On behalf of Green City Force Alumni, our Service Corps, Board Members, and Staff, please join us in support of our first GCF Thanksgiving Celebration on ‘Giving Tuesday’, December 1st. As we mark 10 years of service with our first-ever (virtual) fundraising event, we’ll feature friends of GCF and leaders committed to social, economic, and environmental justice.
Featured ‘Friends of GCF’ include:
Domingo Morales, GCF Alumni and inaugural David Prize winner. Domingo discovered his passion for farming and composting as a member of Cohort 10 in 2015. While serving with GCF, Domingo secured a job at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden working at the very compost site where he was receiving his training. Several years later he was managing the largest human powered compost site in the country. Domingo’s vision is to build sustainable compost sites throughout NYC, with an emphasis on underserved communities and NYCHA. He is also developing an educational video series focused on urban composting.
Ritchie Torres is a fighter from the Bronx who has spent his entire life working for the community he calls home. Like many people in the South Bronx, poverty and struggle have never been abstractions to him, and he governs from a place of lived experience.
Ritchie’s mother single-handedly raised him, his twin brother, and his sister in a public-housing project. In 2013, at the age of twenty-five, he became New York City’s youngest elected official and the first openly L.G.B.T.Q person elected to office in the Bronx.
At the City Council, Ritchie stood out, and during his seven years has tenaciously tackled problems big and small for the Bronx and New York City. He has passed over thirty pieces of legislation, including legislation protecting the City’s affordable housing stock and tackling the city’s opioid epidemic. He was also instrumental in passing landmark criminal justice reform legislation that changed how New York approaches low-level offenses. Most recently, he passed legislation protecting tenants from discrimination from landlords related to COVID-19. As the Chairman overseeing NYCHA, he held the first committee hearing ever in public housing, which led to a $3 billion-dollar FEMA investment, the largest in NYC history.
As the Council’s Chair of the Oversight & Investigations Committee, he has led investigations into the heating outages and lead poisoning at NYCHA, the Taxi Medallion scandal, the City’s controversial Third-Party Transfer program, and Kushner Companies.
Ritchie is the Congressman-Elect for NY’s 15th Congressional District.
Ritchie currently lives in the Bronx.
Rasmia Kirmani-Frye, is an independent consultant focusing on urban problem solving, housing, movement building, governance design, non-profit management, narrative development and strategic planning. Rasmia is currently working with the Ford Foundation on public housing reform. Until December 2018, Rasmia was Director at the Office of Public/Private Partnerships, New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), appointed to the executive team in 2015. She developed and managed NYCHA’s strategic relationships with external cross-sector entities. While at NYCHA, Rasmia founded The Fund for Public Housing in 2016 where she served as its first president. The Fund for Public Housing invests in the well-being of public housing residents and their communities by collaborating with partners to re-imagine and improve the way public housing in NYC works.
Prior to that Rasmia served as director of The Brownsville Partnership, a community based organization. She spearheaded the effort to build a collective impact neighborhood network working with community residents, many of whom live in public housing. Rasmia earned a Master of Science degree in Urban and Public Policy from The New School and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Urban Studies from the College of Wooster in Ohio. She is Chair of the New York Foundation, board member of Hester Street, serves on the national advisory board of the Center for Court Innovation, and Chair of the Youth Design Center (formerly Made in Brownsville, Inc). In 2018, the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation named Rasmia a Sterling Network Fellow, New York City leaders from government, non-profit and business sectors working together to tackle the challenge of increasing economic mobility across the five boroughs.
Vinson Cunningham, a staff writer and a theatre critic at The New Yorker. His essays, reviews, and profiles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, FADER, Vulture, The Awl, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. In 2020, he was a finalist for a National Magazine Award in Profile Writing. A former White House staffer, he now teaches an MFA Writing course at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City.
Brigitte Vicenty, a lifelong New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) resident, is the founder of the Inner City Green Team. She has led the fight for herself and fellow residents in their “Right to Recycle” for a decade. She created ICGT when she learned that NYCHA’s recycling program was nonexistent and there were no other options. She envisioned a convenient way for residents to recycle that could create jobs in communities with some of the highest unemployment rates. As a teen, Brigitte observed her mother’s passion for caring about her community and witnessed the effects it had on others. Brigitte hoped to serve in a cause that would be impactful beyond where she grew up. With her passion for the environment and appreciation for its life-giving power, Brigitte wants others to join her “green ministry.” In 2018, she won the NYCx Co-Lab Challenge and was honored at the Zero Waste in Shared Space Recognition Ceremony. The project was recently featured on New York’s PIX11 and News12 as well as by Politico. Brigitte is a 2020 Echoing Green Fellow and a member of the waste advisory panel named the Climate Action Council established by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.
Gregory Russ, the Chairman/CEO of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). He came to NYCHA after serving 2 years as the Executive Director for the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority (MPHA). Prior to working in Minneapolis Mr. Russ served as Executive Director for 12 years at the Cambridge Housing Authority. Mr. Russ has over forty-four years of experience in public housing policy, operations, and program management. Although it is early in his tenure at the MPHA, issues related to the creation of sufficient capital investment in the housing stock, voucher reform, energy, customer service, and program efficiencies will drive future initiatives and efforts.
At the Cambridge Housing Authority, Mr. Russ lead the policy and operations team that: designed and implemented the Agency’s Moving to Work (MTW) Public Housing Rent Simplification Program, secured $81M in an initial round of funding for the Agency’s ten-year $300 million housing preservation program; worked with the City to rehabilitate the old police station into combined CHA and city office space; secured a $300M portfolio repositioning opportunity for the all the agency’s Federal public housing using CHA’s Moving to Work flexibility and HUD’s Rental Assistance Demonstration; secured State and City funds along with tax credits to rebuild Public Housing at Jefferson Park; provided assistance to foster a city wide resident group; implemented an MTW sponsor-based voucher program to address housing and support needs for hard-to-house families; and, developed an expiring use preservation program that uses MTW flexibility to retain affordability for these properties in Cambridge and elsewhere in Massachusetts. Under his leadership, CHA’s policy team has also designed unique MTW subsidy programs that, in cooperation with local partner agencies, elevate the Agency’s role in ending homelessness and fostering family asset development and self-sufficiency.
Mr. Russ started in this field at the Dauphin County Housing and Redevelopment Authority (DCHA) in central Pennsylvania. After working at DCHA, he went to work for the State of Pennsylvania and subsequent to that ran his own consulting and training firm for 12 years. In 1995 he went to work for HUD in Washington, DC where he played a key role in HUD’s successful take over of the then troubled Chicago Housing Authority; he also worked in Detroit as part of an partnership effort to move that troubled agency forward. Later, Mr. Russ went to work for the Chicago Housing Authority first as the Chief of Staff and then as Chief of Policy Development where he assisted in the negotiation of Agency’s MTW agreement and the accompanying Plan for Transformation. Mr. Russ came to Cambridge from the Philadelphia Housing Authority, where he served as Deputy Executive Director for Operations and contributed to the creation and implementation of that Agency’s MTW Rent Simplification policy.
He is the past President of the Public Housing Authorities Directors Association (PHADA). He is also a member of the Board for the Council of Large Public Housing Authorities (CLPHA) serving since 2007.
Host Committee:
Ibrahim Abdul-Matin
Bahij Chancey
Kevin Delaney
Anne-Laure Fayard
Mark Foggin
Naomi Johnson
Sharon A. Myrie
Daphany Rose Sanchez
Jennie Schueler
Victoria Shaw
Shannon Snead
Lee Trotman
Celebrating a Decade of Service and Leadership:
Ed Cohen and the Cohen Family
In Honor of Lawrence Harris
Matt Nimetz
Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison
Event link provided upon RSVP.