Gifted Hands
Charity type: 
Homelessness
Charity Number: 20 053 2170
http://www.giftedhandsnyc.com/
Gifted Hands is a community of volunteers who have a passion to help improve the lives of their neighbors in New York City, neighbors who face challenges, often difficult ones, in having and sustaining a meaningful quality of life.
The mission of Gifted Hands is to provide marginalized and broken people in New York City the opportunity to participate in a therapeutic and recreational art programs that contribute to their physical and emotional well-being.
Through art, Gifted Hands seeks to help individuals recognize that, in the same manner we learn to design and create something beautiful, our lives and our outlook can take on an inner beauty even in the midst of life's most challenging circumstances.
Gifted Hands has been serving the NYC area for over 15 years and more than 60 programs have been established in senior centers, homeless shelters, foster care facilities, and HIV/AIDS residences. At any given time over 200 volunteers are serving and loving individuals and families who have lost hope and often have lost the ability to cope with their immediate surroundings. Through the simplicity of art and the added ingredients of friendship and acceptance, these volunteers bring renewed focus, new levels of self-esteem, and hope for the future to countless people living in the margins of society.
One of the goals of Gifted Hands is to develop an unfinished raw available space in New York City to create a Community Arts Center for youth at risk, homeless and needy, abused women and children, and lower income families that do not have the resources or finances for the arts.
We would like to have a fully staffed and renovated space open 5 days a week, to offer multiple art programs to the under served. Programs such as dance, photography, music, singing, art and design, acting and theater workshops. This would also function as a training center to teach other agencies and New Yorkers how to give back to their communities.
