Eleven staff, about forty volunteers, and a former bank.

The building on Bleecker Street was a bank until 1994. The vault is a storeroom, the teller counter is the front desk, and the green terrazzo strip in the lobby floor is the reason for the colour on this page.

Most evenings there are Karen, Somali, Bosnian and Spanish speakers in the building at the same time. About forty volunteers teach, sit in on assessments, and mind the childcare rooms, and eleven of us are paid.

Why there is no application form.

Because an application form is a filter, and the people it filters out are the ones who most need a class. You come on a Tuesday, you sit with somebody for twenty minutes, and you are placed the same afternoon. We ask for a name, a phone number and a date of birth. We do not ask about immigration status, we do not record it, and there is nothing on our system for anybody to request.

What we will not tell you.

That we will find you a job. The nursing assistant course ends in a state credential that employers here hire on, and we know which nursing homes have rung us looking for people. That is not the same thing as placing anybody, and blurring the two is how a certain kind of school sells a certain kind of loan.

We also do not put our funders on this site. Not out of secrecy — the filings are public — but because getting a name or a year wrong on somebody else’s money is a worse mistake than saying nothing.

No photographs of students, anywhere.

Some of the people in this building have live asylum cases. A face on a website is a real risk to them and there is no version of a nicer-looking homepage that is worth it. Where a photograph would normally go, this site has a date instead.