We organize impactful community-led campaigns that make tangible changes in our people’s lives and sustain broader movements for dignity and justice. We organize in our neighborhoods while helping to lead statewide and national movements for immigration reform, workers rights and more.
Our issue committees meet weekly and give members a chance to identify common problems, devise solutions, and wage grassroots campaigns to enact those solutions. In this way, we are able to cultivate grassroots leadership that ensure that our campaigns and movements are led by those most impacted.
We create compelling digital campaigns and mobilize thousands of people each year in the streets to demand enactment of more just policies, driving change at the city, state, and federal levels. Our policy demands are based on our on-the-ground experience: Each day, we work to address critical needs in our individual members’ lives. We then identify patterns and conduct research in order to design creative policies that will result in enforceable and far-reaching policy victories, from protections for TGNCIQ New Yorkers to fairer school discipline policies. Most recently, we have helped lead the national resistance to the vicious anti-immigrant, anti-worker policies coming from Washington.
Each of our member committees drives campaigns on an issue that impacts our communities . Committees organize on workplace justice, immigration, housing and environmental justice, policing, education, TGNCIQ issues, and more. We use a “high-touch” model with regular committee meetings. Our grassroots and digital campaigns win victories for New Yorkers and catalyze action across the country.
- We mobilize tens of thousands of people in the streets each year through grassroots and digital organizing.
- Led by MRNY members and workers at 11 union carwashes, we won over $3 million in back wages and penalties for workers and helped clean up this notoriously exploitative industry.
- After a ten-year fight, we helped pass the Asthma-Free Housing Act which requires landlords to inspect for and address asthma triggers annually.
- We mobilized thousands to win a $15 minimum wage for workers in New York City, Westchester, and Long Island, a historic victory for nearly 1.5 million working families.
After fleeing violence and discrimination in her native Mexico, Bianey Garcia arrived only to endure further injustice here. She joined Make the Road New York at the age of nineteen. After a MRNY fellowship, she became an TGNCIQ justice organizer, leading our Trans Immigrant Project (TrIP). Bianey played a key role in our successful push to ban the use of condoms as evidence in prostitution cases, which had resulted in the harassment and profiling of trans New Yorkers of color. Now, as the lead organizer for TrIP, Bianey is known throughout Queens as the go-to person for trans Latinas facing violence, workplace exploitation, or discriminatory police encounters.
“I didn’t choose to be an activist,” Bianey has said. “Injustice pushed me.”
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