COMMUNITY ORGANIZING & ADVOCACY
The Challenge
The South Bronx has a long history of organizing and advocacy. It is how we have survived, endured, and persevered.
In 1970, the Young Lords Party, a community organization, staged a takeover of Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx, which was widely known to be understaffed, under-resourced, and mismanaged, with a reputation as a “butcher shop.” The hospital had become a symbol of the City’s neglect of Black and Puerto Rican New Yorkers, and the set of demands made by the Young Lords were accepted as legitimate even by the hospital’s chief administrator.
The Young Lord’s 12 hour-long peaceful occupation had lasting effects, resulting in the establishment of a holistic drug rehabilitation program. This is just one example of organizing and advocacy in the South Bronx. It is also an example of the challenges and hurdles we face when we organize. Despite the lives the rehabilitation program saved and improved, in1978, Mayor Ed Koch announced that it was a failure and forcibly removed staff from the Lincoln Hospital building.
This type of abandonment, of disinvestment, of neglect, of aggressive elimination of a community-driven initiative, combined with ill-conceived and failed urban renewal programs as well as a history of false promises from elected representatives have taken their toll, resulting in disillusionment and disengagement among many neighborhood residents.
It has also made organizing more difficult.
Our Response
Voter Mobilization
Our community may not be economically wealthy, but we have power. One way we exercise our power is through the ballot. Though electoral politics is not the answer to all our challenges, it is an important avenue through which to bring about change, by voting in candidates who genuinely represent our interests and by holding legislators accountable.
Heat Map & Air Quality Monitoring
In partnership with Columbia University, we are working on an Urban Heat Island Mapping project, collecting environmental data about the hottest and coolest places in our area and we are also testing the feasibility of developing low-cost noise monitors built and deployed by citizen scientists to collect high spatio-temporal resolution noise data and to develop spatio-temporal noise maps for the South Bronx.
Campaign Against Fresh Direct
South Bronx Unite formed as a diverse coalition of neighborhood residents, community organizations, religious groups, and many others to challenge the subsidy and plan. We argued that the relocation would further increase air pollution in a neighborhood that already has the highest rate of asthma in the country.
No New Jails
On February 14, 2018, Mayor De Blasio revealed a plan to speed up the closing of Rikers Island by transferring those incarcerated into existing (retrofitted) facilities in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, bypassing Staten Island altogether, and building a new jail in a South Bronx community still reeling from decades of disinvestment, destabilization and the resulting fallout, and where two other jails already exist.