Name | Steven Raga |
District | 26 |
What is your plan for getting the city back to work, particularly in its hardest hit sectors? What kind of workforce development programs do you envision that would ensure access to communities of color and people with disabilities? | Recovering from COVID-19 will not be an easy feat. We must take a multi-faceted approach to support the hardest-hit sectors and also revitalize the workforce. We must immediately expand our green jobs. Our city has an opportunity to not only invest in renewable energy, green technology, and achieve zero waste but we can also provide thousands of high-quality jobs. Going forward, we must provide additional protections and relief to our excluded workers. Our cash economy workers, gig workers, freelancers, artists, and immigrant workers deserve the same workplace protections and job security that New Yorkers with 9-5’s are granted. We also now know that working from home is a feasible long-term work option. So even as we re-open, New Yorkers with disabilities can continue to work from home without any type of job discrimination or penalties Workforce development programming is also key in prepping our City for its future transformations. The jobs of today will not always be present in the future -- and that is okay. What we must do as a City is begin offering more widespread job training and vocational programs so that immediate needs are met but we are teaching New York City residents the skills needed to be successful in the future, like digital literacy and tech skills. This programming has to be offered to all New Yorkers, especially our NYCHA residents and New Yorkers who live in supportive housing. This is also a great opportunity to work with community centers and organizations as partners in order to make sure that all residents of NYC have access to these types of trainings. While making sure our economy recovers and works for all New Yorkers will be a major step. We also can take as an opportunity to challenge what is considered “work” and make sure that our workforce development programs are including artists, cultural workers, gig workers, freelancers, and immigrant workers. |
What is your plan for creating healthy stable communities? How do you envision enlivening vacant commercial and city owned spaces? | Healthy communities are communities with open spaces, green spaces, and full of arts programming. With that in mind, we must immediately enact commercial rent relief for art spaces and galleries, for our theaters, and for our cultural centers. We need to invest in and maintain our open spaces, especially for uses relating to arts and culture. Furthermore, we must keep public land for public use. We should not be selling public land to private developers but instead opting for community land trusts that can decide how to use the land based on the need for the community. Art and cultural spaces need to be prioritized in rezoning applications and we have to end unnecessary barriers for rezoning spaces into mixed-use spaces. We must also provide subsidies for utilities so that arts and cultural spaces will face less of a financial burden in order to operate. Vacant storefronts and commercial properties should not go unused; we’ll make sure that these spaces are repurposed into art spaces, music venues, theaters, and other necessary spaces. This can be done in a few ways, but we can incentive this through property tax credits or grants to arts and culture nonprofits to take over and reinvent the space. |
What do you foresee is the role of creative economies in supporting economic recovery in New York City particularly for communities most affected by environmental, housing, and health instability due to COVID including our aging, immigrant, and working class communities of color? | Arts and culture are an intrinsic part of New York City. The role of arts programming is vital in our recovery. Creative economies provide communities with moments to gather in unity and allow us to escape some of the most intense and harrowing moments our city has seen. This is a time where our arts and culture workforce can lead in community programming and healing. So we will expand programming and partnerships with arts and cultural organizations to have regular performance in public spaces and public housing, and providing programming with our public libraries. Having wealth or living near historical institutions of art should not be the determining factors in being able to access art. We will invest in our cultural institutions, especially indigenous and immigrant institutions. This is also a time where we can truly prove that art is work. We’ll provide additional funding to artists and cultural workers so not only can they maintain their programming, but also begin their own personal recoveries. We’ll need to bolster grant opportunities for artists and make sure that there are robust partnership opportunities for our arts and culture institutions. |
What is your plan for the city’s school system and what is your vision of the role that arts in education plays? | Funding for the arts and arts education in our public schools is vital. We’ll work to make sure that funding for NYC public schools is specifically allocated for arts programming across all schools. And make sure that public schools need at least one full-time arts teacher. Our City’s education system needs to be redesigned so that it’s more expansive, inclusive, and solely focused on test scores. Arts education provides students the opportunities to develop their own skills but also provides them with an outlet to express and explore themselves. That opportunity must not be taken away from our students. We also need to facilitate partnerships between schools and cultural organizations so that students can benefit from these cultural institutions but also those artists, musicians, dancers, and cultural workers can utilize those spaces. |
What are your plans for supporting incarcerated and formerly incarcerated New Yorkers? | We must be working off of a restorative justice model. Re-entry for our formerly incarcerated New Yorkers shouldn’t be made any more difficult, especially if we want their re-entry to be successful. This means that we have to provide additional programming throughout being incarcerated. Also including better re-entry planning programs so that formerly incarcerated New Yorkers have a clear pathway to successful re-entry. We will work to end barriers for the formerly incarcerated to receive resources, aid, and finding work while expanding reentry support services across all 5 boroughs. Lastly, we will work to raise the minimum wage to $22 an hour so that all New Yorkers will receive a living wage and afford food, rent, and everyday necessities. We will expand public healthcare and medical infrastructure so that treatment is accessible to all. Lastly, we will strengthen tenant protections and expand dignified affordable housing so that we are keeping our New Yorkers housed. |
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