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Composting the Patriarchy: A Feminist Green New Deal for Sanitation


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Shahana Hanif (photo: @ShahanaFromBK)


Trash is too often an afterthought. Voters and friends pause when I share my love for recycling, composting, and colorful trash cans. But, as a climate champion endorsed by Sunrise NYC, Resilience PAC, TREEage NYC, and NYC’s chapter of Sierra Club, I know that waste equity is critical to achieving New York City’s climate resiliency goals.

We need to stop thinking of waste as ‘trash.’ Waste is valuable material; compost is nutritious food for our community gardens’ soil. Over one third of New York City’s waste is made up of food and organics that should be composted. Instead, this resource is thrown away and transported to decompose in landfills, which contributed to 3.5% of New York City’s carbon emissions in 2019. These landfills pollute Black and brown neighborhoods as far away as Virginia, furthering the disproportionate burden of waste inequity, pollution, and the immediate impacts of climate change on communities of color.

Environmental racism is local to Brooklyn too. It should be no surprise that predominantly Black and brown, working class, and immigrant neighborhoods, like my home neighborhood Kensington, are not prioritized in waste collection and other sanitation services. 

I am calling for a Feminist Green New Deal for Brooklyn.

To me, feminism means collective action to address harm. Through the City Council District 39 Participatory Budgeting process, our community created the largest community-based compost facility in Brooklyn at the DEP/DSNY Salt Lot in Gowanus. Repairing the harm of waste inequity across the city and District 39 means investing in more sanitation services and creating good composting and recycling green jobs.

During the pandemic, the city’s residential composting program and environmental education programs were also completely cut and the Department of Sanitation had its budget slashed by $106 million, despite operating the city’s emergency feeding programs. Even though $2.9 million was restored in July 2020 for community composting, it was only for a few drop-off sites across the city, mostly in Manhattan. This lack of service has led to trash buildup.

To clean up our neighborhood, my neighbors and I have had to call in programs like ACE New York to pick up waste and rely on neighborhood trash cleanups organized by community members, like the Kensington Stewards and Ocean Parkway Cleanup. A Feminist Green New Deal calls for us to compensate those caring for our communities, instead of relying on nonprofits, private organizations, or volunteers to keep our neighborhoods clean.

As a lifelong resident of Kensington, I know the pandemic budget cuts did not cause this waste crisis. In our district, neighbors in Park Slope have long had curbside compost pick-up, while residents in Kensington and Borough Park do not. We must fully fund the Department of Sanitation to equitably handle waste and prioritize waste-overburdened neighborhoods. We need a comprehensive citywide composting program that will produce local green jobs, lower the carbon footprints of New Yorkers, and enhance our green spaces.

Composting is one local component to addressing climate change. We must dedicate resources to protect our existing compost sites, and expand funding for programs, like the NYC Compost Project, which provides training for community members to build and maintain more composting sites. We should also push for increased flexibility of park space for gardening and composting to encourage community engagement, environmental education, and ecological stewardship.

The climate crisis is at the crossroads of racial justice, migrant justice, economic justice, labor justice, and gender justice. We cannot waste another minute. We must secure a climate resilient future by building dynamic local solutions to our waste problem.

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Shahana Hanif is a Democratic candidate for City Council in District 39 in Brooklyn. On Twitter @ShahanaFromBK.

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One Crime Question Mayoral Candidates Still Need to Answer


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Ending violence against women (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)


In poll after poll in the lead-up to the mayoral primary election, New Yorkers are citing crime and public safety as a top issue of concern. Yet debate after debate, the question never gets asked, “what will you do to root out sexual assault and street harassment as part of rebuilding New York and creating a world class city?”

Women want to know: when will leaders realize that running on a platform to transform how we treat women is a winning one.

It’s an area of crime that no candidate for mayor has seized fully. It won’t come as a surprise that the two leading women in the race, Maya Wiley and Kathryn Garcia (both of whom NOW-NYC has endorsed), have raised the issue in debates and on the campaign trail. Other candidates, Andrew Yang and Dianne Morales, have said they are in support of decrimihalizing the sex trade -- which sexually exploits the most vulnerable among us and goes hand-in-hand with other criminal activity. Morales has a vision for it, with red light districts around the city. Ms. Morales, how will you decide which lucky neighborhoods become magnets for sex buyers and violence?

We already know that the NYPD has to spend resources and time tracking and investigating human traffickers who import immigrant women and recruit local women and girls from our poorest neighborhoods to meet existing demand from wealthier New Yorkers looking to buy a sex act.

Red light districts would certainly exacerbate the problem of rape and sexual assault. As it stands, the NYPD hasn’t been able to adequately respond to the current levels of assault. Year-to-date, there have been nearly 1,500 rapes reported; and as we know, what’s reported is a fraction of the real picture.

This past year, Women's Justice NOW, in partnership with NOW-NYC, conducted a survey to evaluate the NYPD’s response to survivors of sexual assault and rape. All 20 rape crisis programs and first responder organizations, working with an estimated 5,000 sex crimes victims, said the same thing: the quality of Special Victims Division (SVD) investigations varies widely (19) or that SVD handles these cases poorly most of the time (1). Not one organization said that SVD handles sex crimes well most of the time.

When asked how providers would rate the job SVD is doing, 13 out of 20 organizations (65%) said “not so good” or “poor.” Not one organization believed that the NYPD’s SVD was doing an “excellent” job. Only 3 out of 20 organizations (15%) said “good.”

These results go hand-in-hand with the findings of a 2018 New York City Department of Investigation report, which found a persistent lack of investment in SVD and in the training and experience levels of its investigators.

How is it that in 2021 -- four years after MeToo had its breakout moment and three years after the devastating DOI report led to rallies and protests pressuring Mayor de Blasio -- reforming the NYPD’s Special Victims Division is not a major theme candidates for mayor are running on this cycle?

It’s a question worth asking at the final debate and when you get in the voting booth.

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Sonia Ossorio is President of National Organization for Women NY. On Twitter @soniaossorio & @NOW_NYC.

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Primary Voters Must Consider Public Health in the Voting Booth


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Vaccination (photo: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)


For the first time in more than a year, New Yorkers are starting to see a light at the end of the COVID-19 tunnel. The city is finally leaping toward the promised “new normal” as basketball fans flood arenas and restaurant patrons spill into the streets with fewer worries about masking up and keeping distance. When our next mayor and City Council take office in January, we’re optimistic that the covid pandemic will be truly behind us.

But for many New Yorkers, the health disparities that COVID-19 created and exacerbated will be here to stay. The pandemic laid bare the brutal reality that results from an under-resourced and insufficient public health infrastructure.

It is in this environment that New Yorkers are now tasked with making critical decisions about who should lead our city. This is an enormous responsibility and an incredible opportunity to chart a more equitable course. More than ever, voters and candidates alike must consider health equity as the top issue in the upcoming New York City elections. 

For the past 14 months, COVID-19 has justifiably dominated the public health conversation. Everyone has struggled, but for many, the pandemic has only magnified the health disparities that have existed for decades. Before COVID-19, nearly 13% of New Yorkers – a whopping 1.2 million people – experienced food insecurity. Now that number is more than 1.5 million, a 38% increase over just the past year. One in three children in New York don’t have access to enough food. A recent Public Health Solutions survey of New York City residents revealed that 42% of respondents with a COVID-19 diagnosis in their household said they or someone in their household had been laid off in the last year, compared to 24% of those without a COVID-19 case.

Other major public health crises have been ravaging the city since long before anyone had heard of COVID-19. In New York, Black mothers are 12 times more likely to die of pregnancy-related complications than their white neighbors. Despite the Affordable Care Act, 12% of New Yorkers continue to lack any sort of health insurance, a number that has likely increased due to covid-related job loss. Moreover, Black and Latino New Yorkers are far more likely to suffer from asthma as a result of long-standing environmental racism, a likely contributor to higher covid-related death rates among those groups

These issues have long lurked under the surface and at the margins of society, affecting our most vulnerable friends and neighbors. Though many of us eagerly anticipate a return to some semblance of normalcy, we must recognize that for millions of New Yorkers, that “normal” was not nearly enough to begin with. That “normal” is the reason New York’s most marginalized communities suffered the most from COVID-19. As a city, we must do better when it comes to combating these long-neglected public health emergencies, and we should choose our leaders with this mission in mind.

As we emerge post-pandemic, New Yorkers have the opportunity to make our voices heard and to elect leaders that are committed to eradicating every health disparity that our city faces. From the mayor to comptroller to borough presidents to members of the City Council, we have the chance to vote for politicians that are committed to making health equity a key part of the plan to keep New York moving forward.  

The ability to live a long and healthy life depends on whether a person lives in a safe neighborhood; experiences racism or discrimination; enjoys access to medical care, food, and stable housing; or has adequate income, knowledge, and opportunities to make healthy choices. Without systemic changes to our approach to health, and without new infrastructure that addresses the root causes of poor health and puts New Yorkers at the center of the health delivery system, we will be in the same situation and experience the same results again and again.

The major Democratic mayoral candidates have all espoused policies that focus on the need for a healthy city, with plans that range from supporting health clinics in underserved communities to dealing with the maternal health crisis. This is a good start, and it shows that the candidates realize addressing community health must be at the forefront of helping alter the path for millions of New Yorkers. I encourage you to read about their plans.

When you step into the voting booth and consider your options, think about what issues matter most to you. Is it racial justice? Educational reform? A fairer economy? Whatever it may be, it will be unachievable without first addressing the glaring health inequities of our city. Racial justice is impossible when Black and brown New Yorkers are dying from preventable causes at rates far exceeding their white neighbors. Education reform is out of reach so long as one-third of New York’s kids don’t have enough to eat. How can we have an economy that works for everyone when a single medical bill can ruin families? 

When we cast our votes this week and next, it isn’t just a policy decision. It’s a moral one. We have the choice to radically redefine what a healthy city looks like, or the choice to condemn millions of our friends and neighbors to poor health just because of the circumstances of their birth and environment. For decades, health has been an afterthought at the ballot box, but COVID-19 has proven that the status quo simply won’t work any longer. On June 22, let’s finally get this right.  

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Lisa David is the President and CEO of Public Health Solutions.

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