In 1982, the NYC Health and Hospitals Corporation (HHC) announced its plan to close the 67-year-old Greenpoint Hospital on this site and replace it with the 600-bed Woodhull Medical and Mental health Center in Williamsburg which had been built in 1978 but remained vacant because the city said it could not afford to open it. The Greenpoint Hospital Task Force had created plans to build a nursing home
Continue readingNWWG History
1976 – Neighborhood Women Network News
‘The NCNW newsletter was an interesting mix of articles on women’s groups across the country, the organization’s local efforts in Brooklyn and lobbying efforts in Washington, D.C., recipes, oral histories, essays and personal columns, and letters to the editor. The newsletter went through many incarnations as different women joined the group and contributed to it. The first version
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1992 – Eastern District High School Boycott
In 1992 after a riot inside Eastern District High School, where a student got stabbed in the head, Juanita Orengo-Rodriguez organized a boycott at the school. Juanita Orengo-Rodriguez had been the PTA director for three years. Her community activism had been greatly influenced by her participation as member of Neighborhood Women of Williamsburg-Greenpoint.
Continue reading2012 – Neighborhood Women Legacy Project
‘The complexity of community life today presents problems so difficult that we believe woman need a special kind of network to empower and support us becoming strong, effective, and efficient leaders.’
Jan Peterson, NCNW founder
The Neighborhood Women (NW) Legacy Project intends to highlight the role of grassroots women’s leadership in the historical development, growth and vitality of their communities.
Continue reading1982 – Neighborhood Women House Living and Learning Center
‘The spaces will blur the traditional divisions between working and living. They will allow for personal privacy, peer-support, and bring permanent residents, visitors and the community together under the same roof. Embedded within the LLC concept is the belief in life beyond retirement; the value of multiplying partnerships and interface between grassroots groups; the opportunity
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1980s – Williamsburg – Greenpoint Women’s Action Alliance Political Club
Text forthcoming…
1975 – Small World Day Care Center and Swinging Sixties Senior Center
‘As we focused on the obstacle course neighborhood women -welfare poor, working poor, and working-class women who live side-by-side – negotiated each day just to survive, we decided that the obstacle course itself had to change. Continue reading
1977 – First Battered Women Shelter in NY
In January 1977, the National Congress of Neighborhood Women and the Brooklyn YWCA opened the first battered women shelter in NY, The Center for Elimination of Violence in the Family. The problem of battered women had just started to gain attention. Evidence showed it was a widespread issue in the borough of Brooklyn. In 1974-75, out of 700 hundred women filing for divorce in Kings County represented by Brooklyn Legal Services, Corporation B, 41.5% complained of physical assaults by their husbands. In Park Slope, the 72nd Police Precinct informally reported in 1976 that 50% of their night calls were from battered women.
Continue reading1986 – You Can Community School
Content forthcoming…
1975 – Neighborhood College Program
‘The women made it clear that they did not want to be viewed simply as recipients of services and subsidies. They felt they had valuable experience and skills to offer from having provided services informally
Continue reading1975 – Project Open Doors
Text forthcoming…
1974 – The Beginning – Washington DC Conference
‘The National Congress of Neighborhood Women began partly as a defense of the values of neighborhood women, particularly white, working-class, ethnic women, who in the 1970’s were feeling misunderstood and unheard. Continue reading