Mel King Community Fellowship: Leaders in NY Government Report
This report summarizes the activities and recommendations of the Mel King Community Fellows (MKCF): Leaders in NY Government Program. The fellows were legislators of color representing over 1.7 million New Yorkers in the Bronx and Brooklyn. The Fellowship began with a learning journey to the Mondragón Cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain, and culminated in a joint New York City and New York State hearing on economic democracy and building an economy that works for people of color.
The goals of this report are to:
• Summarize the critical insights gained from the fellowship and its joint city-state hearing on economic democracy in November 2018.
• Summarize recommendations and proposals that the Fellows developed during the program, as well as outline some additional recommendations from CoLab given the impacts of the current global pandemic on Black and Latinx people in New York.
While elected officials work to meet the emergency needs in their communities caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and police violence, the clear lesson of this moment is that Black and Latinx communities and Black and Latinx leaders must do more than react to crisis. They must propose bold solutions that not only lead to a just recovery from COVID-19, but actually create the possibility of transforming the systems that produce poor health, poverty, and violence that disproportionately and egregiously harms Black, Latinx, poor, working class, and other communities of color.