Joy.
Power.
Possibility.

The Lower Eastside Girls Club connects young women and gender-expansive throughout New York City to healthy and successful futures through free, innovative year-round programming and mentoring.

Our Mission

Since 1996, the Lower Eastside Girls Club (LESGC) has created a safe space of “Joy, Power, Possibility” where young people can dream big, discover their passions, and connect with peers and careers through free, year-round programming and mentoring. Our Center for Wellbeing & Happiness (CWBH) extends this mission, offering healing-centered wellness services for all ages and genders across the Lower East Side —because thriving communities are built when everyone has the support to flourish.

At our Center for Community facility, we offer after-school, weekend, and summer programming in STEM, Arts, Digital Media, Music, Wellness, Leadership, and College and Career Exploration. Our 35,000 sq. ft facility includes a Maker Shop for robotics; Environmental Studies lab for STEM exploration; Alphabet City Art School for visual arts and crafts; Center for Digital Media; Sound Studio for music production and our radio station/podcast, WGRL (Where Girl Radio Lives); Design Studio for material arts; an expansive and productive rooftop farm; full Culinary Education Center; and 64-seat dome Planetarium.

Our Community

The 1000+ youth, ages 10-23, who participate in Girls Club programming each year reflect the diverse demographics of our community. While many of our members are from the Lower East Side, we serve young people from across the five boroughs through our city-wide initiatives. Among Girls Club members, 39% identify as Black/African American, 33% as Multiracial, 12% as Asian, 11% as White, 4% as Middle Eastern/North African, and 1% as Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander. Ethnically, 42% identify as Latine, 58% as Non-Latine. The Girls Club doesn’t just serve a diverse community—we celebrate it, honor it, and build our programming around the lived realities of navigating life in NYC. This is the foundation of Joy, Power, and Possibility.

Girl Photographs by Erin Yamagata + Cassidy Turner

Center for Wellbeing & Happiness

Where Self-Care Becomes Community Care

Our Center for Wellbeing and Happiness (CWBH), which opened in 2022, expands our mission and reach to offer healing-centered wellness services to all generations and genders on the Lower East Side. CWBH serves as both a hyperlocal community gathering space and a dynamic wellness hub, offering free nutrition classes, fitness programs, creative expression workshops, and support groups, along with a Weekly Food Pantry that serves over 2,000 neighbors monthly.

The Center for Wellbeing & Happiness serves as a culturally rooted institution of the Lower East Side, with 44% of adult members identifying as Latine,  24% identifying as  Black, 10% as  Asian, 10% as White, 8% as Multiracial, 1% American Indian/Alaskan Native,  and 3% Other. On average, 350 adults visit CWBH every month, with hundreds more attending ongoing community events.  40%+ of CWBH members are ages 50+, with seniors (62+) as the single largest age group. This reflects CWBH’s critical role in serving older adults and seniors on the Lower East Side, combating chronic loneliness, providing accessible wellness programs, and addressing food insecurity.

From Girls Club youth to older adults at CWBH, we truly serve every stage of life on the Lower East Side—creating an intergenerational community anchor where cultural continuity, mutual support, and collective wellbeing thrive across generations.

Our Values

Intention, Community, Radical Imagination, Social Justice, Sustainability, Innovation 

We act with Intention. With care and purposeful action, we create space for meaningful discoveries, healing, growth and evolution.

We build in partnership with our Community. We recognize that we need solidarity and collaboration to build a just world.

We embrace Radical Imagination. We facilitate learning as a joyful, playful, and emancipatory act that allows our members to envision a present and future that breaks the boundaries and barriers of the status quo.

We are rooted in Social Justice. We believe a more equitable and just future is possible and commit to both acting upon and embodying the values of anti-racism, gender- and sexuality-based equality, and socioeconomic justice.

We commit to Sustainability and environmental justice for ourselves, our community, our city and our world.

We foster Innovation through dynamic and proactive youth and community programming. We are trailblazers, building new, intergenerational pathways for our members and community to thrive and to create their own transformative change.