Gagá pa’l pueblo is back in February

Gagá pa’l pueblo is back!

Domingo, 26 de enero, 3–6 PM | Sunday, January 26th, 3–6 PM

Usually taking place every Sunday in the summertime at Anne Loftus Playground at Fort Tryon Park, Gagá pa’l pueblo is a gathering of folks preserving, enhancing, and practicing Afro-Dominican traditional music. Now that it’s a little chillier outdoors, we’re bringing the celebration indoors once a month. Please join us for this amazing musical celebration.

 

Projections: Shift Change—film series starting January 25th

Join us for the inaugural film in the Projections series, Word Up’s winter series of film screenings with local filmmakers and neighborhood collaborators!

 

Ecomundo Cleaning & Word Up Community Bookshop / Librería Comunitaria

present Shift Change (69 min), an award-winning documentary that tells the little-known stories of employee-owned businesses that compete successfully in today’s economy while providing secure, dignified jobs in democratic workplaces. 

Members of Ecomundo Cleaning—a cooperative business based in Northern Manhattan and the Bronx—will present their own experiences forming a worker coop. Worker cooperative developers Jennifer Welles and Joe Rinehart will also be present.

 

DATE: Saturday, January 25, 2014

TIME: 6–9 PM

LOCATION: Word Up, 2113 Amsterdam Ave. @ 165th St.

ADMISSION: $5. (Reduced to $3 if you sign up for the Word Up CSB program as a Continuing CSB Member—wordupbooks.wordpress.com/csb.)

  

ABOUT THE FILM: 

Shift Change—a documentary film by veteran award-winning filmmakers Melissa Young and Mark Dworkin—tells the little known stories of employee owned businesses that compete successfully in today’s economy while providing secure, dignified jobs in  democratic workplaces.

 

With the long decline in US manufacturing and today’s economic crisis, millions have been thrown out of work, and many are losing their homes. The usual economic solutions are not working, so some citizens and public officials are ready to think outside  of the box, to reinvent our failing economy in order to restore long-term community stability and a more egalitarian way of life.

 

There is growing interest in firms that are owned and managed by their workers. Such firms tend to be more profitable and innovative, and more committed to the communities where they are based. Yet the public has little knowledge of their success, and the promise they offer for a better life.

 

Shift Change encourages support for employee ownership, and provides on-the-ground experience from a variety of enterprises and locations.

 

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

Ecomundo Cleaning is a group of mostly women (and 2 men), from Upper Manhattan and the Bronx, who have formed a cooperative business in order to ensure ourselves decent wages and healthy work conditions. Ecomundo offers green cleaning services for homes, offices, and businesses in the New York Metropolitan area.

Jennifer Welles is the cooperative coordinator and housing developer at Northern Manhattan Improvement Corporation, where she is developing both low income housing cooperatives and a worker cooperative. She has overseen the conversion of several multifamily buildings into limited equity cooperatives. In this role, she wears many hats, ranging from facilitating the acquisition, financing and rehabilitation of the buildings to training and organizing the tenants to become responsible owners. Recently she organized the first worker cooperative in Washington Heights, Ecomundo Cleaning, a green cleaning company, which was launched in April 2012.

Joe Rinehart got involved in the worker cooperative movement as a Peer Advisor in the Democracy at Work Network. Joe is a former worker-owner at Firestorm Café & Books and instructor at Appalachian State University.  Prior to that, he completed a Master’s degree in Industrial Technology at Appalachian State University with a focus on bio-fuels production, on-farm technologies and renewable energy.  He taught in the Technology department and co-created and taught a course on Cooperatives and their role in sustainable development. Joe currently serves on the board of the Eastern Conference for Workplace Democracy.  When at home in Brooklyn, NY he is generally working on perfecting his Kimchi recipe, riding his bike to the edges of the city, contra-dancing or trying to find a time and place to build an aquaponics system.

 

Film website: www.shiftchange.org

Ecomundo Cleaning: www.ecomundo.coop

Facebook event: facebook.com/events/1394071100847825

Conversatorio sobre sentencia 168-13

23 de enero @ 6:30 PM

Invitación a un diálogo comunitario en ocasión de cumplirse cuatro meses del dictamen de la inhumana Sentencia 168-13.

Ven y únete a las voces que demandan la restitución de la nacionalidad dominicana a las personas afectadas por la Sentencia.

¡La privatización arbitraria y discriminatoria de la nacionalidad en República Dominicana es una clara violación de los derechos humanos!

La Coalición DOMINICANOS/AS X DERECHO@NYC es un esfuerzo surgido en New York en repudio a la Sentencia 168-13 del Tribunal Constitucional Dominicano que deja sin nacionalidad a miles de personas y propugna por la restitución de la misma a los afectados y las afectadas. La Coalición está conformada por: Casa Verde Camila, Las Mariposas Urbanas, SEIU 1199, Centro Altagracia de Fe y Justicia, La Coalición del Alto Manhattan para Los Derechos del Inmigrante, Frente Amplio, The Legacy Circle, Congreso Dominicano, Realengo Studio, Alianza País, Mesa de Izquierda, Lionel Legros . . .

Word@4F Spoken Word Workshop & Open Mic for Teens

CALLING ALL TEENS!

Wednesday, January 22 | 4:30–6pm
Word@4F Spoken Word Workshop & Open Mic for Teens

Angy Abreu and Chakira M. Haddock from Word@4F host a spoken-word workshop and open mic for high school students. Teens can take part in an interactive workshop led by veteran spoken word artists/poets, discuss spoken word as an art form, and participate in writing exercises aimed at promoting creativity and verbal self-expression. The creation and performance of bilingual spoken word pieces will be encouraged. After the workshop, teens will have the opportunity (but are not required) to perform their pieces (new and old) in front of their peers and Word Up’s general audience. Although attendance at the workshop is encouraged, it is not required for participation at the open mic.

ALSO, if you can’t get enough mid-week spoken word, then don’t forget to RSVP for Word@4F’s one-year anniversary party, which will be held at Apt. 78 on Thursday, January 23rd. Word@4F, a mobile open mic committed to fostering the literary community uptown, was started by our friends Rammer and Angy when we had to close the original Word Up location. Word@4F shows that you can’t hold the community back! More info here: www.facebook.com/Word4f.

Novels with a Social Conscience: A Book Club begins February 2

Novels with a Social Conscience: A Book Club @ Word Up

Bring your copies of John Steinbeck’s classic, OF MICE AND MEN (1937, 107 pp.), and be prepared to discuss!

This book club will meet each month to examine and discuss novels that use compelling stories and characters to raise important social issues, including those related to gender, race and ethnicity, and class. Attendees are encouraged to actively participate in all our discussions. More questions? Feel free to contact Bob Lamm at blamm86@gmail.com.

The club will be led by Bob, a writer who teaches at NYU. His political articles, personal essays, interviews and profiles, and fiction have appeared in more than 50 outlets-—among them the New York Times, the Village Voice, Ms. Magazine, nytheatre.com, and the ACT NOW New York blog—and in five anthologies. He writes about city life, feminist issues, Jewish issues, theater, and television. He has taught nursery school, junior high English, high school history, and at five universities (Yale, Queens College, the New School, the CUNY Graduate Center, and NYU). He is a proud “child of the ’60s” who has been a radical and a political activist ever since.