“If a city is good for children, it will be good for everybody else.” – Enrique Peñalosa

The Upper West Side is a neighborhood defined by family that also features some of the best schools in New York City.  Yet, like the rest of the city, it is beset by traffic and plagued by deadly drivers.  Join a nationally recognized movement to improve the streets and intersections that surround our schools.  The Department of Transportation has just finished its first round of improvements to Priority Schools around the city and now is the time to work to expand the benefits to schools in our neighborhood.

Our Mission:

We seek to provide a safe, sustainable, and livable environment in which children can walk, play and gather.  W­­e believe that if a city is good for children, it will be good for everyone.  We will achieve our objectives by organizing our community through inventive and engaging activism and advocacy.  In our actions, we will strive to realize a neighborhood worthy of the next generation.

NNG Goals:

• To raise awareness of the safety and sustainability issues facing our city’s most vulnerable citizens.

• To educate people of all ages about the existence of viable solutions to these problems.

• To bring tangible change to the built environment in which our children live.

NNG Method:

By partnering with Upper West Side schools, we will reach out to both children and educators to begin a dialogue about the effects that our cityscape has on our lives, and how we can make our neighborhood more people-friendly by asking for small but significant changes.  This outreach will take the form of both in-school events such as talks, classroom visits, and fun activities (bike-bus to school, group walks, etc.) and longer-term curricular education.  

At the same time, the community will be engaged in the process of re-imagining their streets through activities like the Mom ‘n Me Bike Ride on Mother’s Day (and of course Dad gets his turn too), chalk mural drawing in Riverside Park, free picnics, etc.  By simultaneously stimulating children’s’ natural curiosity about their environment and parents’ desire to guarantee their children’s future, we will build a powerful constituency for change.

Moving forward, both children and parents will find ways to make themselves heard.  These will include the small but symbolically important (such as the CalhounSchool’s new “No Idling” signage, demanded by the 3^rd grade class) as well as the large (demanding traffic calming measures from the City).  The only certainty is that there’s no arguing with a kid whose mind is made up.