Andrew Friedman during a press conference this year. Photo Javier Castaño
After fifteen amazing and inspiring years, we, Andrew Friedman and Oona Chatterjee, will be stepping down as Co-Executive Directors of Make the Road New York (MRNY) on April 1, 2012.
On that date, Javier Valdes and Deborah Axt, both of whom currently serve as Deputy Directors of MRNY, will join Ana Maria Archila as MRNY’s Co-Executive Directors.
This new leadership team is tremendously talented and deeply committed to MRNY’s mission, membership and staff. We will both continue to serve on the organization’s Board of Directors.
Andrew is moving on in order to launch an exciting and critically-needed new organization, the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD). The CPD will be a high-impact national organization that will promote equity, opportunity and a dynamic democracy by partnering with base-building organizations nationwide to generate organizing power and transform the state and local policy landscape. Through strategic partnerships, the CPD will take the innovative and successful organizing model of MRNY to a national scale and will develop, win and replicate important city and state policy victories that working families can see and feel every day.
Oona looks forward to continuing to support citywide and national youth organizing and police and education reform organizing efforts, helping to launch the Center for Popular Democracy, and strengthening MRNY’s sister 501c4 organization, the Make the Road Action Fund.
We look forward to sharing more with you over the next few months about our future plans, and about next steps at MRNY. We also look forward to reflecting on our fifteen years of work co-founding and building the beautiful and generative organization that MRNY has become.
Please accept our deepest gratitude for everything we have accomplished together. MRNY has been the dyanamic community that has, and continues to, shape who we are.
We are leaving MRNY full of energy and hope, and humbled by the love, courage, hard work, community and intelligence we have been surrounded by for the past fifteen years.
We look forward to many more years of working for justice together.
In Solidarity,
Andrew Friedman and Oona Chatterjee
