Disruptive Engagement

Ridgewood Tenants Union chalk wall (photo RTU)

Disruptive Engagement is an organizer’s guide to building community power for justice in land use and housing in New York City. The guide emerged from a 2020-2021 participatory oral history project with organizers and activists in New York City facilitated by Naomi Schiller and Vanessa Thill. Our aim was to document histories and connect our struggles for more just land use and housing. We wanted to understand the limits and possibilities of New York City’s official engagement procedures and strategize about how best to create care and safety for all. This handbook draws on knowledge of organizers from across New York City about how to disrupt the official community engagement apparatus in the most productive ways possible towards the goal of building justice in land use and housing.

Read More

The Urban Politics of Climate Change: a conversation with Naomi Schiller and Eric Dean Wilson, August 7, 2023 / Distributaries

Timeline

Disruptive Engagement will join the Western Queens Community Land Trust’s Queensboro People’s Space Street Festival

  • Date/Time: Saturday, September 30, 2023, 1PM – 6PM
  • Location: 44th Drive, between Vernon Boulevard and the waterfront

Disruptive Engagement Launch Celebration

  • Date/Time: Thursday, October 12, 2023,  6-8pm
  • Location: The Skylight Room in the Graduate Center

Meeting April 22 at SSCC (photo Naomi Schiller)

SPCUNY Artist

Naomi Schiller

Naomi Schiller

Faculty Fellow 2022-2023

Collaborators

Vanessa Thill organizes with Art Against Displacement and Coalition to Protect Chinatown and the Lower East Side. Thill is an artist who has participated in struggles against displacement and gentrification, including in Chinatown and the Lower East Side where she has worked to pass the Chinatown Working Group plan and to stop luxury development in Two Bridges.