HIGHER ED TODAY
BRONX TIMES REPORTER,4 OCT. 30-NOV. 5, 2020 BTR
Wakefi eld residents
protest shelters
President of the Wakefi eld Taxpayers and
Civic League Virginia Sanders speaks about
how the community doesn’t need more shelters.
Photos by Jason Cohen
Mail: Bronx Times
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BY JASON COHEN
Wealthy residents in the Upper West
Side hired a lawyer and are currently
in a legal battle to force a homeless shelter
out of their community — a starkly
different situation than the one happening
in the blue collar Bronx neighborhood
of Wakefi eld.
In May, the NYC Department of
Homeless services reneged on a promise
to not turn 4747 Bronx Blvd. into a
homeless shelter, without so much as
an email to local stakeholders.
In 2016, the city nixed plans to build
a shelter for people with HIV after outcries
from the public. Residents were
told this was a temporary shelter due
to COVID-19, yet nearly seven months
later, it is still there.
Community Board 12 is home to four
homeless shelters, and the area was recently
targeted for two additional 200
bed shelters — one at East 233rd Street
and the other at Furman Avenue. On
Oct. 21, the Wakefi eld Taxpayers &
Civic League held a rally against homeless
shelters.
“This is where we live, why are they
dumping all of these shelters here?” exclaimed
Virginia Sanders president of
the civic. “Please somebody listen to
us. We don’t need this.”
Sanders stressed that homeless
people need more than a temporary
fi x like 4747 Bronx Blvd. Instead, they
need substantive living arrangements
and services to get their lives on track.
According to Sanders and other
residents, the people staying there disrupt
the quality of life in the neighborhood
by urinating and defecating
in the street, doing drugs outside
and treating residents “like second
class citizens.”
Fellow civic association member Adeyemi
LaCrown Oloruntoba expressed
a similar disgust with the amount of
shelters in Wakefi eld.
According to Oloruntoba, the Department
of Health and Human Services
has not shown Wakefi eld any respect.
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He said that no one is against
homeless people, but residents are
against having the area oversaturated
with shelters.
“What we see going on in this community,
we don’t like it,” he shouted.
“Don’t use our neighborhood to be a
dumping ground for homeless shelters.
That place was meant to be a hotel, not
a homeless shelter.”
Resident Carlton Berkley shared
his frustrations with the Bronx Times.
Berkley has sat in on meeting with
CB12 District Manager George Torres
and DHS, which Berkley said has not
been transparent and refused to say
when the people at 4747 Bronx Blvd.
are leaving.
Berkley felt if the agency gave an exact
date, it would provide some comfort
to residents.
“We don’t want Wakefi eld to be the
homeless capital of NYC,” he said. “We
want affordable housing.”
One of the most crucial ways that CUNY
has committed to its mission in recent years
has been to respond to the evolving needs of
our students after graduation. And the central
strategy of that focus has been to vigorously
pursue partnerships with employers
who share our vision of creating professional
opportunities for students from underserved
communities. It’s an approach
with payoffs for both our students and the
local economy.
Now, of course, there is a new urgency to
this priority: The pandemic confronts New
York with economic challenges we couldn’t
have imagined a year ago, and CUNY is determined
to support its students when they
need it most and to take a leading role in the
city and state’s recovery.
Prior to the coronavirus, we had put together
a team in our workforce programs
office to help CUNY and its colleges forge
connections with private-industry partners
in the city’s largest and most thriving economic
sectors with the goal of creating career
pathways for our students. The result
has been remarkable: Tens of thousands
of professional opportunities in the health
care, finance, tech, real estate, architecture
and cultural sectors. Now we are doubling
down on these efforts, making good on our
mission to propel students up the socioeconomic
ladder at a time when the pandemic
has eliminated thousands of internship and
job opportunities.
One of our newest and most exciting
partnerships is with the New York Jobs
CEO Council, a coalition led by 27 chief executives
of some of the largest employers
in New York including JPMorgan Chase,
Amazon and Microsoft. It’s a collaboration
that will create job opportunities for 25,000
CUNY students with a focus on low-income
and Black, Latinx and Asian communities.
The Jobs CEO Council has a direct impact
on the economy and our partnership will
create a robust pipeline of skilled CUNY
workers into the growing workforce.
This fall we’re also launching our Federal
Work-Study Experimental Site, a program
that will allow both companies and
non-profit organizations to hire some 9,000
CUNY students for paid internships. This
unique opportunity will allow students to
work off campus with private companies at
a time when the pandemic has halted many
on-campus activities, including work-study
employment that so many students depend
on. And with many businesses struggling
and in need of financial support to hire and
retain staff, this initiative allows employers
to hire CUNY workers because costs are
shared with the federal government.
And then there is the CUNY 90-day Upskilling
Challenge, which is providing free
virtual skills training and includes partnerships
with Google and IBM to connect
students to employers that are hiring during
COVID-19.
Meanwhile, the continuing pandemic
keeps us focused on the need to engage
our students with the career opportunities
available to them in the healthcare field —
and to provide them with the training and
experience that will give them the skills and
credentials they’ll need to walk into wellpaying
jobs.
Our ongoing relationship with Montefiore
Health System is a prime example.
All three of our colleges in the Bronx have
partnerships with Montefiore that help prepare
their students for jobs in health care.
At Lehman College, Montefiore is a partneremployer
of the Braven Accelerator Course,
a professional readiness program that was
launched in the spring and helps students
build skills in the health service field.
Montefiore and Hostos Community College
have worked closely to develop and deliver
health care training for students. H.E.R.O.
High School, which opened in 2013 in the
Bronx as a collaboration between CUNY,
Montefiore and the city Department of Education,
provides an integrated six-year program
in which students gain healthcare
workplace experience while they earn a Regents
diploma and an associate’s degree in
nursing or community health from Hostos.
Montefiore also serves as an industry adviser
in the development of a new associate
degree in health sciences at Bronx Community
College.
The list goes on: CUNY partnerships
with financial firms like Centerbridge Partners
and Deerfield Management, trade associations
like the Real Estate Board of New
York, economic development companies
like the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development
Corporation and nonprofits like the Urban
Land Institute are helping us weather the
pandemic and keep our students on track to
be part of the recovery. With support from
the Mellon Foundation, we are expanding
the CUNY Cultural Corps, our provensuccessful
program to expose students to
sustainable career paths in the city’s arts
and cultural sectors. Break Through Tech,
which grew out of the successful Women in
Tech (WiTNY) program and was launched in
partnership with Cornell Tech and industry
allies, promises to move many more young
women into tech-focused fields in which
they have been long underrepresented.
Two recent economic impact studies
noted that CUNY and its colleges pump
billions of dollars a year into the regional
economy and our growing list of private
sector partnerships is no small part of that.
CUNY’s first priority is always to our students—
to graduate them into good jobs and
careers and to put them on paths to fulfilling
lives. This year more than any other we
expect New York City to be the beneficiary
of their success.
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