Please join the AREJ Organizing Team in welcoming a few new folks to the team!
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Jen Brown, Silke von der Emde , and Brian Robinson
Category Archives: Celebrations
January Celebrations – Good things happening in our community!
My Brothers Keeper – Arlington Chapter
President Obama launched the My Brother’s Keeper Initiative in 2014 to address persistent opportunity gaps faced by boys and young men of color and ensure that all young people can reach their full potential.
Arlington High School inaugurated their chapter of My Brother’s Keeper (MBK) last week – Arlington students and families should contact Mr. Miguel Suarez (msuarez@acsdny.org), Arlington HS MBK Coordinator, for more information about how to participate.
Mid-Hudson Aquatics and Heatwaves
Mid Hudson Aquatics is a Poughkeepsie based not for profit organization dedicated to promoting aquatic awareness through teaching confidence in water safety, learn to swim, fitness, and competition with an emphasis on diversity and inclusion. Mid-Hudson Heatwaves Builds Community for Local Hispanic Swimmers
The Poughkeepsie Healthy Black and LatinX Coalition
Their goal is to address health disparities within the Black and Latinx communities in the Cities of Newburgh and Poughkeepsie, which are under served, unaware of resources, and under utilizing health care services, putting them at risk. As part of the coalition, service providers, local government, and the greater community will identify additional health disparities to be addressed together.
The Poughkeepsie chapter meets on the Second Thursday of every month from 9:30-11am. The group sends out information about what is going on in the community at these meetings and through its Facebook page. Please join it! https://www.facebook.com/groups/nphblcoalition
Vassar College Land Acknowledgement
We acknowledge that Vassar stands upon the homelands of the Munsee Lenape, Indigenous peoples who have an enduring connection to this place despite being forcibly displaced by European colonization.
Munsee Lenape peoples continue today as the Stockbridge-Munsee Community in Wisconsin, the Delaware Tribe and the Delaware Nation in Oklahoma, and the Munsee Delaware Nation in Ontario. This acknowledgment, however, is insufficient without our reckoning with the reality that every member of the Vassar community since 1861 has benefited from these Native peoples’ displacement, and it is hollow without our efforts to counter the effects of structures that have long enabled—and that still perpetuate—injustice against Indigenous Americans. To that end, we commit to build and sustain relationships with Native communities; to expand opportunities at Vassar for Native students, as well as Native faculty and other employees; and to collaborate with Native nations to know better the Indigenous peoples, past and present, who care for this land.
Flashback
Molly McGlennen wrote and recited the poem, “Vigilance,” in the fall of 2016 in support of the Dakota Access Pipeline protests (hashtag #NoDAPL) and against the Trump election. The poem was featured in the exhibition entitled “The World After January 20th, 2017,” curated by Judy Nichols and Monica Church, in the wake of Trump’s inauguration, which brought together the work of community artists, poets and activists through an exhibit and protest that circled Main building at Vassar. “Each morning we wake up to a new order: bans, firings, and threats to liberty, humanity and the Earth.” The work continues.
VIGILANCE
This winter you will need insulated boots
and gloves; propane and wood, though
wind generators are ideal.
You never knew camp etiquette
would read like a manifesto.
A thin shadow cast by shortening
days. Solstice approaches
then falls away. Everywhere, it falls
away. Sub-zero hands direct
kinship, traffic, a camera’s shutter.
What more can greed take, when protracted
songs pitch shelter against
sets of men’s pockets,
whether thieves, plutocrats,
churchgoers. Everything, you say.
You erect tents and websites, assemble
pittance before long histories of amassment.
Free land, free labor, makes the rapacious few.
Come spring, you will notice
new needs. A windbreaker, you hope. For now
those stars set deep in what seems
a blacker sky.
You pluck one, you think,
and place it in your gloved palm, almost
your heart. Almost your life.
From Our Bearings, by Molly McGlennen. © 2020 by Molly McGlennen. Reprinted by permission of the University of Arizona Press and the Author.
July Celebrations – Good things happening in our community!
POUGHKEEPSIE COMMUNITY WIFI PROJECT (PKCW)
Nubian Directions II Inc., a long standing local not-for-profit with a history of working with low-income, under-served, academically under-prepared, multi-cultural populations in the City of Poughkeepsie, continues to move forward to provide free Wi-Fi access to “unconnected” City of Poughkeepsie residents.
It is the objective goal to create a local WiFi project that is “community owned-supported”. The WiFi mesh network will aid in closing the socio-economic digital divide while building a technology inclusive community. As NDI “builds-out” and expands the PKCW WiFi mesh network in the City of Poughkeepsie, we are very mindful that we need to prepare quickly in case there is a second round of COVID-19 in the upcoming fall/winter months. NDI will continue to work with our local colleges, school district, City/County officials, CBOs/non-profits, homeowners, faith-based and civic organizations, businesses, in order to expedite the site locations and WiFi equipment installations.
Free WiFi is available at the following locations; Winnikee Avenue, Mansion St. Square Park, Malcolm X, and Pershing Avenue Park. Local city residents and Poughkeepsie City School District students can now enjoy free WiFi/internet access.
Interested parties are welcome to join us and email us for more information about serving on a volunteer WiFi committee. Contact Nubian Directions (845) 452- 8574 or email rwright@nubiandirections.org.