Our mission is to enable New York City's homeless men and women to re-enter the workforce and achieve long-term economic self-sufficiency. We serve recovering homeless individuals with multiple barriers to employment, including substance abuse, criminal histories and psychiatric diagnoses. Our approach consists of two programs designed to combat the cycle of homelessness at its roots. Project Comeback is an intensive, four to six month vocational rehabilitation program that incorporates work experience, job-readiness workshops and one-on-one counseling. Upon securing full-time employment, graduates of Project Comeback are encouraged to sign up for Project Stay, our life-long job-retention program. Project Stay provides a permanent safety net for our clients, helping them to maintain and build upon the positive changes they have made in their lives. A.C.E.'s unique strategy has been wildly successful. Since January 2006, 87% of our clients have remained employed for two years or longer.

We also involve the community through our local initiatives, the SoHo and TriBeCa Partnerships. As members of these Partnerships, our neighbors support our clients, who, in turn, clean the streets of SoHo and TriBeCa on a daily basis as part of their vocational training. Our program thus simultaneously serves our clients, keeps these historic areas beautiful, and fosters a sense of community.

On a summer morning in 1992, Henry Buhl was leaving his loft on Greene Street in SoHo when a local homeless man asked him for $20. Instead, Henry offered the man a job sweeping the front of his building and rallied the stores on his block to pay the man to clean their storefronts as well. Within months, the number of recovering homeless clients cleaning the streets had increased exponentially and the SoHo Partnership was born. It was followed five years later by its sister branch, the TriBeCa Partnership. A.C.E. was created as an umbrella organization to oversee both community initiatives.