On June 14th, 2013 students from The High School for Enterprise, Business and Technology led a tour of the area surrounding Grand Street Campus. This walking tour was the culmination of the Leadership Workshop developed by the National Congress of Neighborhood Women (NCNW) and Student Community Action Tours (SCAT). The students spent the spring interviewing neighborhood leaders, researching the history of Williamsburg, and reflecting on community leadership and power.

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‘The National Congress of Neighborhood Women began partly as a defense of the values of neighborhood women, particularly white, working-class, ethnic women, who in the 1970’s were feeling misunderstood and unheard. Continue reading →

Neighborhood College Program Photograph by Janie Eisenberg

‘The women made it clear that they did not want to be viewed simply as recipients of services and subsidies. They felt they had valuable experience and skills to offer from having provided services informally Continue reading →

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‘As we focused on the obstacle course neighborhood women -welfare poor, working poor, and working-class women who live side-by-side – negotiated each day just to survive, we decided that the obstacle course itself had to change. Continue reading →

‘The NCNW newsletter was an interesting mix of articles on women’s groups across the country, the organization’s local efforts in Brooklyn and lobbying efforts in Washington, D.C., recipes, oral histories, essays and personal columns, and letters to the editor. The newsletter went through many incarnations as different women joined the group and contributed to it. The first version Continue reading →

In January 1977, the National Congress of Neighborhood Women and the Brooklyn YWCA opened the first battered women shelter in NY, The Center for Elimination of Violence in the Family. The problem of battered women had just started to gain attention. Evidence showed it was a widespread issue in the borough of Brooklyn. In 1974-75, out of 700 hundred women filing for divorce in Kings County represented by Brooklyn Legal Services, Corporation B, 41.5% complained of physical assaults by their husbands. In Park Slope, the 72nd Police Precinct informally reported in 1976 that 50% of their night calls were from battered women. Continue reading →

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In 1982, the NYC Health and Hospitals Corporation (HHC) announced its plan to close the 67-year-old Greenpoint Hospital on this site and replace it with the 600-bed Woodhull Medical and Mental health Center in Williamsburg which had been built in 1978 but remained vacant because the city said it could not afford to open it.  The Greenpoint Hospital Task Force had created plans to build a nursing home Continue reading →

‘The spaces will blur the traditional divisions between working and living. They will allow for personal privacy, peer-support, and bring permanent residents, visitors and the community together under the same roof. Embedded within the LLC concept is the belief in life beyond retirement; the value of multiplying partnerships and interface between grassroots groups; the opportunity Continue reading →

“You Can empowered students to manage their own education and living conditions” Juanita Orengo-Rodriguez, director from You Can 1995-2005

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In 1992 after a riot inside Eastern District High School, where a student got stabbed in the head, Juanita Orengo-Rodriguez organized a boycott at the school. Juanita Orengo-Rodriguez had been the PTA director for three years. Her community activism had been greatly influenced by her participation as member of Neighborhood Women of Williamsburg-Greenpoint. Continue reading →

‘The complexity of community life today presents problems so difficult that we believe woman need a special kind of network to empower and support us becoming strong, effective, and efficient leaders.’

Jan Peterson, NCNW founder

The Neighborhood Women (NW) Legacy Project intends to highlight the role of grassroots women’s leadership in the historical development, growth and vitality of their communities. Continue reading →