CEC is the NYC branch of COOP Power which is a cooperative based in western Massachusetts that helps low-income people of color who are renters install solar arrays, wind turbines and biofuel systems, which they eventually end up owning and managing. Professor Menser was asked to help form the board of the CEC early in 2019 and has been aiding them in their work in NYC.
They have asked Center for Study of Brooklyn (CSB) to support their work in Brooklyn with the array at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, which is now part of Solar Sunset Park. CSB placed a Brooklyn College student Galilea Mattias who is knowledgeable about coops and energy democracy to intern with CEC through Spring 2020 to do outreach to the Spanish speaking community.
LIPA Reimagined: Building the Public Utility Long Island Deserves
After Superstorm Sandy and Tropical Storm Isaias in August this much is clear: storms are getting worse and more frequent, and trust in LIPA’s public-private partnerships is plummeting. And we fear that Long Island will experience such outages again unless LIPA undergoes serious structural change.
In February 2021, Professor Menser participated in a public forum to discuss the future governance and operations of the Long Island Power Authority. We went over the history of the utility, the benefits of public power, and offered ideas for more participatory structures of governance for the utility. Watch now!
Texas Power Crisis
In March of 2021, a 5-minute educational video by Brooklyn College features Professor Menser discussing the Texas Power Crisis.
Since mid-February, the world has watched as the citizens of Texas face the catastrophic consequences of an unprecedented winter storm that left millions without power and drinkable water in freezing temperatures. While the extent of the tragedy is still being processed, there are many questions about what went wrong.
Professor Menser lived on the Gulf Coast of Texas as a child. His familiarity with the situation is not only observational, but personal.
“Many have died. The Houston Chronicle reported that over 50 have died in Houston alone. Mostly freezing to death, mostly elderly,” says Menser, who is also a member of the board of the Center for the Study of Brooklyn whose areas of research include sustainability and resilience as well as participatory democracy.
On top of the devastating loss of human life, the tragedy has had profound economic impact, with property damage and energy bills skyrocketing to astronomical costs.
“There could be more than 125 billion dollars in damages, which would make it the most costly disaster in Texas history,” says Menser, author of We Decide! Theories and Cases in Participatory Democracy (Temple University Press, 2018).
Menser notes that Texas has seen numerous natural disasters in its recent past, many exacerbated by the effects of climate change. We talked to him about his insight into the current situation, its contributing factors, and how it can serve as an important lesson for the future.
After Superstorm Sandy and Tropical Storm Isaias in August this much is clear: storms are getting worse and more frequent, and trust in LIPA’s public-private partnerships is plummeting. And we fear that Long Island will experience such outages again unless LIPA undergoes serious structural change.
Extensive reports of PSEG Long Island’s management of Tropical Storm Isaias have led LIPA board members to propose several paths forward. Of these choices, only full municipalization can bring the affordable and reliable electric services that Long Islanders deserve.
This report, by the Center for the Study of Brooklyn at Brooklyn College is an investigation into possibilities for strengthening the system of connections and contracts between local vendors and institutional procurers in Central Brooklyn today, gained from interviews with anchor institutions and M/WBE vendors alike.
Excerpt:
Despite an economy which is officially booming, communities of color and minority and women-owned business enterprises (MWBEs), particularly those that are Black-owned, often struggle in New York City. This is especially the case in Brooklyn, which is a hotbed of both increasing business development and intense gentrification and displacement of Black and Latinx communities. This is troubling for many reasons, especially since the MWBE category was designed to bring recognition and support to communities unfairly excluded from a critical source of economic activity: government procurement and contracting. Yet there is hope because the number of MWBEs is increasing, and institutions such as hospitals, universities, and libraries that possess considerable buying power are located amidst these same communities and are ready to engage. Indeed, the “anchor model” framework was designed as a way for these large scale institutions that provide crucial public services to reflect on the ways their employment and procurement practices can support local communities.
This white paper was born of years of work done by community organizations and healthcare institutions to create a wellness-based development framework. As Interfaith Medical Center was threatened with closure, the Coalition to Transform Interfaith fought to build wellness at scale through the restructuring of the institution. That coalition first saw anchor institution procurement as a possible driver for scaling economic transformation inspired by the Bronx Cooperative Development Initiative. Since then, a base of local stakeholders has grown to support a vision of development based in community wellness. This paper, focusing on opportunities for and barriers to local MWBE procurement at anchor institutions in Central Brooklyn, is one piece in a step to achieve that vision.
“Defund the police.” The demand is righteous, and at the same time, destabilizing. It requires not just reform, but systemic change in policing, incarceration, and budgeting. It calls us to both divest and to reinvest our money differently.
Defunding the police is a proposition to invest in our communities in a different way, to treat the budget as a “moral document,” and to place those most affected at the very center of the decision-making process. One arm of this strategy to defend Black lives is a call for community control and self-determination.
Over the last 10 years, the Participatory Budgeting Project has worked to spread the use of “participatory budgeting,” or PB. Alongside nonprofits, community members, elected officials, and coalitions, including organizations that are members of the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), we’ve sought to transform budget processes into opportunities for developing democratic capacities and promoting equity. While PB has been used across the US, it has not been used to defund the police. But that may be about to change.
Around the country, people are wondering and discussing what “defund the police” might actually mean. To answer this question requires addressing a related question: What does a democratically transformed budget process look like? What does it look like to repurpose municipal policing budgets in a way that dismantles structural racism and white supremacy, while building safe, healthy, and empowered communities?
CEC is the NYC branch of COOP Power which is a cooperative based in western Massachusetts that helps low-income people of color who are renters install solar arrays, wind turbines and biofuel systems, which they eventually end up owning and managing. Professor Menser was asked to help form the board of the CEC early in 2019 and has been aiding them in their work in NYC.
They have asked Center for Study of Brooklyn (CSB) to support their work in Brooklyn with the array at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, which is now part of Solar Sunset Park. CSB placed a Brooklyn College student Galilea Mattias who is knowledgeable about coops and energy democracy to intern with CEC through Spring 2020 to do outreach to the Spanish speaking community.
The BC Food and Resilience Gardens Hub (launching July 2020) aims to promote and interconnect school and community gardens and gardeners with Brooklyn College faculty, staff, and students to conduct research and support projects that promote food sovereignty and socio-ecological resilience in Midwood/Flatbush and other neighborhoods across Brooklyn. The Hub would be hosted by the Urban Sustainability Studies Program at BC and draw upon a range of faculty through the Center for the Study of Brooklyn (also at BC).
The Hub would have four functions:
To coordinate and support the growing of food for local consumption including food pantries for residents and students in response to the COVID emergency and long standing food insecurity issues among students and central and south Brooklyn communities.
To support the new School-Community garden in Midwood at PS 152/315 and other school and community gardens to provide support for learning opportunities among K-12 and college students (building upon existing Community Roots program hosted by BC College Now).
To lead and support gardening efforts on the BC campus for teaching and research with students, faculty and community partners for food provision as well as climate resilience including stormwater management, carbon sequestration, biodiversity promotion and urban soil management.
To research, innovate participatory, and teach democratic practices and economic democracy models not just for gardening but for other parts of the food system (transport, sale, etc.) including worker and consumer coops and participatory budgeting (PB) and to connect to city government through community boards, PB NYC and the NYC Civic Engagement Commission.
While face-to-face interactions are limited, a small number of internship opportunities, using socially distanced outdoor training, will be pursued for summer and fall. Also, there will be a a special focus on reaching across the digital divide and teaching and training diverse students and community members to use participatory democractic digital platforms for project management (e.g. Airtable), collaborative decision-making (e.g. Loomio), in depth and interactive surveys (e.g. pol.is), and proposal generation (e.g. Decidim) among other needs and uses.
On-Campus Partnerships
This project builds on existing projects, centers, and institutes at BC including the greenhouse operated by the Aquatic Research and Environmental Assessment Center (AREAC), Environmental Sciences Analytical Center (ESAC), Urban Soils Lab, Legacy Lead Coalition, and the Science and Resilience Institute at Jamaica Bay. The Hub will enhance existing partnerships with departments and programs across the campus including Earth and Environmental Sciences, Health and Nutrition Sciences, Sociology, Philosophy, Business Management, Economics, and Caribbean Studies among others.
Off-Campus Partnerships
The Hub working with the Center for the Study of Brooklyn will establish and/or enhance partnerships with off campus organizations such as the PS 152/315 Schoolyard Working Group, Bed Stuy Restoration, Canarsie Alliance, Canarsie Community Development Initiative, and the Flatbush Food Pantry as well as various civics and community boards especially in Flatbush, Canarsie and Midwood. It will also work to build out the recent partnerships with Community Care of Brooklyn and Brooklyn Communities Collaborative’s work on public health and economic democracy (BC is an “anchor” institution in this network). Private sector partners will also be sought, for example for landscaping and landscape architecture with firms such as Local Office for Landscape Architecture (who is already permitted to work at CUNY).
Creating Resilience Curriculum for CUNY and Public Libraries to promote “green” proposals for the new city-wide Participatory Budgeting Process
“Resilient PB“ will create academic and non-academic programming on the topic of “creating a more just and resilient NYC” for the new city-wide participatory budgeting process (PB) as part of the civic infrastructure building activities of/for the new Civic Engagement Commission created in 2018 per the referendum to amend NYC’s charter. The geographic focus is Brooklyn, but open to other jurisdictions. Project planning starts in Spring 2020 and the grant runs officially through May 2022.
The goal of the project is to further spread informed, participatory and justice-oriented discourse about climate change and how to make specific community-based social, economic and infrastructural proposals to adapt to it in a way that enhances equity and socio-ecological resilience. The geographic focus is Brooklyn. The venues are Brooklyn College (BC), and select community boards (TBA), and the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library (and others).
Due to COVID-19 restrictions on face-to-face gatherings and interactions, the first phase (summer 2020) will begin with a completely online process utilizing civic technology platforms such as pol.is, slack and Loomio.
At BC/CUNY we are linked with the Urban Sustainability Studies Program, the Center for the Study of Brooklyn and faculty in at least three different schools including the Humanities and Social Sciences, the Koppleman School of Business, and the School of Natural and Behavioral Sciences.
a “Resilience PB” module to be used in undergraduate classes at CUNY (incubated at Brooklyn College);
the creation of display media explaining resilience and city wide PB for a non academic audience to be installed in libraries throughout the Brooklyn Public Library System;
to train 5+ CUNY students and faculty to present, or co-present, on resilience and PB NYC for at least 3 Community Boards in Brooklyn.
This proposal fits most directly under the “civic discourse” frame but also connects in large part to the “urban neighborhoods” frame and to a lesser extent to the “blue humanities” since water is a key part of resilience for coastal neighborhoods in NYC.
The first phase begins in Summer 2020 with a BC student intern who will receive training in the civic tech platforms and be able to teach and support other students going forward.
1/ The Resilience PB undergraduate class module. There are still very few classes at CUNY that deal with the basic concepts of climate change, climate adaptation and socio-ecological resilience. While developing new courses and programs is crucial, it is more expeditious in the short term to introduce this topic in a wide range of classes to expose a greater range of students to the basic concepts and develop their agency by connecting them to a participatory democratic governance process like PB and the CEC creating a “Resilience PB” module to be used in undergraduate level classes at CUNY. The module will be constructed so that instructors can do a 1 day session or a 2 week session in which students will learn about resilience in a manner that enables them to formulate proposals to enhance resilience in a participatory democratic way using PB.
2) Train CUNY students to present at support Community Boards. To train 5-8 CUNY students to present, or co-present, on resilience and PB NYC for at least 3 Community Boards in Brooklyn (TBA). Students will learn about existing NYC and non-city databases which have critical information that can assist neighborhoods in making decisions about what infrastructure projects and programming can enhance resilience and improve quality of life.
Course Module
For BC, a course module will be developed on socio-ecological resilience that is informed by the principles of climate justice that we hope can spread across CUNY. The module will contain readings, media, assignments and activities integrating these topics. The content is interdisciplinary invoking history, philosophy, political science, Caribbean Studies, business, sociology, and ecology. It is designed for courses in multiple disciplines and will be doable in a varying time frames: from a one class presentation to a two week utilization.
It will also contain an in-class PB exercise so that students can learn participatory resilience by doing it and start to develop a sense of collective agency that interconnects government and community. This module will be designed to be fully on line as well as face to face. Students will then learn about the new city wide participatory budgeting process and develop the background knowledge to work with their communities to create proposals that can be submitted in PB NYC in 2020-1.
Another jurisdiction where NYCers have an opportunity to influence policy especially around land use is community boards which have been renewed and further empowered in the last year. We will create dedicated programming to present at CB meetings as well as a webpage to keep CBs up to date on what’s happening (to be housed at www.srijb.org where I am the Associate Director of Public Engagement). We aim to train 5+ faculty and students to present in this increasingly important and contentious NYC political space.
The 3rd venue is the Brooklyn Public Library though again it is now being designed to be fully on line in the initial roll out. Libraries themselves are critical spaces of resilience especially for low income NYCers as well as old and young people as Eric Klinenberg’s work has shown. We will develop a different versions of our materials to be on display in a library setting where people interact with the materials in a non-academic setting and must be attractive in ways different from the captured audience of the classroom.
Community Participatory Transformation is a joint research project between the Center for the Study of Brooklyn and the School of Architecture and Urban Planning, Federal University of Brazil, Porto Alegre (UFRGS). I created a joint agreement with Prof. Eber Marzulo for a five year comparative research study (2019-2024) between Brooklyn College and the Federal University of Brazil, Porto Alegre on participatory democracy and urban social movements with a focus on participatory budgeting, housing, cooperatives, and sustainability.
The Center for the Study of Brooklyn hosted the first visit in May 21st. 2019 with community-based researchers in Brooklyn, faculty from the New School and Brooklyn College faculty and students.
The second meeting was a Seminar on Participatory Community Transformation hosted by UFRGS in September 2019, and there have been three Skype public events since (see my CV).
In November 2020 we collaborated again, inviting our guests from guests from Brazil and Puerto Alegre to present for CUNY’s School of Labor and Urban Studies.
The first publication from this partnership is Menser (2020, in press).
Justa Trama
While in Brazil, my second site visit was to a sewing cooperative on the outskirts of Porto Alegre called Justa Trama. This place was an interstellar explosion of participatory democracy. They are a sewing coop of more than 40 women, buy their cotton from a mill which is a worker coop of more than 400 members, and they get their cotton from farms that are coops and grow their cotton organically! There is some info in English here: https://b2brazil.com/hotsite/justatrama
This place is remarkable on so many levels: first off, it started by making tote bags for the world social forum that took place in 2004 in Porto Alegre. I received their bag when I went in 2005! Since then their coop was able to grow in large part to participatory budgeting. They got money from PB to fix up the building, pave the adjoining streets and also get sewage lines in their neighborhood which is a self built settlement but now has full services. Their building is powered by solar panels and they do their own rainwater catchment! And now they make shirts, dresses and dolls. But there is more, they also have their own credit union which issues a local currency in which the workers are partially paid in and is used to promote purchasing with all the other local businesses! Justa Trama then not only co-created a sustainable and democratically owned supply chain, they helped to democratically develop their neighborhood by improving infrastructure and services and by creating good paying jobs, especially for women.
He also was the PI on a $30,000 grant from Commonwise, Inc to conduct research and do interviews with large purchasers and small businesses in central Brooklyn and write a feasibility study on the topic of “Procurement for Wellness.”
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