Lantern Community Services

As one of the largest providers of supportive youth housing in New York City, Lantern Community Services helps its community with the idea that stable housing is the first step towards a better life. Lantern supports over 2,000 low-income, currently homeless, and formerly homeless individuals annually, including youth, families, veterans, people living with HIV, and people living with mental illness, in 17 buildings across the five boroughs, with one more on the way.

Lantern prides itself on being engaged and present, creating and maintaining safe living and helping its tenants to become leaders.

“The hope is that housing will provide stability for people to make individual choices about what they want for their lives, whereas on the street, it’s moment to moment,” said Carol Lemus, Vice President of Program Development at Lantern.

Funding from Brooklyn Org is helping Lantern to expand its Harm Reduction program in supportive housing,  with specialists working closely with the tenants in the building to teach them how to use products like Narcan to prevent overdoses.

Additionally, Lantern is using our support to compensate members of its Tenant Advisory Board, which is comprised of people who have lived with or had familial experience with substance abuse and who meet monthly to discuss improvements to the Harm Reduction program. Through this work, they are paid through support from Brooklyn Org since they are also trained to be first responders to themselves and their neighbors.

“Our Tenant Advisory board is focused on improving our harm reduction throughout agencies… This is really important to us to have the voices of people who the programs are meant for, involved in the creation of the policies and programs,” said Sharayah Hoffman, the assistant director of Harm Reduction.

To continue providing stability to individuals who are currently homeless or formerly homeless, Lantern envisions a future where their Harm Reduction program is standard across all programs and the tenants have more and more control.

While further discussing the organization’s future, Lemus said, “I’d like to have also a trained group of peers who are there, 24/7, who can provide support around harm reduction in the building and be there to conduct outreach and continue to educate the tenants there.”

Although they already have tenants that do this work, one of Hoffman’s goals is to have their tenants need them less and less daily, a vision that inspires us all to work towards a more empowered and self-sufficient community.