Hundreds attend Strengthening Communities Block Party co-hosted by Medgar Evers College’s Transition Academy
Photo by Awa Diallo | Brooklyn Recovery Corps. intern
By David Gil de Rubio | dgilderubio@mec.cuny.edu
With the fall semester set to kick off at CUNY Medgar Evers College on Wednesday, August 28, the ball got rolling via the Strengthening Communities Block Party co-hosted by the Medgar Evers College Transition Academy and the Brooklyn Community Outreach Division.
On a gorgeous summer day between Bedford and Franklin avenues in Crown Heights, between 200 and 300 participants wandered over and enjoyed music, a pop-up pantry, a rock-climbing tower and food.
More importantly, a number of organizations set up tables to inform attendees about the different resources available to them.
Aside from Medgar Evers College-affiliated groups like the Success Academy and the SEEK Program, tables were set up by the New York City Police Department, the Legal Aid Society, the Brooklyn branch of the NAACP and a health van from New York Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital.
As a mixed crowd of older community members and younger residents lined up to get grilled hotdogs or care packages of food from the Cougar Country Pantry, Dr. Waleek Boone, the director of the Transition Academy, was pleased to see the groundwork being laid thanks to the turnout of these many organizations along with the folks they’re trying to reach.
“In order to strengthen any community, we need to give them the resources so they can empower themselves and that’s the purpose of this block party,” he said.
It’s a sentiment echoed by Detective Adaryll Stephens, who was one of the many law enforcement officers manning the NYPD booth. This day was a way of not only forging bonds between the New York City Police Department and local constituents, but a way of educating them about resources available to them.
For Stephens, the opportunities not only go beyond someone possibly wanting to become a police officer, but are available to a wide age range of people.
“We offer things for young adults from the age of 14 and up, who can be in the Explorer Program, which is a non-paid internship program where you can work alongside like-minded individuals who do positive things for the community,” Stephens explained. “Then when they get to the college age, we assist to pay for college once they’re matriculating within the boroughs and I also believe Nassau County. The giveback upon graduation is two years to the NYPD in terms of employment.”
Stephens also emphasized jobs placement goes beyond becoming a uniformed employee, albeit a police officer, school safety agent, traffic agent or 911 operator. Other civilian opportunities in a support staff range from people wanting to do HVAC work to engineers to nurses to physician assistants and doctors to anyone wanting to take a pathway to employment that might involve becoming an accountant, bookkeeper or attorney.
The NYPD has also made it easy to get this information via a number of ways including visiting the department website or dialing 212-RECRUIT, where they’ll be able to speak to an actual person and get answers in real time.
It’s a sentiment shared by members of the Brooklyn Community Affairs Outreach Division which works to form bonds with local citizens via school safety, youth strategies and community relations.
As a Central Brooklyn native, Officer Ebony Walker has first-hand experience of why this kind of event is so crucial to building bridges.
“The importance of an event like this is to build a bond between the community and NYPD by showing that there are resources we can provide,” Walker said. “We’re here for the community versus the negative impact the media shows. We’re also here to show young people the interactions for the community as well as if anyone wants to become an officer. We want to provide inspiration for the community. Being from Crown Heights myself, I hadn’t really witnessed it growing up, but I knew it was there. It’s really just a pleasure to serve the community that I grew up in.”
