Last month, Chinatown’s neighborhood advocates placed a strong vote of confidence in the power of proactive community planning. The Chinatown Working Group — comprising over 40 community-based organizations and three community boards — has been meeting for over a year to hash out the issues that matter most to the people who live, work, and go to school in the neighborhood. The MAS Planning Center provided support to the Working Group process early on by providing area maps and timely information on community-initiated planning.

The group voted to pursue a 197-a plan—one of the City’s most comprehensive planning tools. Named for the section of the City’s Charter that enables them, 197-a plans provide a way to capture a community vision and translate that vision into policies and strategies. (You can view summaries of all of the City’s adopted 197-a plans here.) The Chinatown Working Group has already begun work identifying themes and principles that will guide their work over the coming year. Continue Reading>>

MAS recently sat down with four young people from the Bronx and Brooklyn who are confronting neighborhood planning challenges head-on. Armed with information, enthusiasm and a supportive network of adults, these young people are taking the lead in addressing critical neighborhood issues.

In Sunset Park, Brooklyn, Caesar Alcaite and Celeste Del Brey (pictured at left) have been working with UPROSE, a community-based environmental justice organization. When they came to UPROSE, neither had much knowledge of environmental justice issues. However, after spending more time at the organization and working with youth organizers, these teens quickly learned that there is a connection between their local environment and their quality of life. Since coming to UPROSE these teens have developed strong leadership skills — reaching out to neighbors to inform them of local environmental concerns; helping middle school students map neighborhood assets and burdens; and leading neighborhood environmental justice tours for city officials, other youth groups, and most recently, a group of 50 Columbia University graduate planning students. Continue Reading>>

“A renewal effort has to be conceived as a process of building on the inherent social and economic values of the community. Neglecting these values through programs of massive clearance and redevelopment can disrupt an entire community.”

These words could easily have been written by South Bronx activist Yolanda Garcia. In the early 1990s, she founded an organization known as We Stay/Nos Quedamos, and led a movement of residents who wanted to remain in their neighborhood despite the City’s plan to redevelop it with low-density, mixed-income housing.  They created an alternative plan for affordable housing development at Melrose Commons that is still being implemented today.

However, the words above are actually the opening statement of the Cooper Square Alternate Plan, written in 1961 by a group of activists from the Lower East Side, including Frances Goldin. Known as the Cooper Square Committee, they opposed Robert Moses’ urban renewal plan to demolish and redevelop more than 2,500 housing units in their neighborhood.

On July 13, the Municipal Art Society celebrated the kindred spirits of these two community activists by presenting the annual Yolanda Garcia Community Planner (YGCP) Award to Ms. Goldin.  Continue Reading>>

For the third and final installment of our podcast series of interviews with winners of the Yolanda Garcia Community Planner (YGCP) award, Eve Baron, Director of the MAS Planning Center, speaks with Yolanda Garcia’s daughter, Yolanda Gonzalez. Gonzalez succeeded her mother, for whom the award is named, as Executive Director of We Stay/Nos Quedamos, a community organization in the South Bronx that developed an alternative plan for Melrose Commons in the 1990s, and now oversees the plan’s implementation. Baron and Gonzalez discuss the plan’s creation, and the challenges and victories of community organizing in the South Bronx. The YGCP award jury is currently in the process of choosing the 2009 winner. This year’s award will be presented at MAS’ annual meeting in July.

The image above shows Yolanda Gonzalez, center, joined by her family and South Bronx elected officials, at a street renaming ceremony in honor of her mother, Yolanda Garcia in February of this year. Third Avenue between 156th and 157th Streets is now known as “Yolanda Garcia Way.”

Visit www.mas.org/ygcpa for more information about the Yolanda Garcia Community Planner Award and past year’s recipients.

On Tuesday, June 9, nearly 300 New Yorkers — community board members and staff, their supporters, elected officials, and MAS — turned out to rally around community boards and to send a strong message to City Council that the public cannot afford for community boards to take a big hit. As reported last week, community board budgets — currently, at just under $200,000, and not having had a single increase in 19 years — are looking at cuts totaling $35,000 each.

A cut of that magnitude results in a savings to the City of only about $2 million, but impacts the operations of the board to the point where their ability to do the work of the people — ensuring a voice in local decision-making, overseeing essential municipal services, and serving as a place-based provider of constituent services — becomes next to impossible.

Please contact your local council member and urge them to restore the community board budgets: stronger community boards equal stronger communities, and the public can’t afford to take this hit!

Your community board provides a range of services vital to your community’s welfare, from overseeing essential municipal services, to ensuring that you have a voice in local decision-making, to serving as a place-based provider of constituent services, but each and every one of our city’s community boards is currently facing a budget cut of $35,000.

In response to this, join all five of New York’s borough presidents, all 59 of New York’s community boards, and community advocates of all stripes next Tuesday, June 9, at 11:00 a.m., on the steps of City Hall, to call on the City Council for the restoration of community board budgets for the coming fiscal year. (This rally has been organized by the Manhattan Borough President’s Office.)

Community boards are the public’s interface with New York City’s enormous and complex government, and they are also government agencies’ conduit to the public. Meaning, for example, that when the Department of Health needs to update a community on the spread of the H1N1 virus, it asks the community board for help with outreach. Continue Reading>>

Sideya Sherman of MAS talks with former Yolanda Garcia Community Planner (YGCP) award recipient Elizabeth Yeampierre about her organization UPROSE, how and why she became involved in community activism and environmental justice, and why global climate change is a major issue in this field.

To highlight community-based planning in New York ahead of this year’s YCGP award, this podcast is the second in a series of three interviews with previous award recipients. If you would like to nominate someone for this year’s award, visit www.mas.org/awards.

Ahead of this year’s Yolanda Garcia Community Planner Award (YGCPA), MAS’ Lacey Tauber talks community activism in the Far Rockaways with last years’ YGCPA winner, Jeanne Dupont, Executive Director of the Rockaway Waterfront Alliance.

MAS is accepting nominations for this year’s award through Friday, May 29 (2009). For more information, and a copy of the nomination form, click here.

The Yolanda Garcia Community Planner Award (YGCP) acknowledges the hard-working leaders of grassroots, community-based planning. The award was created to commemorate Yolanda Garcia, a community activist in the South Bronx. Under Garcia’s leadership, the residents of Melrose challenged the city, created an alternative to an urban renewal plan, and transformed a neighborhood. The organization created by Garcia, We Stay/Nos Quedamos, is bringing that community’s vision to life through planning, design, construction, and programming.

In 2007, MAS presented the second annual YGCP award to Elizabeth Yeampierre for her work with the United Puerto Rican Organization of Sunset Park (UPROSE), which has engaged local residents, particularly youth, in multiple community planning and environmental justice initiatives along the Sunset Park waterfront in Brooklyn. Last year’s winner was Jeanne DuPont, Executive Director of the Rockaway Waterfront Alliance. The award recognized her work engaging a diverse community and local youth in open space and environmental issues on the barrier island of Far Rockaway, Queens.
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The bright sun reflected off the many new buildings of Melrose Commons in the South Bronx, as elected officials, activists, developers, friends, family, and other admirers gathered on East 157th Street to honor the memory of Yolanda Garcia yesterday. Third Avenue between 156th and 157th Streets is now known as “Yolanda Garcia Way.”

Ms. Garcia’s family owned a carpet shop in the Melrose section of the Bronx, where she was working in the early 1990s when she learned of a City urban renewal plan that called for displacing local residents and creating low-density housing. Incensed that those residents who stayed in the South Bronx despite decades of disinvestment were going to be displaced, Ms. Garcia founded Nos Quedamos/We Stay. This grassroots group was dedicated to rethinking the plan, including the community in the process, and preventing displacement. The resulting Melrose Commons plan helped to create over 1,500 units of affordable housing in the area, kept thousands of residents from being displaced, and even brought green building principles to the South Bronx. Continue Reading>>