The organizations currently stewarding the cooperative are: 596 Acres, Spaceworks, Fourth Arts Block, Black Land Matters, and Brooklyn Law School’s Center for Urban Business and Entrepreneurship. We are endorsed by the Municipal Art Society’s Committee for Urban Entrepreneurship and received a small grant from RSF Social Finance.
- Fourth Arts Block
- Brooklyn Law School’s Center for Urban Business Entrepreneurship
- Black Land Matters
- 596 Acres
- Spaceworks
Within two years, the NYC Real Estate Investment Cooperative (NYC REIC) will move from the incubation phase and become an independent, cooperatively-governed organization that provides financing and adheres to the democratic principle of ‘one member, one vote’. Minimum member investments are $10, but larger investments are both necessary and encouraged; they simply do not give the investor more control over the cooperative’s decisions.
Please join us on September 28th (RSVP)! The NYC REIC Membership will come together again on Monday, September 28, 2015, from 6:30-8:30pm for a membership report back. Each group will share its research and recommendations with the larger membership. For report backs from each workgroup, and to see upcoming meetings, go to http://nycreic.com/meet.
Fiscal sponsorship for the incubation period of NYC REIC is provided by Spaceworks NYC, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization. As an early-phase initiative, we are seeking planning grants, support for a white paper, and money to cover operating expenses. As stated above, the NYC REIC itself will be incorporated as a for-profit organization for investments by 2017.
In cooperation,
Risa Shoup, Fourth Arts Block
Paula Z. Segal, 596 Acres
Paul Parkhill, Spaceworks
Ted DeBarbieri, Center for Urban Business and Entrepreneurship
Caroline Woolard, independent artist
Mark Scott, BlackLandMatters
and 300 member-owners!
Spend one minute dreaming with us: http://nycreic.com/1-minute/
CORE TEAM
Caroline Woolard brings seven years of experience as the Co-Founder and Co-Director of international resource-sharing networks OurGoods.org in New York City and TradeSchool.coop. Woolard reframes narratives of scarcity by speaking about the future of cultural institutions at MIT, TEDx, and MoMA and in her courses at The New School, Rhode Island School of Design, and at Cooper Union. Beyond her service work, Woolard is an artist and the founding co-manager of an 8,000 square foot work space that serves 40 small businesses and artists from 2008-2016. When Woolard saw that her LLC’s rental expenses for a dilapidated workspace had totalled $960,000 in only 8 years, only to displace the initiative she had worked to hard to sustain, she became fixated on equitable ownership. Over the next three years, PBS’s Art21 / New York Close Up will feature Woolard in three short documentaries about her work as an artist and social innovator. Woolard is currently an Artist in Residence at the Queens Museum.
Risa Shoup is the Executive Director of Fourth Arts Block (FAB) in Manhattan. She has worked as an administrator, curator and leader in the NYC arts community since 2005. The main throughline of her career has been developing and advocating for affordable workspace for artists that is accessible to the community. From 2005-2009, she was the Program Director at chashama. She has also coordinated Seniors Partnering in the Arts Citywide (SPARC) for Queens Council on the Arts and worked with BRIC Arts Media to manage their Fireworks Residency as well as with the Wassaic Project. Prior to becoming the ED of FAB, she was the Associate Director at the Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn.
Paula Segal is the founding director of 596 Acres, New York City’s community land access advocates that have helped communities create 32 new pocket, parks and community farms. She is a Brooklyn-based attorney and educator who focuses her work on building capacity and providing technical assistance for local community-based organizing and decentralized pedagogic practice. She writes about the law and geography as structures that shape life in the city. Paula is a graduate of City University of New York Law School at Queens College, where she was a Haywood Burns Fellow in Human and Civil Rights and worked in the Economic Justice Project at Main Street Legal Services. She is a founding member of the NYC National Lawyers Guild Street Law Team. Before joining the legal profession, Paula taught English to Speakers of Other Languages, developed curricula and ran an all-volunteer adult English school on the Lower East Side. Paula is an attorney admitted to practice in New York State who is a partner in her own firm, Mohen & Segal, which focuses on legal services for entities working on our shared sustainable economy.
Ted De Barbieri is a faculty member at Brooklyn Law School who works with the Center for Urban Business Entrepreneurship (CUBE) and co-teaches the Community Development Clinic and the Corporate /Real Estate Clinic. He previously served as the Senior Staff Attorney for the Urban Justice Center’s Community Development Project, where he advised non-profit organizations on corporate and real estate matters and provided legal assistance to low-income workers and tenants. Brooklyn Law School’s Community Development Clinic is excited to assist NYC REIC to develop model governance and ownership structures, including member/tenant agreements.
Paul Parkhill is the Executive Director of Spaceworks, a nonprofit created by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Paul helps develop long-term, affordable workspace for visual and performing artists in all five boroughs of NYC. From 1999-2012, Paul served as the Director of Planning and Development at the Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center, a nonprofit that has redeveloped more than 700,000 square feet of space for industrial, artisanal and arts-related businesses.
Mark Scott is a technologist and community organizer who wants more people who look like him to think like systems architects. Organizing BlackLandMatters in Bedford Stuyvesant for the past four years, Mark joined the Real Estate Investment Cooperative to build alignment between our city-wide effort and his deeply rooted neighborhood-specific organizing efforts. Mark brings over a decade of work in information architecture and data management for financial advisors, and provides strategic leadership and the design of robust systems for virtual implementation, evaluation, and cooperative management.
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Email us: reic4nyc@gmail.com