Jun
26
Jun
25
A number of Poughkeepsie residents walked through areas of the city Saturday and cleaned up vacant, foreclosed properties and buildings to point up a need for more affordable housing. The effort, spearheaded by the group Community Voices Heard, called on banks to clean up the properties and make them available for homeless residents. Poughkeepsie resident Sheila Blanding was among those marching through the city. “These banks got away with crashing the economy and the housing market, and yet they still own homes in Poughkeepsie that used to belong to people,” she said. “Now these homes are sitting empty, and at the same time we have families who are homeless. Who needs these homes more – the banks or people?”
Jun
22
We joined Senator Michael Gianaris, Assemblymember Brian Kavanagh, the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law and other advocates on June 7, 2012 to endorse the New York Voter Empowerment Act. Brian Pearson, a VOCAL-NY member from Queens who is formerly incarcerated, delivered the following statement during the campaign launch at New York City Hall.
Read the rest of this entry
Jun
17
VOCAL-NY knocked on Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s door on Sunday, May 20th with other affiliates from National People’s Action and the National Domestic Workers Alliance to demand he support a Robin Hood tax and a thorough investigation of the bankers who caused the housing crisis.
Jun
12
On April 25th, VOCAL-NY joined ACT UP for a march marking their 25th anniversary that called for a Financial Speculation Tax, also known as the “Robin Hood Tax,” to fund domestic and global healthcare, including universal access to HIV/AIDS treatment. A Robin Hood Tax would raise revenue to save lives while discouraging speculative activity that helped crash our economy, which is why we’ve been advocating for it since the start of the financial crisis, including World AIDS Day in 2011 and the Showdown on Wall Street in 2010.
Jun
07
Community Voices Heard joined with our partners in PBNYC to discuss the Participatory Budgeting process this morning. Below are some of the presentations shared, and background on the event itself.
Jun
02
April 23, 2012: The following joint statement (which was published broadly by the Associated Press) was released today in response to the April 20th Associated Press story reporting that the Committee to Save New York failed to comply with “state regulations to show how it raised $9 million to support Gov Andrew Cuomo’s agenda while claiming to be a charity.” Sondra Youdelman, Executive Director of Community Voices Heard (CVH), and Sean Barry, Executive Director of Voices of Community Activists and Leaders-NY, released this joint statement.