EL PUENTE was founded in 1982 by Luis Garden Acosta as a community/youth development organization focused on ending community violence and promoting democratic action, healing and all human rights. In the spring of 1981, Luis Garden Acosta, as Director of Community Medicine at Greenpoint Hospital, convened a diverse group of church, community and health activists, most of whom had grown up in the same Brooklyn neighborhood where they now worked. Luis challenged them to address an epidemic wave of gang violence in the “Southside” of Williamsburg that had claimed the lives of 48 young people in one year.

The immediate backdrop for this violence was a local, self-serving, self-preserving political and economic structure that gave rise to a period of cascading social plagues. The beginning of the AIDS epidemic and shortly thereafter, the crack explosion as well as a massive upsurge in unemployment, poverty, homelessness and discredited public officials all conspired to paralyze the community’s activist spirit. Perhaps, no better lens exists to understand this period of deterioration than the discredited public school system.

From the outset, Luis and the development team he organized countered the service provider mentality. They resolved to create an institution that would identify, respect and nurture a broader community leadership. That leadership would eventually provide the direction and strategies needed to resolve individual as well as community problems and thereby spark much needed community renewal and advancement. That leadership would also scan for opportunities and resources to make sure that the people of the Southside and of greater North Brooklyn were not forever limited to survival as a standard of living. El Puente’s community vision would not be limited or determined by a social service agenda or any “provider ideology”. Economic strategies, rich cultural and artistic exchanges, intellectual opportunities, and a healthy environment would require leadership from all aspects of the community.

Luis Garden Acosta, with the primary support of Eugenio “Gino” Maldonado, Rev. Steve Lynch, Judi Agostini and Frances Lucerna, set out to rebuild the community through its young people, and by doing so, reach their families and the entire community. El Puente committed itself to working with youth to strengthen their identities as valuable individuals, and identify the skills and talents they can use to transform their community while improving the lives of their families.