Thank you to all who joined us in honoring Eric Brettschneider and the firm Latham & Watkins LLP!
Celebrating Community 2022
September: Thriving Families Safer Children
Thriving Families Safer Children is a project designed to promote solidarity between community members and to build their capacity to use available community level data to support advocacy and to demand the dismantling of unjust social policies.
This project engages Community Study Circles comprised of diverse groups of Sunset Park residents. These groups, which meet weekly, engage a popular education methodology and are facilitated by community member Zenayda Bonilla, who serves as the Peer Advocate. Participants in Study Circles begin with an exploration of their own migration and settlement stories. In this way, Study Circles become a safe and welcoming place for community members where they can be introduced to and become conversant in publicly available data. The group uses the data to identify the ways that immigrant and BIPOC residents are disparately impacted by economic and social challenges. Specific attention is given to data on economic and social factors which result in disproportionate involvement in the child welfare system. Attention is paid to interpreting data on child welfare investigations and child removals with a goal of uncovering “the story” that data can tell us about human experience.
Participants in these groups look at data on socioeconomic status of members within their neighborhood alongside comparative data showing the socioeconomic status of people in adjacent communities. They also review data on the number of people living in poverty, relying on public assistance, receiving Medicaid, as well as the level of education reached by members of their communities. This data is personal to those reviewing it as it represents their own and their neighbors’ situations and experiences.
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Participants share what they learn with others in their neighborhood and present their observations and proposals for positive change to elected officials and advocacy groups in New York City. Further, Study Circles give those impacted the most by the child welfare system the resources and understanding necessary to challenge the system’s policies. Zenayda Bonilla and Julia Jean-Francois have discussed the problems associated with the current child welfare system in their recently published article “Reflections on our Work in Community- Troubling the Frame,” which is part of the Summer 2022 edition of the journal Family Integrity & Justice Quarterly. Julia Jean-Francois has also written about this issue in her chapter, “Community Based Organizations and Public Child Welfare Authorities: The Challenge of Partnerships,” in the recently published book Leadership Reflections: How to Create and Sustain Reforms in Children and Family Services.
In their article in the Family Integrity & Justice Quarterly Bonilla and Jean-Francois write about reform efforts in the child welfare system in New York City and how these have impacted Black and Brown communities. They bring attention to the long history of community surveillance and family separation and investigate the current and historical conditions which perpetuate disproportionate participation in the child welfare system. They suggest that the solution to this is to support community driven advocacy that focuses on the wellbeing of communities as a whole. To read more about this, click the link here.
Thriving Families Safer Children supports community members to dismantle barriers that perpetuate inequity in their neighborhoods through data driven advocacy that is framed and carried out by the community itself and that can promote a just and inclusive New York City.Â
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August: “Life Lines” Community Arts Project Explores
“Life Lines” is a free, nationally-recognized program that brings together social group work, the arts, and education to involve middle and high school youth in group experiences that promote leadership, develop creativity, and build community.
This summer, the theme was “Art as Nourishment,” and our program participants explored many different ways that art and art-making can provide nourishment to themselves and to their surrounding community.
Our Visual Arts Troupe led workshops for younger children in the Center for Family Life elementary school summer camps at PS 94 and PS 169, working together in small groups to explore patterns and sculpture-making. Our troupe members learned that by offering their attention, mentorship, and art-making skills to these groups, they could provide meaningful activities for the elementary schoolers and bring them joy.
Life Lines Visual Arts Troupe also experimented with nourishing their community through public art, creating colorful tunics with messages they felt were important to share.
The troupe traveled to Governors Island and took pictures with their wearable art in different locations. They also visited the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Arts Center to see the immersive art installation “Sun Seekers” by sisters Amy and Jennifer Khoshbin, a sculpture and performance work that inspired our group with its attention to healing and reconnection with the natural world.
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The third summer project was group murals. This was an opportunity for our troupe members to remember that making art can be a way to nourish themselves, and that sharing art is a way to nourish those around them – a great reminder to take into the Fall as we reach the end of another wonderful summer!
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CFLSP’s Summer Youth Employment Program Participants at Green-Wood Cemetery on Pix11!
Summer youth program offers insight into careers in the environment!
July: CFL’s Cooperative Development Program Brings BrightlyⓇ Cleaning Cooperative to Philadelphia
For this month’s Stories from the Field we talked to Carlos Chacon, one of our Excluded Workers Fund (EWF) navigators.
As you might remember, a high demand for aid depleted New York’s initial EWF Fund quickly, and many immigrant workers and their families were once again left out of receiving much needed financial aid. The NYC COVID-19 Immigrant Emergency Relief Program was created to provide direct cash assistance to those immigrant New Yorkers hardest hit by the economic crisis of the pandemic.
