How to Get Involved

Contact us! Email us at woodbine@riseup.net, or Direct Message us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Or stop by 1882 Woodbine and talk to someone about getting involved.

Do you want to volunteer with packing or distribution at our food pantry? Can you sew masks? Do you have a car? Do you like walking around the neighborhood and talking to people? Do you speak Spanish, Polish, or other local languages? Do you have a printer? Do you like to write, edit, or translate? Do you like to do research, manage spreadsheets, or do dispatch? Do you want to help us find food? Do you like taking photos and videos, doing graphic design, or social media? Are you curious about how our political and economic system works, want to advocate for our rights and work together to change things? Do you have other ideas, resources, or projects to collaborate on? Please reach out!

An Introduction

After three months of quarantine, many were excited to resume their regular routines, but what we are seeing across the city and country is far from a return to normal. Outbreaks in the number of COVID-19 cases have spread across several states. There has been a month of ongoing uprising following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and countless others at the hands of the police. And as of June 22nd, 50,000 eviction cases are being brought to housing court throughout New York City. Instead of relief measures that protect individuals from the threats of contracting COVID-19, police violence, and evictions, elected officials have enacted policies that value individual lives based on the color of their skin or the worth of their labor.

Unemployment continues to increase, and whatever economic recoveries are taking place aren't bringing with them new jobs. For decades, every time there's a new economic crisis, it takes longer and longer for the labor market to recover. After the 2008 financial crisis, it took more than 6 years for employment numbers to return to pre-crisis levels. The current unemployment rates, however, are comparable in scope only to the 1929 Great Depression. With all of this in mind, and with potential future spikes in infections as states reopen, it is imperative to prepare for a very long recovery — especially given how little support has been received by the majority of New Yorkers. 

Instead of freezing rent for tenants, landlords were told they no longer have to make mortgage payments. Those most in need and at risk were never provided with adequate and safe housing. The MTA stopped running a 24-hour train service, and have yet to announce when it will be restored. Meanwhile, Mayor de Blasio has refused to guarantee the redistribution of the NYPD's budget for the purposes of improving access to healthcare, housing, food, social services, and youth programs. And city officials have continued to lie about ICE's presence in New York. 

Four months into the pandemic, we now have a clearer image as to what we can expect in the months to come. At present we are in Phase Two of the Governor and Mayor's plans to reopen New York City, with Phase Three scheduled for Monday. Just as we felt in March, we are distrustful of the city, state, and federal government's expertise and intentions in how they're managing this crisis. 

If the people have made it this far, it is by virtue of collectively taking care of each other and keeping each other safe. This idea forms the basis of the very thing that many across the city have been doing every week, and that Woodbine invites you to do with us: mutual aid.

When we talk about "mutual aid" we mean a form of cooperation in which people exchange their resources to help one another, and build their collective capacity as a community. We at Woodbine are not experts or professionals, but rather community volunteers dedicated to making sure we all get through this crisis together. We each help ourselves by helping others. 

We want to continue sharing information, resources, stories, and experiences from members in our community during this time. We know the future remains as uncertain as it did in March. It will be up to us to support each other and self-organize among neighbors here in Ridgewood and beyond, to survive and fight through this difficult time.

As we enter the summer, we know there can be no simple return to “normal.” And so, it is up to us to make this a time of reinvention. 

Interviews

Yolanda

My husband is the one who works, he works in construction. At the beginning of the pandemic, he wasn’t working, but now he’s gone back. We haven’t received anything from the government, they haven’t given us any help. But we’ve come here for the last two weeks and it’s great, a free supermarket, it’s helped us a lot. About the protests, well, I think people are crazy, haha. We’ve lived in countries where this is happening all the time, but here it seems like there are laws, it’s different! And look, the people who are protesting also tell us to go back to our countries and stuff, so I don’t know. 

Rosa

My niece told me about Woodbine and it’s the first time I’m coming. The pandemic has changed a lot, obviously. My kids now have to attend school online and they haven’t gotten used to it, I have one kid in 10th grade and one in 9th. Yes, we’ve seen the protests, one went by here the other day. I don’t like the insanity at all, but of course, everyone deserves to live, and the police shouldn’t kill people like they killed that man. 

Elvia

I’ve come to Woodbine every week for two months. I’ve lived in Ridgewood for fifteen years and the neighborhood has changed a lot. Five years ago white people started moving here, my rent went up from $1600 to $2000 a month. But I like living here, it’s calm, not like some of the surrounding neighborhoods, and neighbors help each other. 

Patricia

We’ve gone three months without work now, and the government hasn’t given us any assistance. Paying rent is becoming increasingly difficult, we paid it this month, but I don’t know how it’s going to be in the months to come. It’s really hard to know the future right now.

Shellyne Rodriguez - Take Back the Bronx

Take Back the Bronx has been around for about 10 years, and for the last couple of years, we’ve been focusing on the way the city creates the perfect environment for developers to gentrify. We successfully fought rezoning, we’ve been doing tenant organizing in Section 8 buildings, we’re trying to build tenant unions, to get strong together. We have a history of organizing around pig brutality and murder, Ramarley Graham and Reynaldo Cuevas both happened while we’ve been around. We are one of the groups in the FTP formation, which really came to fruition around Cuomo adding 500 cops to the MTA system. The result of that was children getting beat up by police on subway platforms, Adrian Napier who’s 19 getting a gun put in his face on a subway car last October. We participated in the citywide effort to pressure the governor and mayor to pull these pigs out of the subway because essentially it was criminalizing the poor. Take Back the Bronx is about community control of land and housing, and mobilizing comes into that, we can’t self-determine if we don’t move. 

When COVID hit we pivoted towards mutual aid. We’re all volunteers, all the food is donated, all the drivers are donating their time. We have three teams covering the north, southeast, and southwest parts of the Bronx. Last weekend we did 41 deliveries of groceries and PPE. We’re continuing our mutual aid because this COVID shit isn’t over. We have a lot of new members, so catching people up to speed and figuring out our internal structure. We gotta be with the energy in the air, and with the political awakening that’s happened. 

We try to keep our ear to the ground. The Bronx is last of the last, it’s the poorest borough, the South Bronx is one of the poorest congressional districts in the country. We are the lumpen-proletariat, we don’t have the same resources to mobilize that Brooklyn and Manhattan have. Manhattan used to be the centralized location, but it’s becoming less and less so, gentrification has pushed counterculture over the Williamsburg Bridge, and deeper into Brooklyn, so now uptown is really uptown. The counterculture in Brooklyn really thrives, and a very robust decade’s worth of gentrification has brought with it a radical left milieu, but we don’t have that in the Bronx. 

We’re fighting the non-profits and service providers more than we’re fighting anyone else, as they co-opt the language and set a tone. COVID was an opportunity to bring back mutual aid, and we’ve been doing a lot of propaganda, this isn’t charity, we’re giving you this now, but we’ll ask you for something tomorrow. We have to continue this conversation about taking care of each other. There’s a certain level of poverty that I remember, in the 80s and 90s when nobody had shit, and what came along with that was mutual aid by necessity, creating a framework and a culture that we have to look out for each other. Because we’re gonna be out of work, things are gonna run low, a lot of businesses aren't coming back. We’re about to go through a dark period, darker than it’s been, so how do we solidify as a community. 

We have to build the culture of the block, the buildings, and the neighbors. It has to be that way to abolish the police, to re-sow the social fabric, which is what’s broken. It broke ages ago, in the 50s and 60s it was ripped apart by people like Robert Moses, and we have to sow that shit back together.

Odalis Valdivieso - Visual Artist and Educator

I am currently teaching from my place, which was the immediate consequence of the closing of all schools. Educators were forced to redesign their private spaces as mini-classrooms or mini-studios, while still emotionally reacting to the turn of events. We had to invest in additional video cameras, lights, and microphones to maximize the quality of the streaming. We are working extra hours pre-recording instructional videos and building additional materials to facilitate learning. What I have found most challenging is the swift insertion of vocabulary related to uncertainty, vulnerability, and mortality; on how to address deception or to cope with mourning; on how to accept mobility limitations and the meaning of physicality; as well as to help students understand feelings of blurriness and anxiety while still dealing with my own. It took two and a half months for the school system to distribute laptops to all the households in need, yet that doesn’t guarantee wifi, engagement, nor even parental support. If we include the non-English language students, the ones living in shelters, or even the intellectually disabled, the scenario becomes even more opaque. 

The entire school system is already facing major budget cuts, some courses will end, there will be furloughs, and the laying-off of at least 25% of the higher-education staff is already in place, adding more instability here in NYC. We need understanding and to give ourselves space for slowing down from the pre-pandemic accelerated lives we had.

Online learning will remain until the end of the year, something I find challenging but hopefully, it will teach us how to take advantage of the situation to explore new models of education. Young people already connect digitally with each other and they understand its potential, yet as social beings, physical interaction is critically necessary to trigger their minds. The lack of this contact is affecting and teaching us all. We need more feminist theories in the school curriculum that propose an expansion in the understanding of what we are as terrestrial beings, what’s the meaning of connectivity and how to see our house, neighborhood, and cities as 'cared-spaces', and the build-up of mutual aid environments without forgetting our role as one of the millions of critters on the planet. We cannot forget the role of schools as co-parenting infrastructures, that quickly need to adapt to the changing times and to become extra cautious when it comes to our embodied social life. The reopening of these workplaces cannot be based on the modernist models of individual hyper-productivity but instead on collective hyper-care for one another.

Bikash Kharel - Nepalese Indian Restaurant

Given the circumstances, everything is okay. We’re all in the same boat, we’re holding it down. Having a restaurant right now is not as viable as it once was, as the economy is declining. Restaurants that already had a take-out and delivery base and were able to stay open are doing okay, but those that had to shut down and are slowly reopening, there’s a downturn, there’s more competition.

If the situation is as severe as they say it is, I do not see dine-in opening up anytime soon. If that was their way of making money, it’s a difficult situation. First they were saying dine-in could operate at 50% capacity, now they’re saying 25-30%, but that ratio doesn’t really help because you have to pay employees to keep the floor running. I’m skeptical there will be droves of people coming into restaurants, even in two months. I see this dragging into September or October. 

As of right now, we’re family-based, it’s pops, me, my brother, my uncle, we’re putting everything together. Our family has a lot of fear of going back into the economy, everyone has their pre-existing health conditions, but there’s no other viable way for us, there are no resources for restaurants to survive if we don’t go back into the economy, we have no choice. Things are uncertain and it might bring problems, as a family we’re adapting to that, but we want to provide for the neighborhood and get back on our feet.

Now we all have to focus on how we’re spending our money, people have to watch where their money goes, is it to the restaurant, to suppliers, is their money going to the business or to a third party that’s making billions. If you can spend your money directly within the local economy rather than it going to all these online fees, that’s making a big difference for us right now.

Hannah Williams - Rock Steady Farm

My wife is a vegetable farmer, and when we left NYC a few years ago I ended up farming by accident. I’m the CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) coordinator for Rock Steady. I do the admin work, sales, customer service. This is our fifth season.

When COVID hit initially, the farm was concerned about the safety of our crew and navigating everything. Restaurants were closing and futures were uncertain so a big portion of our wholesale was gone. But now there has been an astronomical increase in demand. Last year we had 270 members in our CSA, and this year we’re pushing 400. People are discovering local food and really asking themselves, “where does my food come from and who is my farmer?” So a lot of the work that we’ve done from the beginning is picking up steam. There’s been more awareness about food access, and a huge increase in donations. 65% of our food from the season is going to low-income folks. It feels like a good direction.

We want to continue to scale up and serve as many CSA members as possible and continue to move more and more food to lower-income folks in our community. Rock Steady has been involved in a lot of regional conversations around food access that have started because of the pandemic, organizing a larger network of fundraising that supports local farms.

I hope that the people who are asking these questions about food will stick around until well after this crisis passes. The wealth gap and food insecurity have been around since before the pandemic. After people experience getting their food directly from farmers, the quality, taste, experience, that becomes the new normal.  

Free Ridgewood

Protest Tips: Go with a friend, stay together, wear a mask, wear comfortable shoes and clothes, charge your phone, put a PIN-lock on your phone, bring water and snacks, rest when you need to.

The First Amendment protects your right to assemble and express your views through protest. When you are lawfully present in any public space, you have the right to photograph anything in plain view, including federal buildings and the police. You don’t need a permit to march in the streets or on sidewalks.

If you are stopped by police: Ask if you are free to leave. If the officer says yes, walk away. You never have to consent to a search of yourself or your belongings.

If you are arrested: Information you should provide to the cops: government name, date of birth, address, any pressing medical needs. If the cops ask you anything else, say “I am invoking my right to remain silent. I am invoking my right to talk to a lawyer.” Do not disclose your visa status to anyone, except your attorney. Don’t lie to cops or federal agents. This can result in additional charges. You have the right to make a local phone call, and if you’re calling your lawyer, police are not allowed to listen. Police officers may not confiscate or demand to view your photographs or video without a warrant.

If your rights have been violated: Write down everything you remember, including the officers’ badge and patrol car numbers and the agency they work for. Get the contact information for witnesses. Take photographs of any injuries.

Once you are released: Don’t talk to anyone except your lawyer about the details of your arrest. Don’t post about it on social media. Anything you document could be used against you. Do not miss your court date - if you do, a warrant will be issued for your arrest. If you can’t make your court date, call the NLG-NYC beforehand to learn your options.

Please write us about Issue #3, any ideas, responses, updates, interviews, resources, offers, etc: woodbine@riseup.net

Free Ridgewood was produced with Emma BB Doyle, Anna Gelb, and Sofia Peppe. Layout and edits: Odalis Valdivieso.