Mallory Thatch - Brownsville Justice Center
Allyson Martinez - BKLVLUP
Cecilia Cortes Vila - New York Women's Foundation
The Brooklyn Economic Justice Project (BEJP) brings together community-led organizations focused on collectively interrupting the negative impact of gentrification while strengthening economic prosperity for women, transgender, gender-nonconforming, and non-binary (TGNCNB) people, and their families in four underinvested neighborhoods: Bedford Stuyvesant, Brownsville, Bushwick, and East New York. Through collective action, a cohort of grassroots groups has come together to redistribute power and funding across the community, specifically by providing microgrants to emerging leaders that might not be funded through other mechanisms to support economic security, healing justice and safety initiatives. During this session, members of the BEJP cohort will discuss the experience of resource redistribution through this microgranting process, uplift lessons learned to date from this work, and explore future opportunities for the cohort to further build a community-led movement to revitalize the local economy through BIPOC owned business and enterprise.