Good morning. It's Wednesday. We'll meet the winners of the Just Brooklyn Prize, who will receive no-strings-attached checks for $20,000. We'll also find out how a man who's in prison in New York could sway a House race in Alaska.
Christine Yvette Lewis says there were times in the last 10 years when she paid the rent for the space in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, that Domestic Workers United uses for its monthly meetings. The group is a coalition that organizes grass-roots campaigns for labor rights for housekeepers, nannies and companions for older people. As its culture outreach coordinator, Lewis has a title but draws no salary. "We got grants along the way," she said, but before they came through, she sometimes paid for the space "out of my own pocket." "I did that unseen," she said. But her work did not go unnoticed, and now she has been named one of five winners of the Just Brooklyn Prize for 2024. She and each of the other four recipients will receive no-strings-attached checks for $20,000 from the Social Justice Fund, a nonprofit started by Clara Wu Tsai, who owns the New York Liberty with her husband, Joe Tsai. They also own the Brooklyn Nets. The awards are administered by the Social Justice Fund and Brooklyn.org, which changed its name from Brooklyn Community Foundation last year and channels grants to other nonprofits to deal with immediate crises and longer-range projects. Domestic Workers United pushed for a domestic workers' bill of rights, which became law in New York State in 2010. It codified guarantees that most workers take for granted, like paid holidays, sick days, vacation days and the right to overtime pay. Lewis, who was trained as an early childhood teacher in Trinidad, worked as a nanny after moving to New York in 1989. She pays the bills from her work as an actress and musician; she has appeared in productions staged by the Public Theater. She called her involvement with Domestic Workers United "a labor of love." "Because of the nature of our jobs, we are most times in the shadows," she said, adding that she frequently meets the workers near where they work, often in parks or libraries or sometimes on the streets as they push their employers' strollers. "All of the work we do is centered around educating employees," she said. "When we educate employees, we are able to educate the employers as well. We're not a union. It's advocating to have women stand up and speak for their rights. It's having the courage to stand up and negotiate for wages." Another Just Brooklyn Prize winner, Ninaj Raoul, is the director of Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees. She said the timing of the prize was "even bigger than the money." "Anti-Haitianism is out there," particularly with former President Donald Trump's campaign, she said. "Having this prize raises our voices," she said. "That's larger than the money." She recalled the 1990s, when waves of Haitians fled in makeshift boats. The Coast Guard detained thousands at the Guantánamo Bay naval base in Cuba. "What I saw there was horrible — people were detained in tents," she said. "I never would have imagined to fast-forward 32 years and people would be living in tents like we're seeing on Floyd Bennett Field and Randall's Island. It's been overwhelming, not just for organizations like ours but for the city as a whole." The other winners of the Just Brooklyn Prize for 2024 are:
The eight judges included Antonio Reynoso, the Brooklyn borough president, and Maya Wiley, the president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, who ran for mayor in the Democratic primary in 2021. Clara Wu Tsai said the Just Brooklyn Prize was started to recognize "the work of the borough's unsung heroes" — work that she said was "pivotal to building a more equitable and just Brooklyn." She said some of the winners would use the grant money "to expand their impact in Brooklyn." "But I hope that they also use some of it to treat themselves," she said. "They most certainly deserve it." WEATHER Expect a mostly sunny day with a temperatures near the high 50s. This evening, the sky will be mostly clear with temperatures in the mid-40s. ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING In effect until Thursday-Friday (Sukkot). The latest New York news
We hope you've enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. In prison in New York, running for Congress in Alaska
Eric Hafner is running for Congress in Alaska, but he can't go there to campaign. Hafner, 33, is an inmate at the Otisville Federal Correctional Institution in upstate New York. And he could turn out to be a spoiler under Alaska's ranked-choice system of voting, which allows voters to show a preference for more than one candidate. Hafner — who is serving a 20-year sentence for threatening public officials in New Jersey, where he grew up — mailed in his application in time for an open primary in August. He entered as a Democrat and got 467 votes, less than half a percent of the 109,000 cast. He finished sixth among 12 candidates, far behind the top finishers, Representative Mary Peltola, a Democrat seeking a second full term, and Nick Begich III, a Republican from Anchorage. Only the top four were to advance to the ballot for the November election. But then the third- and fourth-place finishers, both Republicans, dropped out, leaving Begich as the only Republican — and putting Hafner on the ballot in a race in which the Democrat is considered vulnerable. Democrats immediately began worrying that Hafner could draw votes from Peltola. Pundits speculated about whether he could play spoiler in a tight race with a higher turnout than in the primary. Matt Shuckerow, a Republican strategist in Alaska who said he was not working for any congressional campaigns this year, said that Hafner could receive 1 percent to 3 percent of the vote. If the race is tight enough and if even a few thousand of those voters do not list Peltola as their second-ranked choice, "it could cost her the election," Shuckerow said. As a candidate seeking to represent a district 4,000 miles away, Hafner spends his days mailing campaign material from Otisville and parceling out his limited phone time to speak with reporters. He gets some help from his mother, Carol Hafner, who herself sought the seat in 2018 without visiting the state. Hafner told my colleague Corey Kilgannon that he had entered the race not to disrupt the election but because the needs of the state aligned with his own stands on issues such as the problems of climate change, the preservation of natural resources and the rights of Indigenous people. If he becomes a spoiler and tips the race to Begich, so be it, he said. "I really don't care about her not getting re-elected," he said, referring to Peltola. He also said that if he somehow won, he would apply for release and relocate to — where else? — Alaska. METROPOLITAN DIARY Forget SardinesDear Diary: I was waiting for the Lexington Avenue express at Fulton Street on an extremely hot day. When it finally whooshed into the station, I was relieved to escape the broiling platform and squeeze onto a crowded train for my evening commute to Grand Central. The air-conditioning was on, but with riders packed together so tightly, it wasn't doing much good. The car was completely silent and felt pressure-cooker tense as the train made its way uptown. Then I heard a passenger call out to a friend. "Is this how it feels to be a lasagna?" he said. — Meredith Mundy Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here. Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. P.S. Here's today's Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here. Francis Mateo and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
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N.Y. Today: An advocate for domestic workers wins the Just Brooklyn Prize
October 16, 2024
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