The determinants of success in local earmarking: The case of new york city council discretionary expense grants

Author(s):  
Yonghong Wu ◽  
Daniel W. Williams

AbstractThis paper examines the determinants of success in seeking local government earmarked funding. We compile data of the aggregate amounts of the New York City Council discretionary expense grants received or requested by each council district every year during 2011-2013. The statistical results show that the allocation of the expense grants are politically motivated with more earmark funds flowing to the districts council leaders and key committee chairpersons represent. Furthermore, constituents of key committee chairpersons are more successful in the earmarking process. Districts with larger African American population have lower success ratios possibly because they request significantly more earmarks. These empirical findings are consistent with anecdotal perceptions that earmarking is not substantially effective in meeting community need.

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentina Rapetti

Tina Benko is an American stage, screen and television actress who has steadily trodden the Broadway boards for twenty years while starring in films and TV series and teaching acting and movement in New York City. An intensely focused and versatile performer, Benko has played in a broad variety of genres, ranging from screwball and Shakespearean comedies to realistic Russian, Scandinavian and American plays. In this interview, she discusses the factors that attracted her to drama and theatre, her acting training and approach to character-building, and theatre as a space for healing and reconciliation as she experienced it while working in Desdemona (2012), a cross-cultural theatre adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Othello staged by American theatre and opera director Peter Sellars, with texts by African American Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, and music and lyrics by Malian singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré.


Author(s):  
Daniel C. Littlefield

This article reviews scholarship on the history and historiography of slavery in colonial and revolutionary United States. Slavery was a southern American institution associated primarily with cotton and a divinely ordained labour force of blacks. Southerners in the Chesapeake might realize that slaves once produced tobacco, and in low-country South Carolina and Georgia that they once grew rice, and in southern Louisiana that they once raised sugar cane, but most people, when they thought about slavery at all, thought about the growing of cotton and reckoned that an African workforce required no explanation. Few knew that at one time slavery lived in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, that it had been vibrant in New York and Pennsylvania, and that slaves still worked in New Jersey in 1860. Even in the South, where the presence of a significant African-American population made the heritage of slavery undeniable and people generally recognized the meaning of that fact, most understood neither slavery's age nor its origins.


2019 ◽  
pp. 29-46
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Smith

The first of two companion chapters, this essay focuses especially on the historical meeting of European and African American movement vocabularies in English-speaking early-nineteenth-century contexts. It focuses particularly upon public music and dance in two creolized cities: Kingston, Jamaica, and New York City. Primary source evidence includes period illustrations (most notably, a ca. 1802 watercolor entitled A Grand Jamaica Ball) and period accounts of entertainments at lower Manhattan’s African Grove Theater; both are analyzed for the evidence they provide regarding the synthesis of creolized movement vocabularies and, by extension, cultural experiences. Methodology is drawn especially from iconography and kinesics.


Author(s):  
Robert S. Kurtz

In New York City, from the 1990s to the present, covert racism is alive and well in the field of medicine and medical education. The most heavily impacted are African American and Caribbean American females and males. The inequitable treatment thus engendered has concrete results ranging from unwarranted criticism in residency education to forced changes of medical occupations and jobs, to false attributions of behavioral health issues. Combating these challenges requires fortified character armor, seeking percipient well positioned minority, white and off-whites allies, and a willingness to maintain continued vigilance. With persistence and tenacity, success is possible in terms of protecting minorities both in the educational process, and in a mature medical life.


Author(s):  
Thomas H. Greenland

This book challenges the convenient distinction between jazz musicians and audiences by calling attention to the collaborative interactions of performers with the other “nonperforming” participants. It provides a realistic representation of jazz in New York City by taking a somewhat paradoxical and ironic approach: it examines small, specialized jazz scenes to suggest broad-based patterns of jazz participation while also deemphasizing what is happening on stage in favor of the offstage listeners—in other words, the unseen scene. This introduction provides an overview of research on the themes addressed in the book; the symbiosis and synergism that characterize New York City's jazz scene, particularly the avant-jazz scene; and the ideological debate between essentialist and universalist positions—the former emphasizing African American cultural values and the latter emphasizing multiculturalism, individual merit, and colorblindness. The book's main argument is that jazz's deeper meanings and expressions are conveyed when both artists and audiences participate in collective improvisation.


Edna Lewis (1916-2006) wrote some of America's most resonant, lyrical, and significant cookbooks, including the now classic The Taste of Country Cooking. Lewis cooked and wrote as a means to explore her memories of childhood on a farm in Freetown, Virginia, a community first founded by black families freed from slavery. With such observations as "we would gather wild honey from the hollow of oak trees to go with the hot biscuits and pick wild strawberries to go with the heavy cream," she commemorated the seasonal richness of southern food. After living many years in New York City, where she became a chef and a political activist, she returned to the South and continued to write. Her reputation as a trailblazer in the revival of regional cooking and as a progenitor of the farm-to-table movement continues to grow. In this first-ever critical appreciation of Lewis's work, food-world stars gather to reveal their own encounters with Edna Lewis. Together they penetrate the mythology around Lewis and illuminate her legacy for a new generation, making a case for Lewis as a critical voice in African American foodways, and a pioneering professional woman chef, and the single most important figure in regional American food.


2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-38
Author(s):  
Clarencetine Brooks ◽  
Sean Brennan ◽  
Diane Roberts ◽  
WillieFlora Gaines ◽  
Kira Labinger ◽  
...  

Established in collaboration with the Office of Consumer Affairs at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and the Mental Health Empowerment Project, Inc., the New York City Trauma-Informed Learning Community (NYCTIA-LC) represents a unique partnership between the community, local government, and trauma survivors. The NYCTIA-LC is comprised of individuals with lived experience who are committed to learning about trauma and trauma-informed approaches, advocating for the creation of trauma-informed environments, and the use of these approaches in behavioral health. This article will chronicle the development and evolution of the NYCTIA-LC and explore how local government and individuals who have been directly impacted by trauma can partner to consider a community response to this crisis.


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