About Us

Organizational History

NMIC is a community-based, not-for-profit organization founded in 1979 to serve the Washington Heights and Inwood communities. Our mission is to provide resources and support to our community's poorest residents, empowering them to secure economic stability and to be active participants in their community. NMIC’s client-centered programs minimize evictions; improve the most hazardous housing stock; educate and train residents to get better jobs; expand quality childcare by creating family-run businesses, assure clients of entitlements and intervene to bring lasting peace and stability to women and children subject to domestic violence. We are community organizers who assure all our programs give residents a greater voice in the decisions that affect their lives. To accomplish this, we:

Improve physical conditions in the worst buildings in the neighborhood. Our strategies are to:
  • Facilitate tenant takeovers of buildings abandoned by their landlords. Through organizing and providing housing development expertise, NMIC has helped tenants in nineteen buildings take lasting control as owners to put an end to unsafe housing conditions.
  • Prepare Manhattan’s housing stock for the future by collaborating with landlords to provide long-term, environmentally sustainable improvements to housing including new windows, boilers, refrigerators, and other energy efficient measures. Since 1981, our weatherization team has upgraded 385 buildings, providing a total of 12,357 apartments with adequate heat and energy savings.
  • Force the clean up of hazardous lead paint through tenant education and legal action. NMIC's lawyers led a landmark class action suit on lead standards that resulted in passage of Local Law One of 2004, which effectively ended the weak and inadequate responses to unsafe lead conditions that previously dominated city policy. We continue to monitor the City's implementation of this law through our work training tenants and our partnership with the NYC Coalition to End Lead Paint Poisoning.
  • Organize tenants to address Washington Heights and Inwood’s most pressing housing and social issues. The Unión Communal, our tenants’ union, has over 2,200 members, several hundred of which meet regularly.

Support the poorest of Washington Heights and Inwood’s families’ moves to self-sufficiency, particularly by easing the transition of the more than 60,000 Washington Heights and Inwood residents who have left the welfare rolls since 1997. Our strategies are to:

  • Care for children safely. We meet a critical community need for child care and provide independent income by creating self-employed registered family day care providers. The Happy Faces Child Care Network has trained over 200 public assistance recipients and other low-income women now registered as family daycare providers, while simultaneously creating over 540 quality childcare slots and enabling over 400 parents to go to work secure that their children are well cared for.
  • Get people jobs. Provide job readiness, vocational skills training, job placement and post-employment retention supports. Each year we serve over 400 residents annually, resulting in 200 placements with a 70% retention rate.
  • Provide skills local employers seek. Train 100 residents annually for jobs in local industries including building maintenance, construction, customer service, office administration and tax preparation. Trainees receive intensive job development, placement and retention follow-up.
  • Help residents keep their earnings. Maximize use of the Earned Income Tax Credit through free tax preparation services that, in 2005 alone, returned over $5 million to 3,338 low-income workers.
  • Get young people working. Create, through the Jobs Conexión program, two new employment resource centers in the Washington Heights and Inwood community. One will work with out-of-school youth age 17-24 and one will target difficult-to-employ residents in Inwood, the northern part of our community.

Protect the most vulnerable neighborhood residents from the worst elements of poverty. Our strategies are to:

  • Assure the essential needs of shelter, food, and basic income through litigation, entitlements advocacy, and enrollment in food stamps, health insurance, and other benefits. NMIC’s legal department ensured that clients can successfully access these benefits in their far-reaching class action suit, Reynolds vs. Giuliani; meanwhile, our benefits team has assisted over 1000 individuals in accessing public benefits and enrolled 1,380 adults and children in free or low-cost health insurance.
  • Prevent residents from becoming homeless through legal and support services. Last year, we helped 90 formerly homeless families transition to new housing, and helped over 5,000 avoid being evicted through prevention services and housing court representation. Our innovative program to provide eviction prevention services in our local welfare center has been replicated citywide in all centers.
  • Protect survivors of domestic violence from further abuse through crisis intervention, safety planning, legal services, housing assistance and economic support including job training and placement. Since 1999, we have worked with 1,200 women.
  • End chronic lead paint poisoning through our Lead Safe House, a temporary residence where families with children poisoned live while their apartments are being abated. Since it opened in 2003, the Lead Safe House has provided shelter to 67 families.

Increase educational opportunities as the bridge to citizenship and better jobs to the 75% of local residents who speak limited or no English and the 40% of adults over 25 who lack a high school diploma or GED. Our strategies are to:

  • Provide an innovative, culturally appropriate learning center for Spanish-speaking adults and out-of-school youth. Plaza Communitaria’s holistic approach provides an accessible platform for improving literacy and language skills and equips participants to take the next appropriate step in their education.
  • Increase English proficiency and literacy. We provide adult education, family literacy, computer instruction, and Pre-GED classes to 805 adults annually.
  • Promote US citizenship through civics and citizenship classes and legal immigration assistance. Since 2003, we assisted over 600 residents to obtain U.S. citizenship.


Who We Serve

The Washington Heights and Inwood community served by NMIC captures the paradoxical nature of life in New York City. While the neighborhood is rapidly gentrifying, it also contains one of the city's greatest concentrations of poor people. More than 80,000 people and 70% of the children in Washington Heights and Inwood live in poverty – more than any of the other 58 Community Planning Districts in New York City. While the number of public assistance recipients has declined dramatically in recent years, as result of the changes in public policies, we have not seen any corresponding increase in income. In fact, median household income in Washington and Inwood has dropped slightly over the past ten years from $31,962 to $31,633 while rents have skyrocketed. Nearly 75% of neighborhood residents speak little or no English and require an extensive set of targeted services to reach economic stability.

Families live in badly maintained and overcrowded housing stock. Our neighborhood was urbanized in the first part of the 20th century and is seriously overbuilt, with block after block of five and six story buildings, containing on average between twenty and fifty units each. Ninety-nine percent (99%) of the dwelling units are in multiple dwellings, 75% of the buildings were built before 1939 (compared to 50% for the city as a whole), and 89% - 65,000 units – contain lead paint, having been built before 1960, the year New York City banned lead paint in residential units.

Despite the challenges faced by the Washington Heights and Inwood community, Northern Manhattan has great resources in terms of cultural cohesiveness, diverse social, religious, cultural and economic organizations and vibrant commercial centers supported by many small businesses and local entrepreneurs. NMIC works tirelessly to maintain the community’s strengths, while empowering our clients to put an end to weaknesses.