Greater Life
Located across the street from Weequahic High School in Newark’s South Ward, Greater Life’s Community Outreach Center provides a lifeline for a community in need. The neighborhoods and clients Greater Life serves face extraordinary challenges including low income, widespread chronic diseases, limited access to services, multi-generational traumas and mental health challenges. Since 1986, Greater Life – led by the husband-and-wife team of Michael and Maria Westbrook – have been working compassionately to help members of their community face each of their own unique challenges in life.
The Healthcare Foundation of NJ provided a $75,000 grant in 2023 and a $100,000 grant in 2024 to support the life-changing work of Greater Life. Both grants received matching funds through a Greater Life donor, thus doubling their impact.
When neighborhood residents come to Greater Life’s Family Resource Center, they find a caring staff dedicated to helping them discover and address their family’s unmet needs, and link them to crucial resources to provide for medical needs, emotional/mental support, food insecurity, shelter and clothing, and access to educational resources.
During the first year of HFNJ’s funding project, case managers addressed the needs of an average of 9.5 families each month. 576 unduplicated clients participated in the weekly free food program during the project period, during which a total of 44,204 pounds of food and 93 supermarket vouchers were distributed. Two on-site Community Resource Event Days were held to connect community members to resources.
The need in the community for Greater Life’s services – particularly the food program – is growing sharply, and Greater Life witnessed an almost doubling of the number of clients typically served by the food program in 2023. Many of the new clients are newly-arrived, undocumented individuals and families. While the neighbors and the neighborhood may continue to change, what has not changed is the compassionate, humanistic, person-centered approach taken to bettering their community by the Westbrooks and the staff of Greater Life.