The Tree of Life Center on 164th Street in Jamaica, Queens, New York, is nearing completion. To an outsider, it may look like any other building going up in Jamaica Center. But the partnership that has made it a reality sees it as a key community-building resource for the neighborhood, a public square echoing with the sound of community voices in a setting that truly serves the needs of its residents.

“We went out and had 1,200 conversations in the local community about what’s important, what’s needed in this neighborhood,” said Rev. Patrick O’Connor of the First Presbyterian Church. O’Connor serves as board chair for the First Jamaica Community and Urban Development Corp., which is building the center a developer, The Bluestone Organization. 
“Health, nutrition, training and housing were what the community told us was important.” O’Connor stressed.

Those needs spurred the idea of the Tree of Life Center, a mixed-use, energy-efficient building that could offer affordable housing and multiple other resources in one place . Cornell University Cooperative Extension–New York City (CUCE-NYC) and the NYC Community Healthcare Network came on board early as partners in the center because both organizations offer some of the services identified as priorities. CUCE-NYC has been working with the church since the early 2000s with an on-site office that houses a team of Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program (EFNEP) community educators serving Queens and Brooklyn.

“Our programs already had intensive reach in Jamaica,” said Jennifer Tiffany, executive director of CUCE-NYC, speaking about the formation of the partnership during a presentation at the 2022 National Urban Extension Conference in May. “The partnership offers a unique opportunity to break down programmatic silos and to create innovative ways to collaborate.”

“The concept of the Tree of Life is that we respect the people who are there,” O’Connor said. “We just asked the partners to think about serving people comprehensively.”

That comprehensive service and that ethic of respect were on full display at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. New York state had reached out to the NYC Community Healthcare Network about having a testing center in Jamaica.

“We told them about the partnership, and they said that maybe they can do something with that partnership,” said Harvey Diaz, manager of the Community Healthcare Network’s Youth Access Program.

The result was a testing site housed in a $100,000 state-of-the-art tent, which transitioned to a vaccine distribution location in February 2021. Building on the partnership’s connections with Weill Cornell Medicine, students from Weill volunteered to administer vaccines.

“If you talk to people, not just in New York City, but across New York state and across the country, and in many other countries, the partnership between medical care and faith-based, community-based organizations makes access happen,” said Tiffany.

“Queens County became the most vaccinated county in New York City, and it happened because of this partnership,” O’Connor said. “Remember, Queens was where everybody died at the beginning, so to be able to get people to do something positive for themselves is one of the gratifying things that happened with this partnership.”

The partnership will shift into high gear beginning this summer when residents move into the 174 apartments located in the Tree of Life Center. The Community Health Network is on the verge of opening its federally qualified health center in the heart of the Tree of Life Center building, while CUCE-NYC’s office in the adjacent Citibank building is already fully integrated into the center.

“The kind of vision that Cornell brings to the work is ecological,” Tiffany said. “We stay attuned to the way our social world can either help us to thrive or can stifle thriving and human possibilities. We have to be intentional about helping our communities thrive and building up the Tree of Life Center as a village in which people can thrive.”