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Breakfast-of-candidates: a lesson in political non-cynicism

Over at Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn, Louise Crawford has been posting writeups from her interviews with candidates for City Council in the 39th District, and her interview with me is now up.

Like her blog in general, these interviews are refreshingly non-cynical.  Unfortunately, too much of both political journalism and the blogosphere go for the "gotcha" moment.  But each of her profiles really give a nice sense of the person, viewed synpathetically, as though -- well -- you decided to sit down for breakfast and try to get to know them. 

A bit of the interview follows.  You can read the rest, and her other interviews with candidates for the 39th District (the 33rd is still to come), on her blog.

Brad Lander was already seated at Sweet Melissa's when we met for breakfast one morning in late February. In our emails, we decided to meet "after drop off," which is parent parlance for after dropping your kid at elementary school.

With two kids at PS 107 on 8th Avenue in Park Slope, Brad comes across as an engaged advocate for public education. He admires PS 107's principal Cynthia Holton because, he says, "she hires great teachers and the school has a welcoming, nurturing atmosphere that embraces parent participation."
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We talked about his campaign blog, which featured a touching story (written by Brad) about the memorial for soldier Julian Brennan, the Park Sloper who died in Iraq last year.
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Waiting for breakfast to arrive, I asked Brad questions about his early life. He told me about growing up in a Jewish liberal home in the mid-west, where the ideals of the civil rights movements and "the idea of fairness in society" was always emphasized by his public school teacher mom and Legal Aid lawyer dad.  

While an undergrad at the University of Chicago Brad became engaged with the idea of the city. Harold Washington, the African American mayor of Chicago at the time, was another major influence for creating a coalition of African Americans, Latinos and whites. "It was an Obama-like moment in Chicago," Brad remembers.

In 1994 Brad moved to Brooklyn when he got a job at the Fifth Avenue Committee, a group that develops and manages affordable housing, creates economic opportunity, and combats gentrification-induced displacement.  

A policy wonk with a deep interest in community organizing, Brad lit up when he talked about the people he helped at the Fifth Avenue Committee.

He tells me about one person in particular, who grew up in the Gowanus Houses. This young man spent time in prison with a felony conviction. When he came back to the neighborhood he showed up at the Fifth Avenue Committee ready to turn his life around. He got a job through First Source Staffing, an employment service run by the Fifth Avenue Committee and is now employed and a husband and father in Brooklyn.  

Brad's bio on his website also includes the tale of Carmen and Felisa Soto,two 89-year-old sisters  who were able to stay in their apartment after the Fifth Avenue Committee launched the Displacement Free Zone, a way to prevent landlords from evicting families and seniors.

This kind of success seems particularly meaningful to Brad. But friends and colleagues have always wondered when Brad, with his obvious smarts and leadership qualities, was going to run for office.

Toward a 21st Century WPA: Arts, culture, and community recovery

On Thursday, the Pratt Center for Community Development's Initiative for Arts & Community Change -- led by Caron Atlas -- held a fantastic roundtable that brought together artists, community organizers, union members, housing and community developers to talk about the role that arts and culture can play in helping communities recover from the economic downturn, and in strengthening community organizing and development efforts.

It was a truly inspiring day, filled with the passion and insights that come from getting people together across sectors that don't usually talk to one another, and across lines of race, class, and generation.  The room was filled with people with deep passion for social justice, real experience in winning campaigns and making great things happen, and the magic that comes from engaging people creatively -- whether through dance or drama or storytelling, in new or old media.

We learned about the remarkable arts programs in the Works Progress Administration (one of the core public works programs in FDR's New Deal), about the grassroots community organizing and arts work that made the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) program both compelling and controversial, and about SEIU's "Bread and Roses" program.  In all of those programs, innovative approaches to arts and culture helped people who often don't think of themselves as creative to take voice, to tell their stories, to find hope in times of despair, to recognize common struggles and come together with others to make change.   

And we worked to apply lessons learned from the past to the situation we face today.  Across the country, people are working to connect creativity and community.  SEIU is bringing workers armed with hand-held video cameras to Capitol Hill to lobby members of Congress on the Employee Free Choice Act.  Public Allies here in NYC is working to place young people interested in the arts in year-long positions in community-based organizations.

But there is much more to be done.  Yes, we need to build new schools, subway stations, and bridges.  Yes, we need to retrofit millions of homes to be more energy-efficient.  Yes, we need to provide funds to teachers and health care workers and bus-drivers.  But we also need to engage communities in the process of recovery, to tap into the strength that exists on every block where a few foreclosures are threatening blight, or where a few people have lost their jobs.  This is the lesson that my son Marek took away from President Obama's Inaugural Address -- that the problems we face cannot be solved simply in Washington DC, but that people in every community are going to have to come together to provide mutual support and ideas and action.

Creative efforts -- like the Groundswell Community Mural Project's work in our community, or the move that the Story Pirates made with my daughter's after-school puppet-making class about why you don't need to be afraid of puppets, or Elizabeth Streb's remarkable Streb Lab for Action Mechanics, or the Urban Bush Women's current project on health care -- provide powerful ways for people to come together, to express themselves, to see commonalities and differences, to turn fear and pain into hope and courage.  I hope we can find ways to nurture and support such efforts in these challenging times ... because I know these efforts will help nurture and support us.

What were the odds? My first night of door-knocking

On Wednesday, I went out on my first night of door-knocking in Cobble Hill.  Over the years, I've talked to a lot of people about issues -- encouraging them to get involved in campaigns for affordable housing, or to strengthen tenant protections, or help create new jobs, or to push for rezonings to preserve neighborhood quality-of-life.  And I've knocked on door for the Obama campaign, and for progressive local candidates here in New York City.

But I've never knocked on doors to ask people to vote for me ... so in some ways it was a new and strange experience.  Lots of people (understandably) don't want to talk at all, so they don't answer the doorbell, or they explain that they are in the middle of making dinner or giving their kid a bath.  Others make a minute to talk, and I learned about some of what matters to a few folks on Warren Street -- improving the environment and addressing climate change, saving Long Island College Hospital, helping small businesses cope with the economic downturn.

At one door, I rang the bell downstairs, under the stoop, and then a man came out from the upstairs door onto his stoop, polite, but eyeing me a bit skeptically.  As I walked slowly up a stair or two, his wife came out behind him.  I introduced myself: "Hi, I'm Brad Lander.  I'm running for City Council, and I'd love a minute to talk about the issues that matter to you."  She looked at me, and said: "Are you David Lander's son?"

Now, my parents have lived in St. Louis, Missouri all their lives.  They love to visit Brooklyn, but it is still pretty rare that I run into someone here that knows them, that I've never met.  

But it turns out that Fran Mendlow (nee Seltzer) graduated University City High School with both my parents (my folks met in kindergarten, and when through University City public schools together), and was friends with them more than 40 years ago in St. Louis.

I've been hoping that my record of results at the Fifth Avenue Committee and the Pratt Center for Community Development -- on affordable housing, creating jobs, strengthening neighborhood quality-of-life, and fighting for a more sustainable city -- would resonate as I talk to new people.  And I even imagined that my family ties might help a bit.  Between connections at at P.S. 107 (where our kids go to school and Meg's on the School Leadership Team), little league baseball, basketball, and soccer, swimming and art classes, Meg's work at the Brennan Center for Justice, etc. there are many chances to meet someone in the neighborhood who knows Meg, Marek, or Rosa.

But what were the odds of meeting new voters who know and like my parents from high school in St. Louis?  (I wish they were larger, because my folks are great people, and anyone who knows them would indeed by much more likely to vote for me).  Their class was just a few hundred people, forty years ago, half-a-continent away.

I don't know if the right word is bashert, or kismet, or just dumb luck.  But I'm taking it as a good sign.

Very Hungry Caterpillar Day

Who knew?  But it turns out Friday, March 6th was the 40th anniversary of the publication of Eric Carle's marvelous children's book, "The Very Hungry Caterpillar."

To celebrate, I was invited to read a few Eric Carle books to kindergarten classes from P.S. 130 at the Windsor Terrace Library, along with the great P.S. 130 principal, Maria Nunziata.  She read "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" and "Little Cloud."  I read "From Head to Toe" and "Today is Monday."  We both wore goofy looking antennae, and made fools of ourselves on the various animal motions. 

Besides having a great time with the kindergartners (the same age as my daughter, Rosa, who goes to P.S. 107 in Park Slope, the schools that's in the "Knuffle Bunny" books), I was very impressed with the Windsor Terrace Library, and the partnership they have with P.S. 130.  Classes from the school are constantly in the library, to read, learn, and research; there are after-school programs every day; and many speakers and community programs.

Neighborhood branch libraries are an underappreciated treasure of our city.  Not only are they a marvelous place to read Eric Carle books and hold after-school programs.  More than 50% of Brooklyn households do not have broadband internet access at home, and over one-third of them say the public library is their primary place of access.

Unfortunately, the libraries are taking a big hit in this financial crisis, with large cuts in both public and private funds.  They've already had to close on Sundays ... which means its now a day when half of New Yorkers can't check email or use the internet.  The Brooklyn Public Library system has launched a Support Our Shelves campaign -- check it out, and consider contributing time or money if you can.