Building a New Table

As New Yorkers marked the fourth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, our television screens flickered with ghastly images of devastation on the Gulf Coast. Even after what we'd been through, it was hard to grasp the scale of this disaster. But when members of Congress began to talk about modeling reconstruction on post-9/11 programs that ended up gentrifying New York and hurting the poor, those of us who worked to bring community perspectives into that process couldn't help feeling that our experience might yield some lessons for folks in New Orleans, Biloxi and other ravaged communities.

Progressives sometimes talk about not just having a seat at the table but building a new table. In New York a fragmented civil society came together after 9/11 and, to a significant degree, built a new table. Immediately following the attacks, the Fiscal Policy Institute, where I work, and the New York City Central Labor Council called together all the groups in our Rolodexes. We had no clear plans, but at a time when attention was focused on disaster relief, we wanted to begin the conversation about rebuilding. Several other clusters of discussion merged with ours, and around December 2001 we gave ourselves a name: the Labor Community Advocacy Network to Rebuild New York (LCAN).

Our organizing principle was that we were a network, not a coalition. We didn't want to be naïve about the difficulty of bringing like-minded groups together in one big happy family. After several months of discussions, we put together a draft document that focused on our key issues: jobs, housing, environmental justice and linking lower Manhattan to the rest of the city. In the end, more than fifty groups signed on to the LCAN agenda, including unions, immigrant rights groups and neighborhood organizations.

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