Our history coincides with the introduction of Community Housing Development Organizations (CHDOs) in the 1992 National Housing Act. In early 1993, Nassau County's Office of Housing and Inter-governmental Affairs funded New Directions and Hofstra University's School of Continuing Education to provide five county neighborhood groups with training to create CHDOs.

In 1995/1996, the City of Long Beach's Community Development Agency funded us to bring the New York Institute of Technology's (NYIT) School of Architecture and its fourth year class of 45 students to work with one of the new CHDOs. The Martin Luther King Center and Long Beach High School students participated in a design competition in response to local concerns voiced in grassroots meetings facilitated by New Directions. This competition produced over 20 design possibilities for the low and moderate income neighborhood of North Park in the City of Long Beach. Shortly afterwards, Senator Alphonse D'Amato's office announced the planned immediate removal of an old incinerator located in this neighborhood.

New Directions next helped the School of Architecture at NYIT form a Center for Neighborhood and Regional Planning (1997). This collaboration produced a review of 20 years of master planning for the Bay Shore/Brightwaters School District community. In 1998, Citibank funded New Directions to design, organize and facilitate a community dialogue, called Circles of Hope, on the subject of neighborhood housing, for the Bay Shore/Brightwaters School District Summit Council. Shortly afterwards, the Long Island Housing Partnership announced its plans to produce an urban subdivision called South Wind Village just north of the railroad station in Bay Shore.

In 1999/2000, Citibank funded us again to organize a two-year grassroots community improvement study for the Lowell Avenue Civic Association (LACA) in Central Islip. Findings, obtained with the help of faculty and students from NYIT School of Architecture and Stony Brook University's Sociology Department, are reported in Lowell Avenue Neighborhood Profile (1999). By July, 2001, we published Claiming a Seat at the Table, which describes how this study convinced the Town of Islip Planning Department to increase the rate of capital improvements in the neighborhood.

During the Spring and Summer of 2000, New Directions worked with the Mt. Sinai Civic Association on a project funded by Assemblyman Englebright. NYIT student architects listened intently to a focus group facilitated by New Directions and responded with an exciting park design for a 17-acre parcel in their community. In addition, we incorporated a CLT for them to hold land for a community center, the Mount Sinai Heritage Trust, in 2000, the first CLT organized on Long Island.

In the Fall of 2000, New Directions, presented an innovative grassroots community-building process to the North Bellport Weed and Seed task force in the South Country Central School District (SCCSD) in the Town of Brookhaven. A local Oversight and Stewardship Committee made up of the Bellport Hagerman East Patchogue Alliance, St. Joseph the Worker Parish Outreach, the Bellport Foundation, and the Victory Church of God, groups that had experienced sharp disagreements in the past, came together for several months to work on a Learn By Doing program. Learn By Doing acted as a focus group to describe a design program for the North Bellport neighborhood. In December 2002, the Bellport Station report outlined this process and presented a new downtown Town Center design, for the intersection of Montauk Highway and Station Road, produced by the NYIT Architectural team in response to the needs highlighted by the Oversight and Stewardship Committee.

In the Fall of 2002, New Directions secured a partnership with SCCSD that enlarged the work to the entire school district community of 16 square miles, with 26,000 inhabitants. Together, we formed a learning community to combine adult education with college level service learning. This new effort, entitled Discover South Country, operated from early 2003 through the Spring of 2005. It produced (1) a self study by over 50 residents sponsored by the SCCSD and the Town of Brookhaven called the South Country Hamlet Study; (2) a pilot community circles dialogue program; and (3) a South Country Community Land Trust, formed to help address the local housing needs identified in the self study. In addition, New Directions connected the school district's innovative Family Support Center (FSC) to the educational and social work programs at Stony Brook. The FSC identifies needs of children and families and arranges to provide services in one convenient location.

The goal of New Directions' Discover Your Community program is to increase community resourcefulness by establishing ventures such as community land trusts and family support centers. Public support for these institutional breakthroughs grows out of the community self study and the community dialogues