Fridays · 4–8 PMAges 11–17Food & drink $10
Friday nights, somewhere they actually want to be.
Free. Four hours. Board games, dinner, and a room full of people who will know their name by the end of it. Built to be a night they want to come back to, and one you feel good about either way.
Friday, September 11 · 4:00 – 8:00 PM · 6 Arc Place, Staten Island
- Cost
- Free
- To sign up
- No account needed
- Next step
- RSVP: nothing to pay, just tell us you are coming
- If cost is the problem
- Ask us, there is a scholarship fund How it works
Why this exists
Their world is getting bigger. You do not get to pick all of it.
Somewhere between eleven and fourteen, home stops being the only voice. So does school. In come friends, group chats, whoever is funny on a screen, an older cousin, a teammate, a stranger with an opinion and an algorithm behind it.
That is not a crisis. It is what growing up is. Every generation has done it.
The question was never whether other people would shape your child. It is who gets a seat at that table, and whether anyone put a chair there on purpose.
The missing place
Home. School. The masjid. And then the rest of the week.
Three of those are covered. The hours in between, the ones a young person actually chooses what to do with, mostly are not.
Home
Where they are loved, and where the values start.
School
Where the days are structured and most of the hours go.
The masjid
Where the deen is taught, and where they are one of many.
NEXGEN
Where they choose to be. Friends, mentors, responsibility, and room to work themselves out.
Friday Nights is the simplest version of that fourth place. One evening a week, the same room, the same faces, on purpose.
What it feels like
Doors open at four. By ten past, nobody is standing alone.
A bag goes down by the wall and a game is already running on the far table.
Someone shouts a name across the room. That is the whole welcome, and it is enough.
A mentor loses at UNO, loudly, to a thirteen-year-old.
Dinner, and the noise level triples.
Maghrib is called. The game pauses mid-hand. Then it does not.
Eight o’clock. Half of them are still arguing about the rematch on the way out.
The part that looks like nothing
Most of the night is unstructured. That is the design, not the gap in it.
It is a fair thing to be sceptical about. Four hours, and only twenty-five minutes of it is the actual programme. It can look like we are running a games room and calling it youth work.
Here is the reasoning. You cannot schedule a relationship. A young person does not open up because it is 6:45 and the topic is identity: they open up because the person asking spent the previous two hours losing at ping pong to them, and is not a stranger.
The circle works because of everything that happened before the circle. Take away the free time and you are left with a lecture delivered to people who have no reason to trust the person giving it.
So the unstructured hours are doing the work: friendships forming, arguments getting resolved without an adult stepping in, a new kid getting pulled into a game, someone finding out that the mentor in the corner is worth talking to. None of it looks like a programme. All of it is the point.
What we are actually going for
Five things a room like this can do that a lecture cannot.
Written as what the environment is designed to encourage. Nobody can promise you a child’s character, and anyone who does is selling something.
Belong
Find your people.
Friendships with other young Muslims who are working out the same things at the same time, without having to explain the background first.
Talk
Say the thing out loud.
Faith, school, friendships, identity, pressure, ambition, the internet, the mistakes. Twenty-five minutes a week where those are the actual subject.
Trust
Someone a few steps ahead.
An adult who is not your parent and not your teacher, who remembers being your age, and who is still here next Friday.
Grow
Get better at being a person.
Losing a game well. Including the new kid. Carrying the chairs without being asked. Character is built in ordinary moments, not lectures about character.
Lead
Become the one who welcomes.
The young person who was nervous at the door in year one is the one running the tournament in year three. That is the whole design.
None of these happen in one Friday. They happen because it is the same room and the same people, week after week, for years.
Start with one FridayThe mentors
Someone a few steps ahead.
There are things a young person will not bring to a parent, and things they will not bring to a scholar or a teacher either. Not because those relationships are failing, because of what those relationships are.
Our mentors are Stewards: NEXGEN’s 18–29s. They are close enough to remember exactly what fifteen felt like: the group chat, the double life, the question about deen they were too embarrassed to ask out loud, and far enough ahead to have a useful answer.
They are not a substitute for you, and they are not a substitute for your imam. They are the person your child talks to on the walk to the car, about the thing they were not going to mention.
Every one of them is background-checked before they have unsupervised contact with a young person, one-to-one time happens where another adult can see the room, and contact between sessions runs through NEXGEN channels with a parent copied, never a personal phone or a private DM.
Deen
Maghrib is called. The game pauses. Then it starts again.
Nobody gets a lecture on Friday night. There is no halaqah disguised as a hangout and no adult keeping score of who prayed.
What there is: twenty young people who stop what they are doing, pray together because that is what you do, and go back to the game. Ordinary. Unremarkable. Which is exactly the lesson.
Faith here is not a separate activity. It is the texture of a normal evening: in how people speak to each other, who gets included, who helps stack the chairs.
Friends are not required to be Muslim to come. Character is the standard, not gatekeeping.
The long game
From being welcomed to being the one who welcomes.
Friday Nights is not a programme a young person ages out of and leaves. It is the first step of a loop that ends with them running it.
- Tweens11–13
Find your people.
Walk in not knowing anyone. Walk out with two names and a rematch to settle.
- Teens14–17
Find your voice.
Start saying the harder things out loud: in the circle, or in the car park afterwards to a mentor.
- Stewards18–29
Come back and run it.
Paid and volunteer leadership: mentoring the room you grew up in, for the kid who is standing at the door the way you once were.
The mentor who greets your eleven-year-old at the door this Friday was, not that many years ago, an eleven-year-old at that door. That is not a nice story. It is the mechanism.
Hour by hour
What a Friday night actually looks like.
It is mostly free time, on purpose. Four hours to play, eat and talk with the same people. One mentor-led talk in the middle. The rest is theirs.
4:00 PMDoors open
Check in at the front desk, drop the bag, and the room is theirs. Games are already out. Nothing to sign up for.
5:00 PMTweens and teens split
Each age group moves to its own room with its own mentors. Same idea, different room. An 11-year-old should not spend Friday in a room built for 17-year-olds.
6:00 PMDinner together
Everyone back in the main space to eat. Hot food, $10 for food and drink, less on a plan. Coming to Friday Nights costs nothing; eating is the part that does.
6:45 PMThe circle
Twenty-five minutes. Phones down. One topic, mentor-led, in small groups. It is a conversation, not a lecture. It is why the rest works.
7:15 PMBack to free play
Tables reset and the room opens up again. Whatever tournament has been building usually gets finished here.
7:50 PMWrap and pickup
Announcements, next week’s plan, back to the front desk. Doors close at 8. A mentor stays until the last kid is collected.
Good to know
- Board games, cards and table games are out all night. Bring a favourite from home if you like.
- The podcast room and studios are NOT part of Friday Nights. Book those through Studios.
- We pray Maghrib together whenever it falls. In winter it lands mid-night and everything moves around it.
- Dinner is included. No cash needed on the night.
- Check-in and pickup both happen at the front desk. So there is a record of who collected whom.
- Tweens and teens are supervised by their own mentors. They are not pooled into one room.
- Come late or leave early if you must. But the 6:45 circle is the piece worth being here for.
Trust
You drop them off. We take that seriously.
Not a values statement, the specific things that are true about a Friday night in this building.
Every adult is checked, to the state standard
The same three-part screening New York requires of licensed child-care staff: Statewide Central Register, fingerprint-based state and federal criminal history, and the national sex-offender registry. Volunteers on the same basis as paid staff.
Check-in and pickup happen at the desk
Both are recorded, so there is a record of who arrived and who collected them. You name who is allowed to collect your child, and you can revoke it at any time.
Two rooms, separately staffed
At least one adult per fifteen for ages ten and over, the ratio New York sets for registered school-age child care. NEXGEN is a youth programme, not a licensed centre, so we adopt that number voluntarily. The tween and teen rooms are staffed separately rather than pooled.
Someone qualified is on the floor
At least one member of staff holding current paediatric first aid and CPR whenever programming runs. Any injury is written up and a parent contacted the same day, not at pickup.
Screening, ratios, one-to-one rules, medication, cameras, and how to raise a concern, all of it written down.
Read the safety policyStraight answers
What Friday Nights is not.
Not another class
No curriculum, no homework, no register of who got the answer right.
Not a four-hour lecture
One conversation, twenty-five minutes, in small groups. The rest of the night belongs to them.
Not babysitting
The room is designed, the adults are trained, and the night is built to do something specific.
Not a free-for-all
There is structure, supervision, separate age groups and someone accountable for every young person in the building.
Not a replacement for you
Or for the masjid. Friday Nights fills the hours neither one was ever meant to cover.
If you are the one being sent
Nobody is going to lecture you.
It is a room with games in it, food at six, and people your age who are not going to ask you to explain why you do not eat that or why you left early on Friday.
You do not have to talk. You do not have to join anything. You can turn up, find a table, and see how it goes. Bring a friend: most people do the first time, and they do not have to be Muslim.
Worst case, you were bored for four hours and had dinner. Best case, this becomes the night you do not want to miss.
Before you decide
The questions parents actually ask.
If yours is not here, email hello@gonexgen.org and a person will answer it.
Yes. That is the normal way in. No term, no block booking, no minimum. Come once and see. Most families do exactly this.
Where membership fits
Friday Nights is free, and stays free.
Members and non-members get the same place in the room, the same dinner and the same mentors. There is no priority queue and nothing behind a paywall. Sixty places, first come.
Membership is for the rest of the week: Pathfinders, Saturdays, the studios, workshops: at one flat price for the whole family, every child included. Plenty of families come to Friday Nights for months and never join. That is a perfectly good outcome.
- Food and drink $10, less on a plan
- Tweens and teens supervised separately
- Come late, leave early, skip a week
- No account, no membership, no fee
One Friday
Don’t take our word for it. Send them once.
Come at four. Meet the mentors. Eat with everyone else. Play something. See how it feels, and then decide whether next Friday is a thing in your house.
Free to attend. Food and drink $10, less on a plan. No membership, no account.