On the Next Urban Focus

State Senator José R. Peralta, the recent victor in a special election in Queens, will be the guest on the next Urban Focus. Mr. Peralta, a member of the Assembly, won a special election this week for the state Senate seat that was formerly held by Hiram Monserrate. Mr. Peralta will discuss the Senate race and a host of public policy initiatives he hopes to pursue.

The show will be broadcast on Wednesday, March 17, at 5 p.m. Jonathan Hicks, a former political reporter for The New York Times, is the show’s host. Urban Focus is broadcast every Wednesday from 5:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. It is broadcast nation-wide via the Internet athttp://www.mec.cuny.edu/ . The programs may also be heard on this web site, where they are archived.

The program will include an interview with Bayo Oyewole, the chief operating officer for Timbuktu Media Limited, a media organization based in Lagos, Nigeria. In an age when many newspapers in the United States are struggling to make a profit, Timbuktu Media made the decision recently to begin publication in the Nigerian capital. Mr. Oyewole will discuss the conditions for media companies in West Africa.

The show will be broadcast on Wednesday, March 24, at 5 p.m. Jonathan Hicks, a former political reporter for The New York Times, is the show’s host. Urban Focus is broadcast every Wednesday from 5:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. It is broadcast nation-wide via the Internet athttp://www.mec.cuny.edu/ . The programs may also be heard on this web site.

A Discussion: What’s Next For New York City’s Economy?

Thursday, March 25, 6:30 p.m.
Mary Pinkett Hall, at Medgar Evers College

The DuBois Bunche Center for Public Policy will host a discussion of a number of policy ideas about how New York City should approach its post-recession future. The discussion will include several prominent New Yorkers who contributed chapters to the recently released book, From Disaster to Diversity: What’s Next For New York City’s Economy? The book was published by the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy and edited by DBC senior fellow Jonathan Hicks and Dan Morris, the communications director for the Drum Major Institute.

Among the speakers at the event will be City Councilman Brad Lander, Drum Major Institute Executive Director Mark Winston Griffith.

DBC to Study Community Benefits Agreements

The DuBois Bunche Center for Public Policy is launching a far reaching review of the various Community Benefits Agreements that have been adopted in urban centers throughout the United States. Roger L. Green, the executive director of DBC, said that the center intends to review the origins of the various Community Benefits Agreements to determine their effectiveness in enhancing minority business and equal employment opportunities.

The review of Community Benefits Agreement will be aligned with the study on non-profit administration which is a major within the Department of Public Administration at Medgar Evers College School of Business.

The DuBois Bunche Center intends to publish its finding in a book that will be released later this year.

Citizens Union Announces Support for “Prisoners of the Census Bill”

Citizens Union became the latest organization to announce its support for a bill in the state legislature that will address a longstanding disparity in the manner in which districts for the state legislature are apportioned. The bills, authored by State Senator Eric Schneiderman and Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries, require that prisoners be counted at their last residency prior to incarceration rather than at the prison where they reside. It is legislation that has been championed by the DuBois Bunche Center.

"To count prisoners in districts in which they can't even vote and use their presence for the purposes of political representation is nothing more than a political game of three card monte. Like the game, the prisoners get shuffled around and someone else gains at their expense,” said Citizens Union Executive Director Dick Dadey. Mr. Dadey said further that, "This bill correctly aligns prisoners with representatives from the place they previously lived instead of the prison where they serve their sentence, which is a fairer and more accurate way of counting them for the purposes of reapportionment."

The Value of Community Benefits Agreements

By Roger L. Green

On Thursday March 11, 2010 numerous dignitaries and civic leaders gathered at the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn to celebrate the groundbreaking for the sports arena for the Nets basketball franchise and the Barkclays Center.

This event was possible because of the historic Community Benefits Agreement that was jointly sponsored by the Forest City Ratner Development Corporation, eight non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) and community based organizations.

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Robert Quashie offers a challenge to black advertising professionals: "You have to come up with a better story than this." In the new global economy, he states, marketers have an opportunity to create more sustainable and profitable models for selling products and services to all people, including us, based in large part on adaptive consumption.

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Charles Ellison looks at the rollicking world of New York politics. "One can’t help but think, for a moment, that it’s some kind of lingering payback engineered by Chicago-land Obama operatives who didn’t appreciate the New York machine’s backing of Clinton in 2008," he states.

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Syracuse Post-Standard Endorses Bill Promoted by DBC To Alter How New York’s Prisoners are Counted in Census

The Post-Standard in Syracuse, New York, has become the most recent in a long list of supporters of a bill supported by the DuBois Bunche Center for Public Policy to end the so-called prison-based gerrymandering in New York State.

The bill’s prime sponsors are Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries and State Senator Eric T. Schneiderman, both Democrats. . The bill would allow prisoners to be counted as part of the population of the areas considered to be their home areas, rather than as residents of the locations of the prisons.

Under the current system, New York State’s nearly 70,000 prisoners are counted in the locations where they are incarcerated, often upstate locations far from the urban communities where they reside. As a result, they are counted as part of the population of those rural communities, a practice that has a significant impact on how state funds are allocated and how voting districts are carved.

Roger Green, the executive director of the DuBois Bunche Center for Public Policy, has offered the center’s enthusiastic support for a bill now before the Legislature in Albany that would change the method of counting prisoners for the collection of census data

Cuba’s Treatment of it’s Black Citizens Criticized
A group of prominent African Americans, traditionally sympathetic to the Cuban revolution, have for the first time condemned Cuba, demanding Havana stop its "callous disregard'' for black Cubans and declaring that "racism in Cuba . . . must be confronted."
South Africa Plans to Expand HIV Treatment for Babies
The Administration of South African President Jacob Zuma recently announced ambitious new plans for earlier and expanded treatment for HIV-positive babies and pregnant women, a change that could save hundreds of thousands of lives in the nation hardest hit by the virus that causes AIDS.
Is Liberia’s Ruling Party Vulnerable After Loss in Local Election?
In a second round of voting, Geraldine Doe-Sheriff won an upset victory Clemenceau B. Urey, the candidate representing the ruling Unity Party, the party of President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. And the winner said that the victory by her party, Congress for Democratic Change’s, was a harbinger for the country’s presidential election in 2011.