According to this press release, New York City foundations and the nonprofit organizations they support tend to have racially diverse staffs, but this diversity decreases at higher levels of seniority.

Sound familiar?

Philanthropy New York and the Foundation Center conducted a major study this year and produced a new report called Benchmarking Diversity: A First Look at New York City Foundations and Nonprofits (which you can download for free here).

The study, the first of its kind in New York and the U.S. to examine foundations and nonprofits side-by-side, “provides a factual basis for understanding diversity in the city’s philanthropic sector.” The idea is to inspire informed conversations and ultimately better progress in the diversity and leadership of these organizations.

Here are just a few key findings of the study:

• Among the 95 Philanthropy New York member foundations responding to a survey, nearly half (48 percent) of administrative staff members are people of color, as are 43 percent of program officers, 16 percent of chief executives, and 18 percent of board members.

• Foundations with at least 25 percent people of color on their boards are more likely to have racially and ethnically diverse staffs, to have diversity policies on staffing and grantmaking, and to specifically target populations of color through their grantmaking.

• Among the 540 nonprofits organizations responding, over a third identifying themselves as “minority-led organizations” do not have a chief executive who is a person of color, meaning that many such organizations are led by white CEOs. (More details about findings and methodology can be found on the press release.)

So… what to do with this information? I had hoped to find hands-on trainings in New York where nonprofit or foundation leaders could learn how to purposefully, sensitively increase diversity within their organizations. I didn’t find any listed on the topic for October or November at the Foundation Center. But on October 29, Philanthropy New York will host a briefing and discussion about the study and the president of the Foundation Center will give an introduction. Hopefully that will be a productive space to learn more or inspire next steps. If you know of other resources, please leave a note in the comments!

The Center for Urban Pedagogy recently unveiled this year’s collaborators in their quarterly project Making Policy Public, which produces “a series of foldout posters that use graphic design to explore and explain public policy.”

According to the website:

This series aims to make information on policy truly public: accessible, meaningful, and shared. We aim to add vitality to crucial debates about our future. At the same time, we want to create opportunities for designers to engage social issues without sacrificing experimentation and for advocacy organizations to reach their constituencies better through design.

They do this by matchmaking pairs of advocates working on a variety of issues—from the “tomato supply chain” to “navigating juvenile justice” to “keeping parks public”—with graphic designers. Looking forward to seeing the beautiful work that’s sure to result from the newest roster!

Founded in 2007 and run entirely by volunteers, the Street Memorial Project honors cyclists and pedestrians that have been killed on New York City’s streets. According to the website, the Project was inspired by similar groups in Pittsburgh and St. Louis, and continues the work of many groups and volunteers who have created similar memorials in NYC for over ten years.

One of the most poignant things I’ve ever witnessed was the vigil for Alice Swanson, a 22 year old who died in an accident while biking to work last summer in Washington, DC. I didn’t know Alice, but I passed her Ghost Bike every day on my way to our (then) office, and it was heartening to see the respect and care with which the memorial was created and maintained. The memorials are sobering, respectful, beautiful—and perhaps most importantly, they can inspire awareness, conversation, and hopefully action toward safer streets for everyone.

80 known bicycle-related fatalities have occurred in NYC since June 2005. The Ghost Bikes volunteers have created memorials in honor of 56 of these victims; they have no information about the identities of the rest of the victims or the details around those crashes, so they remember them during an annual Memorial Ride and Walk.

Visit the website to read a list of Ghost Bikes in NYC, view a map of their locations, and get involved.

On September 18, activists who want to confront structural injustice and social workers at all stages of their careers are invited to attend a conference called RISE: Social Work in an Era of Change.

From the website:

RISE  is an all-day conference serving to empower social work students and emerging professionals to become effective agents of social change. RISE will provide a foundation to reclaim our profession’s focus on social justice and build interdisciplinary alliances to tackle institutional social problems.

The workshop and panel lineups look intriguing, with topics ranging from “Thwarting the Cradle-to-Prison Pipeline” to “The Relationship between Community Gardens and Community Well-being” to “Addressing Disparities and Intersecting Oppressions for Gender-Variant Individuals in Health Care.”

The one-day conference will be sponsored by the Graduate Student Association of the Silver School of Social Work at NYU, allowing organizers to host the event at NYU’s Kimmel Center. Registration for the conference begins in August; the fee should be no more than $25, and no one will be turned away due to a lack of funds. Learn more here.

If you think the High Line is cool, check out the plans for the new Queens Plaza. From Urban Omnibus:

The Queens Plaza Bicycle and Pedestrian Landscape Improvement Project transforms the tangle of urban infrastructure cutting through Long Island City from a harsh, disorienting industrial maze into a lush, navigable landscape, a gateway to Long Island City that organizes various flows and scales while providing a refuge for residents, workers and the road-weary.

(If you’ve never experienced that “harsh, disorienting industrial maze,” you can take a snarky yet informative little tour thanks to the folks at ForgottenNY Street Scenes.)

Urban Omnibus interviewed three members of the design team behind the project. If you’re interested in the interplay between art, ecology, and infrastructure, or if you’ve ever just gotten lost somewhere between Queensboro Plaza and Queens Plaza, it’s worth a read.

Anyone out there know when this lush “urban canopy” is set to rise, let alone open to the public?

In what looks like a pretty impressive cross-sector, cross-continent, and cross-NYC collaboration,  18 leaders from NGOs in Azerbaijan, Cambodia, Estonia, Ethiopia, Israel, Latvia, Liberia, and Uruguay recently landed here for three weeks of “intensive training in nonprofit management and building civil societies.”

According to a press release from the 92nd Street Y, the Ford Motor Company International Fellowship of the 92nd Street Y brought ten men and eight women to New York this month. Participants were selected “from countries that have undergone conflict or upheaval but are stable enough to support at least the beginnings of a civil society, which is characterized by the voluntary participation of citizens whose behavior is not governed by coercion or imposed by the government.”

The agenda looks packed, from a kickoff dinner with Ford executives, local Ford dealers, and local diplomats; to neighborhood tours of Jackson Heights, Coney Island, Brighton Beach, Harlem, and the West Village; to a number of site visits, including:

• The Point Community Development Corporation
• Sesame Workshop
• Sustainable South Bronx
• Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding
• The United Nations

I’d have loved to be a fly on the wall; this looks like quite an enriching—and exhausting!—few weeks. Imagining this budding global network of NGO leaders, I can’t help but remember old episodes of Captain Planet: by their powers combined, who knows what amazing things might happen? 

I’ve only been here a few months, but I already catch myself going through the ritual of my commute on autopilot. Sometimes I put my newspaper down and look around the subway car and it hits me: I live in a city with eight million other people. These aren’t just faces on a Guess Who game board; they’re three-dimensional humans with more stories than we could ever count.

Whether you’re new to town or a lifelong New Yorker, you’re sure to appreciate Overlooked New York. Artist Zina Saunders tracks down “real New Yorkers who have found fascinating ways to unleash their joy on the roofs and rivers and parks and streets” of our city, from subway musicians to mushroom hunters to radio control jet pilots. She paints a portrait of each of her subjects, then posts it alongside a written interview.

The result is a totally addictive compilation. I had to tear myself away from the profiles of the 24-year-old bike messenger whose job shifted drastically after September 11, 2001, and the cooking artist who entered a curry contest just three months after her arrival. Go take a look!

Between the summer-blue sky and the “Air Force One photo op,” I’ve been directing my gaze up at the skyline more often these days. On May 9, I’ll be even more excited to crane my neck: an international kite design competition is coming to Riverside Park!

FlyNY invites architects, engineers, artists, designers, and children to construct and submit original kite designs. There will be live music, family-friendly activities, open kite flying from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.—and, after the competition, the original kites will be placed on display for a silent auction to benefit the New York Affiliate of Architecture for Humanity.

To see official contest rules, a lineup of musical acts, and a soaring site design, visit flyny.org.

Photo by Ryan McFarland

Back in March, we shared some information about how you can track the spending of economic stimulus money in New York. Since then, the NYT City Room blog has posted more. From City Hall Invites You to Track the Stimulus (March 30):

Want to know which local transportation projects are getting a piece of the $261 million that New York City has been allocated, thanks to the federal stimulus package?

Now you can find out — and track every stage of the bidding process, too — by clicking a new Web site, set up by the Bloomberg administration, called the NYCStat Stimulus Tracker.

The Mayor’s office is responsible for the site, which currently allows viewers to read summaries about how the stimulus money relates to five categories: Infrastructure/Energy Efficiency; Economic/Workforce Development; Social Safety Net; Fiscal Assistance; and Public Safety and Criminal Justice. According to the site, “new features of the NYCStat Stimulus Tracker are expected to be fully operational by the end of April 2009.”

On a dreary day like today, the excursions offered by Food for Thought Tours sound like a belly-filling and soul-warming way to usher in springtime. And as a relative newcomer to New York, they strike me as a delicious way to learn a lot about the agriculture and economy of my new state.

Trips, scavenger hunts, cooking classes, and other gatherings reveal the secrets of nearby wineries, inns, markets, and restaurant. Participants learn about sustainable agriculture and organic cuisine as they support local communities.