ABOUT
WHAT WE DO
The Shape of Cities to Come Institute (SCCI) convenes place-based community leaders, cultural workers, neighborhood actors, and urban activists from across New York City's grassroots communities and movements to collectively shape our cities through the STUDY. PLAY. ACT program.
Our aim is to elevate and nurture BIPOC, working class communities from the ground-up, and infiltrate infrastructures of urban knowledge, culture, and communication to subvert New York City’s power structures. As a social movement incubator space, we offer an ecosystem of care, support, solidarity, and camaraderie.
Through our peer-to-peership program, our peers foster collaborations across diverse movements, intersectional projects, cross-neighborhood alliances, advocacy issues, and common ground proposals. Each 15-month cycle will culminate in critical projects in communities across the city that grow on the peers’ existing work and practices.
In cooperation with our partners, SCCI offers a stipend, project funds, and resources to facilitate this collaborative endeavor.
WHY NOW?
New York City stands at a crossroads of vicious inequities or compassionate social reinvention. We are confronting the growing rise of the real estate state, displacement and homelessness; record-high commercial vacancies; omnipresent policing as a catchall solution; environmental injustices of racial capitalism; inhumane immigration policies; historical under-investment in the cultural landscape of people of color and working-class neighborhoods; inflation coupled with city budget cuts; and post-pandemic after-shocks of repressed mourning.
These issues and dynamics are best understood by those involved in such struggles, and through collective efforts that counter the threat of increased alienation. Grounded experience and cultural competence are necessary as we organize to shape the city towards a path of fairness, accountability, and individual and collective self-determination. The question is why not now?
