Community & Data
Non-Profits & Community
When a family in Boston is about to lose an apartment, the first phone call is almost never to a city department. It is to a non-profit. These organizations are infrastructure rather than charity: they keep people housed, fed, employed and out of court, and several of them will pick up the phone for a seventeen year old with the same seriousness they bring to anyone else.
Who to call, and for what
| Metro Housing Boston | Housing. Eviction prevention and rental assistance, and the place to call before the situation becomes a court date. 1411 Tremont Street. 617-859-0400. |
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| Boys and Girls Clubs of Boston | Young people. Neighborhood clubhouses across the city with after-school programs, education and recreation. 617-994-4700. |
| Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance | Homeownership. First-time and first-generation homebuyer education and financial coaching, plus organizing. 1803 Dorchester Avenue. 617-822-9100. |
| Ethos | Older and disabled residents in southwest Boston. If a grandparent needs help staying in their home, this is the number. 555 Amory Street, Jamaica Plain. 617-522-6700. |
| Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce | Business and workforce. Runs programs connecting young people to employers. 265 Franklin Street. 617-227-4500. |
The press is civic infrastructure too
A non-profit can help one family, while a newspaper can change what an entire city knows, and a city that gets watched is a city that behaves better. Almost everything on this website that is uncomfortable, the councillor who took a cash kickback, the election department the state had to seize, the 1,700 phone calls that went unanswered, reached you because reporters went out and found it.
The Boston Globe is the city’s daily paper of record. If you have a story, a document, or a thing that is happening in your school that nobody is talking about, journalists genuinely want to hear from you.
- The Boston Globe. 1 Exchange Place. Newsroom tips: newstip@globe.com. 617-929-2000.
- The Bay State Banner has covered Black Boston since 1965, and the Dorchester Reporter covers the city’s largest neighborhood in a detail no citywide paper attempts. Both are working newsrooms, both are easy to find online, and both publish their current contact details there.
How a teenager actually gets involved
- Volunteering is a door. Most of these organizations need people, and the ones that work with young people will take a fifteen year old seriously. Ask what they need rather than what you can offer.
- Get paid for it if you can. SuccessLink, the city’s own youth jobs program, hired more than 10,500 young people last summer and pays real wages. Many placements are with exactly these kinds of organizations.
- Bring them your problem. If your family is facing eviction, if a relative needs care, if you need a job, pick up the phone. That is precisely what the numbers above are for.
- Tell a reporter. If something is going wrong at your school and no adult will fix it, that is a story, and you are a primary source.
These organizations are infrastructure, and they hire. SuccessLink placed more than 10,500 young people in paid work last summer at fifteen dollars an hour, and a great many of those jobs were at exactly these kinds of organizations.
Photo: Lëa-Kim Châteauneuf, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.