Chinese Progressive Association (CPA) is going to be participating in Student Voter registration day.

If you turn 18 by December 31, 2016, you can vote in any of the 2016 elections.

Friday March 18 from 9:15-11:30am. 

They will be registering students (18 year old 12th graders) at Pace High School (not for the general public!). Students will gather in the library. There will be a short program, a talk and then voter registration right there.  

Once you’ve registered to vote, there is the link to go to check that you’re in the voter rolls : voterlookup.elections.state.ny.us  

CPA will need a few volunteers who are free that morning to help register the students.  The students will be given the forms to fill out themselves. CPA will collect them, but they will need people to help collect and do a quick check of the form.

If any coalition members are free that morning to help please contact the Chinese Progressive Association: cpanyc@cpanyc.org or 212-274-1891

For those interested in volunteering, there will be a training: Thurs. Mar 10 at 10am or 2:30 pm.  The trainings are being held at the  NYC campaign finance board.

 CPA has launched an exciting 2016 campaign!
“2016 will be an exciting year.  We will vote for President, and our representatives in Congress and the State Assembly.  Join us to get our voice and vote heard! 

• Register new voters
• Get the word out about community involvement in local forums.
• Chinese language skills are welcome but not necessary.
• Training provided. You will learn about voting and community empowerment, how to have a conversation to help more people participate and vote!
• Work in a team and have fun.
• Community service credits provided.

Contact us at cpanyc@cpanyc.org or 212-274-1891 to volunteer.”

“We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.” -Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945), German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi

The Goldman Environmental Prize is given to grassroots environmental activists from each of six world regions. The 2015 year winner included Honduran indigenous rights leader Berta Caceres and her organization. They were fighting not just governments, but some of the world’s most powerful corporations to protect their land and livelihood. They faced death death threats and repression.

Wednesday, Berta Caceres was shot and killed in her home in La Esperanza, Intibuca. While the killers’ ID remains unknown, activists, media observers and the Cáceres family pointed to the increasingly reactionary and violent Honduran government, which has frequently clashed with Cáceres over her high-profile activism against land dispossession and mining, and her defense of indigenous rights.

“…the struggles around the world — whether we call it environmental activism, or struggles around indigenous rights to their commons (and rights-to-their means-of-livelihood)– are the target. These are also as much struggles against various violations of women’s ESC rights. Women, whether in the leadership of these struggles, or participants, are physically harmed/ sexually abused.”- Shiney Varghese

There is a petition to end the US military aid to Honduras and stop the murder of environmental activists that reads:

“Secretary Kerry:

I have recently learned of the murder of Berta Cáceres, co-founder of the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras, and winner of the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize.

Her tragic death is emblematic of the grave human rights situation in Honduras today. Although we do not know who her assailants were, we believe her murder is the latest in a growing trend of state suppression against social movement leaders like Berta.

We urge the State Department to promote a truly independent investigation into the killing of Berta and the many other environmental and land defenders in Honduras, and begin subjecting Honduras to vetting process under the Leahy law, and to enforce the law by immediately stopping military aid to the country.

Sincerely,”

From the Houston Street Center an Art experience for families called PACT (Parents and Children Together with Art)! 

5-13 years old children (and their parents)

Free

8 Weeks 

Every Friday starting March 18th

Enrollment deadline THIS FRIDAY, March 11^th

Chinese translation in each course. 

Parents! This is an 8 week commitment -come consistently.

For more information: University Settlement’s Houston Street Center

Flyers are below in English, Spanish & Chinese. 

Each session begins with exposure to a professional work of art that serves as an inspiration image, followed by an art-making experience, and concludes with a sharing circle. PACT activities are designed to increase parental involvement and graduate in complexity to encourage positive forms of family communication and sustained teamwork. With a 1:2 or 1:3 volunteer to family ratio, Professional Facilitators lead trained Volunteer Coaches to implement a creative arts curriculum that requires families to develop ideas and work collaboratively. .

Lousy news for this neighborhood.

Rivington House sold for $116 million dollars. The city “lifted the deed restrictions without any guarantees that the property would remain a community asset”.

At the same time that Cuomo and de Blasio are frantic to find housing for people with HIV AIDs this building, a former AIDs hospice, was let go for $16 million to the Allure Group (who just flipped a nursing home for condos in Bed Sty).

To read more detail: Lo-Down.

Thanks to the Lo-Down for their thorough reporting.

Dear New Yorkers:

The New York State Comptroller’s Office is conducting a survey on noise in New York City neighborhoods and would like you to take the survey.

You can access the survey through your Community Board. Your Community Board will email the survey weekly so make sure that you are on your Community Board’s email distribution list.

Community Boards may also choose to post  the survey links on their websites, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds and other social media.

Research has demonstrated that noise can adversely impact public health. For example, noise can disturb sleep and increase stress levels.
We want to learn about your experience of noise in your community and solicit your ideas for reducing noise.

Toward that end, we are asking all community residents take the survey by March 15, 2016.

Thank you!

State Government Accountability
New York State Comptroller’s Office

Survey Links:

English: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/5B9QWY5

Chinese: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/B5DC5TR

Spanish: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/8YTWYXV

Happy New Year Everyone

Sometimes things matter enough to take action on even in the midst of our overwhelming lives.

Tonight, Thursday January 7^th at 6:30 Community Board 3 Committee will take up the issue of the sale of Rivington House which has been left exposed to becoming market rate housing.

Please come to the meeting below, call 311 or email 311 ( Office of the Mayor) and email the mayor’s liaison: Tommy Lin (TLin@cityhall.nyc.gov).

Thank you to everyone who has already written or called.

Health, Seniors, & Human Services 

Thursday, January 7th at 6:30pm — Chinatown YMCA Cornerstone at Rutgers – 200 Madison Street (btwn Rutgers & Pike Sts)

Item will be third:

3.  Position on future of Rivington House nursing facility—replacement of beds and future of facility

This has been a building that served its low-income neighborhood from its inception. As a public school, then AIDs hospice and finally as a non-profit, low-income nursing home.

The mayor’s administration has seen fit to remove the protection of a carefully crafted deed restriction (which required it to stay a non-profit health care facility in perpetuity). Leaving it utterly vulnerable to market rate conversion. 

They removed the restriction in an obscure and opaque procedure this June – knowing this neighborhood and our electeds  had rallied successfully to save the building, just months before, as a low-income community facility. We did this despite our scarce and stretched resources, time and energy.

It is an insult to ask us to listen to the rhetoric of a “Tale of Two Cities”, to be asked to trust an “affordable housing” plan when this valuable resource was sold cheaply and silently to a corporation with a for-profit agenda. Sold away from a community that sorely needs it for any kind of low-income housing.

Either this is incompetence or egregious contempt for the “unimportant people” whose lives have been or will be greatly impacted, disrupted or destroyed.

We have lost three nursing homes in our Community Board to market rate conversions. Forcing elders to leave their neighborhoods (when they can no longer live at home) breaks relationships, leaves our elders without the care of their families and friends, it dismantles the communities we built out of love and caring  – the only real security anyone ever really has –  and leaves our most vulnerable citizens as refuse in the wake of stupid and short-sighted profiteers.

It sends a clear message: No elders, no disabled, no one in need of help will be allowed to live in our brave new (and very hip) world. 

To follow the saga of Rivington House please see the excellent coverage in the Lo-Down. http://www.thelodownny.com/?s=rivington+house

And most recent news: http://www.thelodownny.com/leslog/2015/12/followup-city-cleared-the-way-for-luxury-housing-at-former-rivington-street-nursing-home.html

…Patty Astor who ran the Fun Gallery in the 80’s “…said it … hurt to see a new symbol of affluence on the Lower East Side linked in any way to the neighborhood’s grittier past.

[she]…is among those depicted in that work, and she has objected to the use of her image and Mr. Purple’s to ‘validate and advertise‘ the hotel…..”

“They are trying to say that this new, manufactured reality is O.K.,” she said. “I’m saying not in my name.”