth it.”
Burnout could have doomed Hester Street much sooner. By 2013, after more than a decade standing up the organization, Frederick was already feeling it.
Taking a sabbatical from Hester Street, Frederick went out to Hawai’i, to the island of Kauai, for a surfing trip, and never came back. She met her eventual husband on that trip, and they settled on a homesteading farm where Frederick took a break from it all for two years. By 2015, she was back in an executive director role, this time at the Hawai’i Alliance for Progressive Action, the job she still holds today.
“It’s not something I took lightly, stepping away from something I’d put so much energy into building,” Frederick said. “I think it’s kind of a setup for burnout, to be honest, the role of an executive director, although I keep finding myself back here.”
The transition wasn’t seamless. With Frederick going on sabbatical starting in 2013, the following year Hester Street’s revenue fell to $341,423 — just over half of Frederick’s record-setting total the previous year. But Frederick had left behind enough of a financial cushion to give MacLean time to settle in and start making it rain.
“I don’t believe in the model of founding executive directors who never leave their organizations,” Frederick said. “There’s certain values I would hope that got carried forward, but in terms of how those are expressed, and different ways of operationalizing them, I think it’s healthy to have new energy and new ideas. I was excited to see the organization grow and take on a whole new life.”
It was as if lightning struck twice. MacLean threw herself into the job, taking Hester Street to new heights, with Baliga playing a key role. As long as MacLean and Baliga kept bringing in the revenue to match their more expansive vision, there was little reason for Hester Street’s board to get in their way.
Some nonprofit boards are heavily involved in fundraising, cutting personal checks or making phone calls to wealthy friends who can cut big checks. Hester Street had long moved away from that kind of model, relying more on its executive directors’ fundraising ability, while board members acted more as a sounding board or set of strategic advisors.
For a while, it worked. According to tax documents, Hester Street took in grants, donations and contract fees totaling $1.8 million in 2017, $2.8 million in 2018, and $3.6 million in 2019. MacLean and Baliga also took care to strengthen the organization’s financial position, amassing enough cash reserves to cover around ten weeks of operating expenses. And just in case, in 2019 Hester Street also established a working capital line of credit from a community bank based in the Bronx.
It worked as long as someone, or a pair of someones, kept all those balls in the air. In 2020, when Hester Street’s board approved Baliga’s promotion to co-executive director, board members viewed it as more than just a recognition of her role working hand in hand with MacLean to shape Hester Street’s growth. It was also a form of succession planning — in case either of them wanted to move on, the other could shoulder the burden.
It caught the board by surprise when, in August 2021, MacLean and Baliga told them that they would both be leaving the organization at the end of the year.
For Baliga, her heart was in the work of the organization, but not necessarily in the work of being an executive director. It was something she only realized over the course of almost two years as co-executive director.
“One of the things about being an executive director is, you’re running an organization and doing mission-driven work, but often, for me as someone who really likes projects, you don’t actually get to do that much about them with all that other stuff,” Baliga said. “While I really loved the work, being an executive director of a nonprofit, I’ll tell you now, I’m never gonna do it.”
Meanwhile, with a new mayoral administration beginning to make plans for transitioning into office, MacLean saw an opportunity to take her career in a new direction.
“I was ready to try a new challenge,” MacLean said. “I’ve always wanted to work in government, to try out this theory that government can do good and do right. There was an opportunity for me to create the first ever Office of Engagement in New York City, and so that seemed like a big, beautiful, excellent next step.”
In addition to the financial cushion they’d built, MacLean and Baliga both believed the team they’d carefully curated over the years had built up the reputation for the organization’s work, a reputation they could leverage even if the co-executive directors moved on. Towards the end of their tenure, some of Hester Street’s most senior staff started taking on some of the burden of fundraising and business development. MacLean and Baliga had decided that when either wanted to leave, they would leave together and allow one or two of these colleagues to step into their shoes.
“It was the mix — the blending of the two of us, the partnership — that created that version of Hester Street, and the next version needed to be created by the new director,” MacLean said. “We also really felt like we had built a pretty deep bench at that point. We had done some real kind of intentional investing in senior leadership, this layer of directors who had been with us.”
After MacLean and Baliga officially stepped down as co-executive directors in December 2021, the Hester Street board of directors set a six-month timeline to make lightning strike a third time. In the meantime, Rasmia Kirmani agreed to step down from her position on Hester Street’s board to serve as interim executive director, with a mandate to keep the trains running and bring in just enough new funding to maintain the organization at the level where it was, financially.
This leadership transition was radically different from Hester Street’s first: The organization now had a citywide track record, a reputation for its work that sometimes brought in more potential projects than it could take on, an organizational budget approaching $5 million, and more than 30 people on the payroll.
The search began in less-than-ideal conditions. The pandemic had exacerbated challenges facing the nonprofit landscape, and the switch to remote work had done irreparable damage to Hester Street’s collaborative team environment and collective vision.
Hester Street formed an executive search committee, including both board members and staff at different levels. The nonprofit also retained a search firm and set off to identify new leadership who would both fit into Hester Street’s unique culture while maintaining a $5 million-plus budget.
Staff did raise questions about whether Hester Street’s growth was sustainable in the long run. Hester Street tapped into one-time, pandemic-related funding sources, as Covid-19 relief packages from Congress doled out record dollar amounts directly to many local governments and agencies. Hester Street took on contracts to help agencies figure out how to get community input on the deployment of those funds.
What was the path forward after the pandemic relief funds dried up? After spending two decades relying on the vision of charismatic executive directors, Hester Street’s board tabled the question for an executive director that they expected to find relatively soon — but didn’t.
“We wanted someone that really matched the culture of Hester Street,” said Tim Johnson, board member and former board chair of Hester Street. “And frankly, we didn’t find anyone that first go-around. So we said, all right, let’s run it back. We took another six months to really find someone that we thought had the kind of complementary skills that could lead the organization forward.”
Another six months of searching, another six months of limited business development without a full-time executive director. It was also another six months of tabling discussions about the long run: boosting the price for Hester Street’s consulting services, right-sizing the organization for a world without a massive wave of pandemic relief. As these topics came up, the board maintained its position that those decisions should ultimately be made in concert with the new executive director.
At the same time, another crisis started brewing in New York. City agencies were already notorious for taking months, even years, to pay nonprofits for services rendered under various contracts. To cope with lags in payments from city agencies, Hester Street had sought out business from a diverse array of city as well as state agencies — the NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development, NYCHA, NYCEDC, Borough President’s Offices, discretionary funding from state or local legislators, and even NYSERDA — the state’s renewable energy agency. But over the past two years, the lags started getting even worse, with payments stuck behind newly established procedures or delayed by understaffing.
“Calling the City and giving them shit every day about why they’re not paying your contract, is not a glamour job that anybody, especially in a mission organization, wants to make their day-to-day,” said Joe Weisbord, the last founding board member at Hester Street.
A prolonged transition after a period of rapid scaling up. A pandemic that heightened burnout among nonprofits, especially nonprofit leadership. A handful of major city agency clients that were struggling to pay up. Hester Street might have survived one or two of these crises, but the three all hit at the same time, bleeding out the financial cushion that MacLean and Baliga left behind.
MacLean and Baliga left behind shoes that nobody seemed interested in stepping into, not even any internal candidates. Ultimately Hester Street’s board was not able to find anyone who combined a strong fit with Hester Street’s unique culture with a desire to fundraise at a level sufficient to maintain the organization’s scale. They finally appointed Eva Neubauer Alligood as full-time executive director in January 2023.
Neubauer Alligood came in with years of experience in the New York community development world. She did not share her predecessors’ belief that all those balls in the air could be kept up. The board handed her a 2023 budget with a fundraising target of $6 million. It seemed like an impossible task to step into a new job and raise that amount from grants or fee-for-service contracts, especially when some of your biggest clients are having trouble paying their bills.
Hester Street had seen the impossible before, growing its revenues six-fold from 2015 to 2021. It’s hard to say definitively, especially given the reputation it had built among communities and government clients, whether Hester Street could have done the impossible again if it tried — or if trying meant it could have at least survived at a smaller scale. But that just didn’t happen.
By July 2024, Neubauer Alligood was out. A month later, with the sunsetting announcement, so was the board.
“If we had just acted a little bit sooner, we could have been much more deliberate about thinking through mergers or a more deliberate kind of downsizing that would not have had the kind of adverse impact on the staff,” said Weisbord. “I think that’s by far my biggest regret, that we weren’t able to do this in a way that was less painful to the affected staff.”
The legacy of Hester Street lives on through the projects it supported, the diverse talent it cultivated, and the standards it has set for what engaging and supporting communities can look like and feel like. One initiative, which had the support of the late Jim Diego, illustrates all three aspects.
A Kansas native who previously worked for the NYC Department of Citywide Administrative Services and the Greater Jamaica Development Corporation, Diego was a prolific long-distance runner, with marathon or half-marathon finishes in all 50 states. He was also known for his singing talent, from staff karaoke performances to gay men’s choirs to being a member of Broadway Barkada, an organization of Filipino performers that supports Filipino art and culture on stage.
Diego joined Hester Street in August 2021. One of his first tasks was replying to an email from community organizer Alexis Smallwood-Foote.
Originally from Harlem, for nearly 20 years Smallwood-Foote has lived in the Edgemere section of the Rockaways. Superstorm Sandy hit the coastal area hard, displacing residents from the only homes left in the city they could still afford. In Sandy’s aftermath, Smallwood-Foote started rebuilding what was left of her community, volunteering with groups like Rockaway Wildfire in-between shifts as a medical assistant at Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital.
In the summer of 2021, the NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development announced the Edgemere CLT Request for Expressions of Interest — an opportunity to work with the department on creating a new community land trust to take ownership of 119 lots in Edgemere and steward their long-term revitalization. The opportunity itself represented years of community groups pushing the department for more support of community land trusts, but there was no guarantee that the department would ultimately select a group with genuine local roots.
Smallwood-Foote was an active participant during the pre-submission conference at the end of July 2021, but she left thinking she couldn’t do it alone. So in August, she sent out a mass email to everyone who attended the event, introducing herself and inviting anyone to join her in putting an application together.
“I said to God, as I put this email out, whoever gets back to me, that’s gonna be my team,” Smallwood-Foote said.
Replies came back from a legal aid group, an architect, an arts organization, and Hester Street. The group started meeting, led by Smallwood-Foote and fellow Rockaway resident and co-conspirator Zahkia Grant. Diego took notes and followed up with the other team members to compile the complex and lengthy application. Smallwood-Foote’s team won, beating out more well-established groups that had had more real estate development experience but weren’t as deeply connected to the community.
“That would have been a real hardship for me or some of my team members to try to put together a 293-page application,” Smallwood-Foote says. “That’s what Hester Street’s part was — they were basically helping communities organize themselves that maybe didn’t have a lot of staff. They were able to come in and be a supplement to them.”
During one of those many conversations with Smallwood-Foote’s team, it was Diego himself who came up with their name — ReAL Edgemere Community Land Trust, the “ReAL” acronym standing for “residents acquiring land.”
Diego tragically passed away, suddenly and unexpectedly, in December 2022. In his memory, Hester Street established a ten-week fellowship for urban planning and design graduate students. The second Jim Diego fellow was wrapping up her time just as Hester Street announced its sunsetting.
ReAL Edgemere Community Land Trust continues to plug away, going through the process now to select developer partners while also putting an application together to fund a mixed-use housing, retail and recreational project for the commercial portion of the 119 lots.
“Jim Diego helped us in ways he couldn’t even have understood, and his work is just absolutely living on,” Smallwood-Foote said. “And that’s legacy, right? Legacy.”
