Kids & Family

Occupy Kensington is Born

Launched Saturday, the group plans to tackle such issues as raising the minimum wage, back-wages at Golden Farm and the area's lack of open space.

 

It's official: Despite very little advertising and competition from a beautiful rain-free evening, a dozen people gathered at a small park Saturday to launch a new chapter of the Occupy movement.

The event was organized by Eleanor Rodgers, a mom of two and doctor’s office receptionist, who wanted to find a vehicle to bring together longtime Kensington activists with new area residents with similar concerns, a merger that had already begun with the local movement to get the owners of to hand over .

Find out what's happening in Windsor Terrace-Kensingtonwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

 “I thought, if only we could create a forum to bring these people together. And at the Golden Farm protests I realized: here is the opportunity,” she said.

The twelve people who came to yesterday evening’s meeting in a tiny park at the corner of Vanderbilt and E. 5th streets, were exactly the mix she was hoping for.

Find out what's happening in Windsor Terrace-Kensingtonwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

“There were four older people who have lived in the neighborhood for 15 to 20 years—community-type people—and six people who were 30-and-under with no kids, who had done stuff with Occupy Wall Street,” she said.

“So it’s bringing together these two groups of people who have this political engagement but from different perspectives,” she said.

During the 90-minute meeting, the group identified some issues to work on, which included getting Golden Farm to pay the back-wages, the lack of open space—or even indoor community space—in Kensington (hence the Windsor Terrace location for the meeting), raising the minimum wage, getting the MTA to continue running the G-Train to Church Avenue (in 2013 it will terminate at Fort Hamilton Parkway), cuts in the city’s education budget, the overcrowded playgrounds and schools and inadequate funding for the city’s libraries.

Rodgers, a longtime socialist who hails from Ireland but has lived in Kensington for the past five years and in Windsor Terrace for four years before that, said she is thrilled to have an ongoing forum for like-minded Kensington residents.

Many area residents, she said, “they tend to go to ” and the like. “They don’t realize how many lefty people there are in our neighborhood.”

 

Occupy Kensington’s next meeting will take place on Monday, June 18 at E. 4th St. at 7 p.m. For more information contact Rodgers at rodgers_eleanor@hotmail.com or 347-403-3798.


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