LA FUENTE A TRI-STATE WORKER & COMMUNITY FUND INC

Causes: Civil Rights, Civil Rights, Social Action & Advocacy, Economic Development, Urban & Community Economic Development

Mission: The NYCPP was founded in 2002 by: SEIU Local 32BJ (the union representing over 75,000 janitors and other building service workers in NYC), Make the Road By Walking (a community-based group in Bushwick, Brooklyn), AFSCME DC 37 (NY City's largest municipal union representing over 125,000 city employees including school crossing guards, cafeteria helpers, librarians and others), UNITE HERE Local 100 (the union that represents over 6,000 restaurant and cafeteria workers in NYC), and the National Employment Law Project (NELP, a national worker advocacy organization). This year, the Laborers Local 79 (the union that represents over 7,000 construction and demolition workers in the NY area) also joined the NYCPP as a new labor partner.Collectively, our four union partners represent over 210,000 workers in New York City. Members of Local 32BJ and Local 100 are predominantly new immigrants. Members of DC 37 include more established minority populations (including African Americans and Puerto Rican constituencies) and a growing new immigrant constituency from South and East Asia, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe and Africa. Members of the Laborers Local 79 are a third new immigrant (mostly Latino and Polish), a third African American and a third white. Despite the immense number of unions, advocacy organizations and community groups working on an array of issues impacting immigrants and workers in New York City, very few groups have the capacity to bring together the power of unions and advocates at the city level with the voices and untapped power of immigrant communities at the grassroots level. The NYCPP was created to begin to foster this type of collaboration, and to demonstrate that immigrant communities (new and old), unions, and community groups can all benefit significantly at these levels through such a partnership. NYCPP work aims to promote: Rights: Promoting labor, civic, and human rights of immigrant workers and their communities through specific campaignsStandards: Extending job protection, adequate pay, and safe working conditions at the workplace to new immigrant workersServices: Improving access to public services for immigrants and their communitiesPolitical Empowerment: Enabling immigrant workers to become powerful forces for change within their own communities and in the city and state through civic participation and activism