Our Mission

As true today as it was in 1968

Argus Community’s Mission is to provide innovative programs which help severely disadvantaged teens and adults to free themselves from poverty and drug abuse and build new lives based on work, hope, and responsibility.

Argus provides a drug-free, safe and nurturing environment in which persons living on the fringes of society can acquire education and skills and transform maladaptive attitudes and behaviors. We emphasis self-help, personal responsibility, and mutual support. Argus was officially incorporated in the South Bronx in 1968.

We began as a substance abuse treatment provider; in ensuing decades we expanded the scope of our programs to address new challenges raised by homelessness, AIDS/HIV, and welfare reform.

Argus has received both national and international recognition: Argus programs have been replicated in Washington DC, San Francisco, Albany, Des Moines, and Belfast, Northern Ireland. Having created our programs in response to community needs, we will continue to respond to new needs as they arise.

In Celebration 

Mary S. Taylor

On March 1, 2011, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg celebrated Women’s History Month with the launch of “NYC Women: Make it Here, Make it Happen,” a video series produced by the Commission on Women’s Issues in collaboration with Emmy award-winning NYC Media that shines a spotlight on extraordinary women of New York City.

When Mary Taylor arrived in New York City in 1948 with no skills, education or support system, she found herself sleeping in Penn Station. Suffering drug and alcohol addiction, Mary sought to turn her life around.  In 1969, Taylor joined the Argus Community, which provided the South Bronx and East Harlem with programs to assist people with substance abuse issues and then educate them to become Substance Abuse Counselors.  Elizabeth L. Sturz’s organization, Argus Community, Inc. (Argus) has since trained hundreds of women who were on welfare or some other form of public assistance to become economically self-sufficient.  Most of these women were then connected to jobs with benefits and opportunities for advancement.

With her thirty plus year career with Argus, Mary “Spiritt” Taylor devoted her life to building the Argus “community” and help severely disadvantaged teens and adults – with a large number of women’s programs–to free themselves from poverty and drug abuse and build new lives based on responsibility, work, and hope.

Argus is proud to continue the work Elizabeth L. Sturz began, with a drug-free, safe, and nurturing environment in which persons living on the fringes of society can acquire education and skills and transform maladaptive attitudes and behaviors.