The Butterfly Effect Project, the Riverhead youth mentorship nonprofit that started twelve years ago with eight girls and no budget, is opening its first North Fork chapter this fall in Greenport. The new chapter will be hosted by the North Fork Arts Center, the nonprofit that now runs the village's restored 1939 movie theater on Front Street, giving village kids and teens a standing place of their own a few blocks from the harbor.

From eight girls in a borrowed room to 800 kids across Suffolk

Tijuana Fulford, known to nearly everyone in the program as Ms. Tia, founded the Butterfly Effect Project in March 2014 with eight girls from Riverhead, Riverside and Flanders. There was no building and no budget, just a plan to give girls a consistent place to be heard and to practice being confident before the world had other ideas for them.

Twelve years later the organization runs more than 30 chapters in schools and communities across Suffolk County and serves over 800 young people and their families. It did not stay a girls program for long. When the brothers and friends of members started asking to join, the organization added the Dragonflies, its program for boys, alongside the original Butterflies. In 2024, a donation gave the nonprofit a permanent home of its own on Main Road in Riverhead.

The results are the kind most youth programs would frame and hang on the wall. Every senior who has come through the program has been admitted to college or a trade program. Enrollment costs families 25 dollars a year, and chapters that meet in schools are free.

What a chapter actually does

Chapters meet every other week, led by volunteer ambassadors working through a curriculum built on four pillars: healthy relationships, care for self and community, critical thinking and confidence building. Members take on community givebacks, and the organization layers passion programs on top, including dance teams, a monologue showcase, a garden club, social justice advocacy, college access work and entrepreneurship projects.

The support runs in both directions. The organization operates the Butterfly Closet, which provides free clothing, along with a community freezer and back-to-school supply drives, so a family that hits a rough month does not have to explain itself to anyone to get help.

Why the old movie theater matters

The venue is its own story. The Greenport Theatre on Front Street has been showing films since 1939, and it nearly went the way of most small village cinemas. When former AMC Networks chief executive Josh Sapan, the theater's owner, offered to gift the building rather than see it sold off for development, the North Fork Arts Center formed in 2023 as a nonprofit to preserve it, programming film, live performance, exhibitions and arts education under one roof.

The two organizations already know each other. In June, kids from the Butterfly Effect Project starred in a free community production of The Lion King on the arts center stage. The new chapter turns that one-off collaboration into a standing arrangement: the arts center gains a year-round youth program in its building, and the mentorship group gets a front door on one of the most recognizable blocks on the North Fork.

What it means east of Riverhead

Greenport is the rare East End village with a substantial year-round population of working families, and most youth services on Long Island thin out fast past Riverhead. A chapter in the village means kids who live there do not need a ride up-island to get what the program offers, and it plants the organization on the North Fork proper for the first time.

For a Greenport parent, the practical takeaway is simple. A mentorship program with a twelve-year track record and a perfect college and trade admission rate among its seniors is setting up this fall inside the theater your kids already know, at a cost that rounds to two dollars a month. Details on enrollment and volunteering are at bepgirls.org as the launch takes shape.