A Historic Merger:
IN UNITY THERE IS STRENGTH
Make the Road New York (MRNY) was
created in the fall of 2007 through the
merger of Make the Road by Walking and
the Latin American Integration Center,
two of New York City’s most innovative
and effective grassroots organizations.
The merger was a natural partnership
that built on proven successes and
created a new citywide organization that
combines democratic accountability to
low–income people and an innovative
mix of strategies to confront inequity
and economic injustice, while fostering
deep and active community roots.
Our organization is membership–led and
based in the low–income communities of
Bushwick, Brooklyn, Jackson Heights, Queens, and Port Richmond,
Staten Island. Our 7,000+ members are
primarily low–income Latino/a immigrants,
seventy–five percent of whom are women.
Make the Road By Walking
Founded in 1997 in Bushwick, Brooklyn,
Make the Road by Walking (MRBW) initially
focused exclusively on working with
immigrant welfare recipients who were
vilified in national policy debates and who
suffered illegal disruptions in their public
benefits in the wake of “welfare reform.”
From the beginning, Make the Road by
Walking combined three interrelated
approaches to fighting injustice:
- Education to help New Yorkers achieve
increased economic opportunity and
meaningful civic participation;
- Legal and support services to meet
families’ immediate needs; and
- Community organizing and leadership
development to identify and implement
collective solutions to the recurrent
problems low–income communities face.
Over the decade of the organization’s
existence, MRBW expanded substantially,
adding a Workplace Justice Project, LGBT
organizing project, and Youth Power Project
in 1998 and an Environmental Justice
Project in 1999.
In subsequent years, MRBW began working
on public education reform and healthcare
access, expanded its legal team, grew the
Adult Education Program, helped to found
the Bushwick School for Social Justice, and
deepened work with students in public
high schools.
Latin American Integration Center
In 1991, a group of Colombian immigrants
who had recently escaped the political
violence that ravaged the country landed
in the little Colombia of Jackson Heights
with the same dream: building a popular
movement for justice from the experience
and voices of Latino immigrants living
in New York City.
Among them was
Saramaria Archila, a feisty Colombian lawyer who
had worked for years for human rights
and economic justice in Colombia. She
would become the first Executive Director
of the Latin American Integration Center
(LAIC), founded in 1992 with the mission to
promote and protect human and civil rights
of Latino immigrants and encourage their
civic participation in New York City.
By 1994, LAIC’s pioneering community–led citizenship campaigns, much like the
historical civil rights voter registration drives,
were attracting over 200 legal permanent
residents every weekend – some of the largest
such drives New York City had ever seen.
By the year 2000, LAIC had helped over
10,000 New Yorkers become U.S. citizens.
LAIC continued to grow deep roots in the
neighborhoods of Woodside and Jackson
Heights in Queens, and in 2001 opened
its office in Staten Island. Over the years,
LAIC developed into a dynamic grassroots
immigrant rights organization, combining
education, support services, and grassroots
advocacy in areas of school reform, access
to health care, and immigration reform.
In 2007 LAIC helped found a public school
for immigrant students in Queens, the
Pan American International High School,
and joined forces with Make the Road by
Walking.…and the rest is history.
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