Parents from the Brooklyn Educational Collaborative authored this editorial about their campaign to secure 444 million from the Department of Education so that every middle school in the city has lawfully functioning science lab by 2010.

 

 

Bushwick Housing Independence Project’s work with tenants in this quickly-changing neighborhood is featured.

 

 

Chinese Staff and Workers campaign to organize delivery workers from Ollie’s Noodle Shop, Saigon Grill and Our Place Chinese Cuisines of China is featured in this article, which profiles workers who are paid as little as $1.75 an hour.

 

 

Good Old Lower East Side, Make the Road by Walking and Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition are working with Retail Workers Union to improve pay and conditions for workers.

 

 

Concerned Citizens for Family Preservation held a forum attracting parents from throughout Staten Island who learned how to navigate the child welfare system.

 

 

An editorial to support Domestic Workers United’s demand to include domestic workers in state labor protections.

 

 

Girls for Gender Equity’s is combating street harassment with posters in local stores and a video created by young women at the organization.

 

 

An editorial critiquing the New York Time’s Company Nonprofit Excellence Awards for recognizing Families United for Racial and Economic Equality’s (FUREE) work and a response appeared this summer.

 

 

Housing Here and Now launched its city wide campaign to reform New York’s rent laws by creating a circle of tenant activist around Stuyvesant Town & Peter Cooper Village.

 

 

Youth organizers from Make the Road by Walking protested the gentrification of Brooklyn.

 

Various New York Foundation grantees have been working for years to ensure that all New Yorkers, regardless of immigration status, could apply for driver’s licenses in the state.  On September 21, 2007, Governor Spitzer announced a policy change that would grant one license for all New Yorkers and change the lives of hundreds of thousands of families in the state.  A New York Times editorial supported this policy change.

 

 

 

The Sikh Coalition report on bias against Sikh children in New York Ctiy schools, presents data from over 200 surveys on their experiences.  Some of the report’s key findings are: three out of four Sikh boys who go to school in Queens have been teased or harassed on account of their religious identity and more than half of the over 200 Sikh students surveyed had experienced some form of harassment in school based on their religion or national origin.

 

A recent report by La Union de La Comunidad Latina and Fifth Avenue Committee concludes that for the largely immigrant community of low-income renters in Sunset Park, their homes are hurting their health.  The experiences of members of La Union de la Comunidad Latina, formed several case studies highlighted in the report, which found that the most common chronic health problems were asthma and other respiratory ailments.  In one-third of surveyed households, at least one household member suffered.  Among that third, nine out of 10 households reported that housing conditions exacerbated their illnesses.

 

Youth organizers at La Union also made a short video dealing with this issue.

 

A Brennan Center report, based on three years of intensive research documents growing workplace violations and describes New York City as a place where jobs pay less than minimum wage, and sometimes nothing at all: where employers do not pay overtime for 60-hour weeks, and deny meal breaks; where vital health and safety regulations are routinely ignored; and where workers are subject to blatant discrimination, and retaliated against for speaking up or trying to organize.

 

 

Trustee Wayne Ho, Executive Director of Coalition for Asian American Children and Families, was the keynote speaker at the National Head Start Institute on Hispanic and Other Emerging Populations.  Attended by over 1,000 participants, the conference aimed to ensure that Head Start programs were providing quality, accessible services for the diverse children and families throughout the untied States.

 

Trustee Alan Altschuler will be honored by the American Diabetes Association at its gala benefit on November 1, 2007 at Pier Sixty, Chelsea Piers.  Mr. Altschuler is a former Chairman of the National Board of the American Diabetes Association.

 

Trustee Mike Pratt was named Chairman of the Board of the Pratt Institute.

 
Staff Making News

Program Officer, Kevin Ryan will join the board of the Neighborhood Funders Group, (NFG) a national network of foundations and philanthropic organizations whose members support community-based efforts that improve economic and social conditions in low-income communities.  Mr. Ryan had served on the conference planning committee of NFG for the past two years.

 

 

Executive Director Maria Mottola wrote a book review (on page 5) for Grantmakers Concerned about Immigrants and Refugees.