NEW YORK—The Open Society Institute today announced a $500,000 grant to the New York Stimulus Alliance to monitor stimulus spending, encourage public participation in state-level decisions, and advocate for an equitable distribution of recovery funds.
"The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is the largest federal spending package in history, and it demands close scrutiny," said Ann Beeson, executive director of U.S. Programs at the Open Society Institute. "Strong oversight and advocacy at the state level is critical to ensure that the recovery brings opportunity to all Americans."
The alliance recently hosted trainings across the state to share information about how best to track stimulus dollars. The groups solicited testimony from their members to learn how the recession has affected them and what needs to done so that stimulus spending reaches all communities.
"In the past, the government's solutions to economic crises have often overlooked low-income communities and communities of color," said Sondra Youdelman, who directs Community Voices Heard, a grassroots membership organization of low-income families. "Our groups intend to make sure that the inequities of the past are not reinforced by the government's recovery approach. We want to see a recovery that benefits all people. Intentional efforts are needed to make sure this happens."
The Open Society Institute structured the grants to bring together community-based groups from across the state and create deeper partnerships with organizations that focus on policy analysis.
"The dynamics of poverty in Buffalo aren't that different from those in Harlem," said Eric Walker of PUSH Buffalo, a community organization working with the alliance. "Low-income people and people of color across the state lack adequate access to jobs and resources. The work we do together around the stimulus will connect people to jobs and resources today and lay the foundation for more collaborative grassroots work on other statewide issues in the future."
The coalition includes the grassroots membership groups Make the Road New York, Community Voices Heard, the New York Immigration Coalition, and the New York chapters and affiliates of Gamaliel, National People's Action, and Common Cause. Further research and advocacy support will be provided by the Center for Social Inclusion, a policy research group, The Opportunity Agenda, the Advancement Project and the Kirwin Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity.
The groups will receive the funding over two years from the Foundation to Promote Open Society, a sister organization to the Open Society Institute. Similar grants were made to groups in California, Texas, Maryland, Wisconsin and Mississippi. The grants are part of a number of new initiatives the foundation has recently launched in the United States. The Open Society Institute's U.S. Programs recognizes that the challenges to open society are deeply linked, and supports efforts that bring people together across issues and communities to address them.