Who Cares? You Care!

In the face of historic upheaval, we sense opportunity.

So we ask: what does a fairer, more just, and equitable city look like? North Brooklyn Parks Alliance is pleased to present a series of panel discussions that investigates parks and open space policies that rise to meet the challenges of our time, in preparation for the future.

During the most influential election year in recent New York City history, we’ve reimagined past iterations of our Community Committee meetings into a seven-part virtual panel series that aims to educate, inspire, and engage the community.

The series, The Future of Public Space: A Green Platform for North Brooklyn, expands on our successful Fall 2020 panel series that focused on parks infrastructure projects to explore the policy and culture of how parks and open spaces are defined and managed in North Brooklyn. We are investigating topics through a variety of lenses: air quality (02/23), the street grid (03/18), funding mechanisms (05/20), sustainable habitats (06/17), and stewardship (07/15).

The titles of these conversations, beginning with Whose Air? Your Air!, is inspired by chants we’ve all heard in recent demonstrations and protests, as well as a direct acknowledgement of our inspiration from El Puente’s ongoing Our Air! ¡Nuestro Aire! grassroots campaign with a 5-Point Action Platform that engages youth organizers, community members, elected leaders, academic partners, local organizations, artists, and schools to address the environmental crisis of toxic air quality in our community

The panel series will be anchored by a Candidate’s Forum in April (04/29), organized in partnership with the emerging “North Brooklyn Open Space Coalition,” comprising our neighborhood’s civic environmental institutions: El Puente, Newtown Creek Alliance, North Brooklyn Neighbors, and North Brooklyn Parks Alliance.

Throughout the year, the Coalition will be engaging the North Brooklyn community to help inform our advocacy priorities for future political leadership. We believe parks and open spaces are critical infrastructure essential to the health and well-being of a neighborhood. Well-maintained parks and open spaces are proven economic drivers that generate an impressive 154 billion dollars in revenue each year across the country. Here in New York City, we have chronically underfunded parks experiencing deeper cuts than most other agencies since the pandemic hit in 2020.

Our panel series seeks to influence future planning and priorities as a new generation of leaders must balance the intersection of public health, environmental resiliency, and job stability. While local in scale, specifically targeting Brooklyn’s Community Board 1, we believe these ideas and solutions can be modeled here and replicated in parks and open spaces citywide.

The panel series culminates in October (10/23) with a community-driven design summit.