Teaching Brooklyn youth of today the time-honored skills of yesterday.

About Us

At Thompson Drive, teens can begin to move forward from any traumas of the past, avoid the distractions of the present, and prepare for the rigors of future adult life. Thompson Drive provides teens with mentors, tutors, and holistic programming to ensure they stay on track in school and learn the skills necessary to have healthy social and emotional interactions with their peers, teachers, and neighbors.

These are the time-honored skills of yesterday. In the 1980s and the decades preceding, communities had streets and blocks for kids to gather, play, and hang out on, all under the watchful eyes of caring neighbors. The neighbors often steered the kids away from trouble. Everyone looked out for one another, and children learned safely how to negotiate the world beyond their homes. Thompson Drive is named after just such a place, the very street in New York where Founder and Executive Director Bobby Ferazi grew up. Sadly, for many of today’s youth, all too often streets and blocks take the opposite role, becoming sources of negativity that can sideline growth and development.

Such is the situation in parts of Coney Island, Brooklyn’s iconic playground, where Thompson Drive is located. Summertime revelers are largely unaware of the neighborhood’s sobering statistics: one in six Coney Island adults lacks a high school diploma, and the neighborhood is in the city’s top twenty for juvenile incarceration. Thompson Drive seeks to reverse such trends and to fill in the gaps left by underfunded schools, overstretched families, and sometimes unfriendly streets.

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