About this panel discussion
Watch the video recording of this conversation here or below:
Read more about this event here in the Brooklyn College Vanguard!
What role can people play in shaping the future of their neighborhood and the broader city? This panel will explore how community organizers attempt to navigate New York City’s complex official decision making processes to fight for housing and to build healthy and sustainable communities. We’ll address how community organizers have responded to Mayor Eric Adams’ vision for a “City of Yes” and what possibilities Community Land Trusts offer for people to steward land on behalf of local communities. Panelists will build on the lessons advanced in their collectively produced handbook, Disruptive Engagement: An Organizer’s Guide to Building Community Power for Justice in Land Use and Housing in New York City.
Panel participants:
Julia Bryant is a longtime organizer with the Brooklyn-based group Movement to Protect the People. Julia has been involved in anti-displacement struggles against the Atlantic Yards development at the intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues in Brooklyn, as well as the City’s plans to rezone neighborhoods adjacent to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden and Prospect Park, including Crown Heights. Julia is a contributor to the handbook Disruptive Engagement.
Jenny Dubnau is co-chair of the Western Queens Community Land Trust. Jenny also organizes with the Artist Studio Affordability Project, and the Justice for All Coalition, Queens. Jenny is an artist and activist who has been involved in many battles for more just land use and housing, including Amazon’s unsuccessful bid to set up a headquarters in Long Island City, and most recently with the fight for equitable and democratic land use in Western Queens. Jenny is a contributor to the handbook Disruptive Engagement.
Memo Salazar is co-chair of the Western Queens Community Land Trust. Memo is a filmmaker and longtime resident of Sunnyside, Queens. He is also a local business owner and co-runs the Sunnyside CSA, which aims to bring sustainable food justice to the neighborhood. Aside from trying to keep Queens affordable for everyone, he is often found working alongside Cookie Monster and Big Bird on a certain street everyone knows!
Naomi Schiller has worked with her neighbors in the Lower East Side to challenge top-down decision making around coastal resiliency infrastructure. She teaches anthropology at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, CUNY and devotes most of her organizing energies to her labor union, the Professional Staff Congress, CUNY and participates in Jewish Voices for Peace. Naomi is co-editor of the handbook Disruptive Engagement.
Vanessa Thill is an organizer and artist who has participated in the group Art Against Displacement to advance struggles against gentrification, including in Chinatown and the Lower East Side where she has worked to pass the Chinatown Working Group plan and to stop luxury development in Two Bridges. Vanessa is co-editor of the handbook Disruptive Engagement.
Co-sponsored by The Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities at Brooklyn College (as part of the New Books by BC Faculty Series) and the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, in collaboration with the Brooklyn College departments of Africana Studies, Political Science, Puerto Rican and Latinx Studies, and Sociology; the Program in Sustainability Studies; and the Center for the Study of Brooklyn, at Brooklyn College.
