When We Fight, We Win
NYCOFI supports campaigns that unite working people, local communities, social justice organizations, grassroots activists, students, and progressive policy leaders in a bold and concerted effort to take back capital from the 1% that siphons enormous amounts of wealth at the expense of workers across the world. The national Hedge Clippers campaign exposes the outsized role hedge fund managers, private equity firms, and Wall Street speculators have in our democratic process, our education, our prisons, our economy, our environment. This fight will only intensify under Government Sachs, and we have no plans to back down.
Housing
New Yorkers face a real affordable housing crisis. Over the past decade, rents have increased at twice the rate of our incomes, while we remain at the mercy of greedy landlords who increase rent as they see fit. As a lead organization in coalitions such as the Real Affordability for All and Alliance for Tenant Power, we fight to ensure that housing policies prioritize and deliver real affordability for the most economically vulnerable households. We also launched the Real Gentrifiers to unmask and target developers who play the biggest role in gentrifying predominantly low-income communities of color while positioning themselves as champions of affordable housing.
Climate
When Superstorm Sandy hit New York, we were there providing immediate relief and organizing campaigns to make sure the most affected communities in New York City and Long Island had a voice in the rebuilding process. Climate change disproportionately affects low and moderate income families, many of them our members, and with the incoming Administration full of deniers in addition to the expected coastal sea level rise, we will step up our action around this issue as the leading group behind the NY Renews coalition, as well as our newly opened Hempstead Community Garden.
Education
Decades of inadequate funding and the Wall Street-backed movement to privatize our schools has created an education system that fails low-income and immigrant students across the state. Our parent members in Hempstead, Long Island fought back, organized to oust their local school board president, and elected two of our own instead. In the city, we are a part of the CUNY Rising Alliance coalition fighting to meet the needs of low-income, minority, immigrant, and working-class students across the five boroughs, and increase their access to and quality of public higher education.
Labor
America has become a nation of the overworked and the underpaid, and in no city is that truer than New York — especially for our immigrant and communities of color. From being at the forefront of the Paid Sick Days fight to igniting the Fight for $15 campaign to raise the state minimum wage, workplace justice sits at the core of our work. Through our Uber Troubles campaign against the gig economy and job automation, the Committee for Better Banks, and more, we stand with fast food workers, supermarket workers, carwasheros, day care providers, bank workers, all low-wage workers and their right to a living wage and to unionize without retaliation.