The Champlain Hudson Power Express (CHPE), a transmission corridor owned by a subsidiary of private equity group Blackstone, is designed to import hydroelectricity from Canada to Queens. A closer look at the situation, however, reveals that the project represents an effort by a leading fossil fuel profiteer to augment its fossil fuel profits with greenwashed imported hydropower as a false climate solution.

When I started studying New York State child care policy in spring 2023, I met Ms. Rhodes, co-founder of Western New York Child Care Action Team, while supervising a qualitative study of Erie County child care providers. Ms. Rhodes introduced me to local providers and coached me through the ins and outs of a complicated industry seeking concrete reforms at the State level. Now, I am embedded in the Child Care Community of Erie County and remain inspired to effect political change, beginning with workforce compensation reforms which will improve wages for child care workers. My passion for this work is largely influenced by Ms. Rhodes’s mentorship, helping me understand the nuances of early childhood education and care, as well as connecting me to other researchers, advocates, providers, and parents who are impassioned about child care policy reform. I had an opportunity to interview Ms. Rhodes, and to publish the interview here with the support of Weave News.

No one seems to be talking about how criminally underpaid child care professionals are in New York State. A coalition of child care providers, advocates, and parents, the Empire State Campaign for Child Care, has announced that child care workforce compensation and development are the top policy priority for the industry. There is consensus about this priority among providers, advocates, and parents outside of the statewide coalition as well. Child care professionals rank among the lowest paid professions in New York State. As the workforce behind the workforce, child care professionals facilitate the working lives of millions. If they remain underpaid and abandon the industry, which they have been over the last few years, the collapse of the child care industry would create unimaginable social ruptures. The child care community wants better pay and government support to achieve it. Will Governor Hochul say anything about child care? Will she invest in workforce compensation for child care professionals?

On Wednesday, December 13, child care advocates from across New York State gathered in front of the midtown Manhattan building where the Governor stays on New York City trips, 633 Third Avenue. There were close to 30 activists huddled together holding signs, speaking into mics, and demanding that Governor Hochul sign the Decoupling Bill. The Empire State Campaign for Child Care, led by Dede Hill, Executive Director of the Schuyler Center, hosted the rally. I was there, too.

“I am not optimistic. I think it will get harder and harder.” This was St. Lawrence County (NY) farmer Dan Kent’s response when asked how climate change will impact local farmers in the years to come. Localized farming practices have both economic and environmental advantages for the North Country. But with warming temperatures and varying weather patterns, local farmers in the region will need to find ways to adapt in order to maintain their livelihoods and retain the benefits of local food systems.

On Thursday, July 20, 2023, Abra Lee, ornamental horticulturalist and Black historian, presented research from her forthcoming monograph, “Conquer the Soil.” This public lecture inaugurated the 2023 Garden Walk series of events, coordinated by Gardens Buffalo Niagara, which includes the East Side Garden Walk, on July 22-23, 2023, and the Buffalo Garden Walk, on July 29-30, 2023. In other words, Buffalo has a two-week flower festival – and Abra Lee got us started.

Ms. Gail Wells is Founder of Buffalo Freedom Gardens and a Project Consultant for Grassroots Gardens of Buffalo. Founded in 2020, Buffalo Freedom Gardens has two aims, first, to help residents create sustainable food sources on the East Side of Buffalo through urban farming and, second, to bring the vibrancy of horticulture to urban spaces. Between 2020 and 2021, Ms. Wells and Buffalo Freedom Gardens helped more than 80 residents start gardening – front-yard, backyard, raised bed, and container gardens – to feed their households and beautify their homes.

Sara E. Jablonski is a 4-H Team Educator in the Cornell Cooperative Extension Erie County. She develops 4-H Youth Development clubs in the Buffalo, NY, and Amherst, NY, areas. She helps young people find their spark! She is one of my colleagues at Cornell in Buffalo, and she was kind enough to share with Weave News the work she does in the community and the flowers that she admires in Buffalo.

I’ve lived in a city most of my life. Save 5 years in Canton, NY, as a St. Lawrence student, I have lived in either New York City (21 years) or City of Buffalo (16 years). I’m a city creature, ranging through one or another major city. Flowers and gardens have not always been of interest to me. In New York City, I lived close enough to Central Park to enjoy some of nature’s bloom. Three blocks from my railroad apartment in El Barrio was the 97th street entrance to the park. As a teen, it wasn’t the park’s green spaces that attracted me, but the hilly walkways that outlined the grassy field. I blazed those roads with my bike, catching enough speed to soar off short ramps made of broken sidewalk…

I’m a recovering college professor. Teaching is my drug – it gets me high. But these “highs'' never last long, and my addiction was costing years off my life. The problem isn’t teaching; it’s learning – learning is the purpose of teaching, and I cannot tell when, how, or why people learn in college classrooms. So to summarize, since 2007, I have been getting high off teaching, leading history classes at two different universities, and sharing my expertise with more than 1500 students until I resigned in 2023. In that period, I’ve struggled with anxiety and depression, I’ve fought off rashes and infections, and I’ve been hospitalized for stress-related conditions afflicting my heart, arms, and brain. Getting high on the job was killing me.

On Friday, June 23, I joined the Fellows on two tours, one of the People United for Sustainable Housing (PUSH-Buffalo) Green Economic Development Zone and another of an urban farm administered by Massachusetts Avenue Project (MAP). On both tours, I was chasing flowers with my phone – I’m obsessed. But I found much more than flower pictures. I found myself on the grassroots, too, a drop of dew shimmering in sight of Eden.

Recently, wildfire smoke darkened our skies in northern New York, making being outside unpleasant to downright unhealthy. We experienced what it’s like when something fundamental that we take for granted, such as clean air, isn’t available. Here in the North Country, far from big cities, we expect clean air; yet we were powerless to do anything about the air pollution we were suddenly suffering. Clean water is also fundamental to our well-being. We expect our waterways to be clean and healthy, but clean water is under threat from pollution.

“Rivers keep us alive and keep so many other living beings alive.” With those words, Blake Lavia, the President of Talking Rivers, welcomed more than 30 North Country community members to a wide-ranging discussion on a revolutionary idea: the Rights of Rivers. Held at Clarkson University on Earth Day (April 22), the event showcased the local and global momentum behind the idea as well as some of the key challenges facing those who would like the Rights of Rivers to become law across the St. Lawrence River / Kaniatarowanénhne and Adirondack Watersheds.

In this article, I wanted to go beyond simply presenting statistics to illustrate the extent of unemployment or economic insecurity in the North Country. I thought it was important to discuss how dependence on the military-industrial complex and the prison-industrial complex make the region's economy vulnerable, negatively impacting workers and their families.

In this article, I seek to go beyond simply presenting statistics to illustrate the scope of poverty or economic insecurity in the North Country. I want to show how the limited understanding of poverty, as a threshold defined by institutions, obscures our awareness of people’s struggles to cover their necessities and of the systemic issues causing economic insecurity. Beyond this, I explore the intersection of social class with other identities such as gender and race while also highlighting the importance of grassroots work. Overall, I hope to generate more empathy for our neighbors and encourage support for the people working to improve their communities.

By Ayla Schnier

Once thought to be a permanently-forgotten Rust Belt city in Upstate New York, Utica has recently made a cultural and economic comeback thanks to an influx of refugees. However, the Trump administration’s refugee cuts -- the most drastic in US history -- are harming this small city’s prosperity. The rationale for these cuts is rooted in several global patterns, and bouncing back from their consequences won’t be easy. But Utica isn’t ready to give up without a fight.

By Eliza Maher

Though not a global city, Geneva, New York, located in the Finger Lakes region of the state, has become increasingly popular among tourists, entrepreneurs, culinary artists, and young, creative people. In the first installment of our new “Glocal Dispatches” series, Eliza Maher critically analyzes the revitalization of Geneva into a city driven by local businesses, art, music, Hobart and William Smith colleges, and Seneca Lake, and explores the shift to an image-saturated society. However, the shift, often characterized as positive, innovative, and diverse, fails to acknowledge the influence the urban branding will have on the minority groups in Geneva who cannot afford the lifestyle driven by localism.

By Chloe McElligott

Weave News correspondent Chloe McElligott speaks with Jack Gilroy, a Veterans for Peace member whose lifelong journey of social justice activism has taken him from military service to self-imposed exile in Australia to campaigns against militarism throughout the United States. Situating himself within the tradition of radical Catholic antiwar organizing, Jack finds hope in the "search for young people who are individuals with a sense of true justice, have a sense of morality, who are not on an ego-trip, who are not on a power trip, but are more concerned with reaching out with compassion and generosity to the world."

By Julianne DeGuardi

In the final installment of her three-part profile of migrant farm worker Juan Garcia, Weave News reporter Julianne DeGuardi details Juan’s differing experiences with accessing health care in New York and Vermont. Read Part I and Part II.

By Julianne DeGuardi

In the second installment of her three-part profile of migrant farm worker Juan Garcia, Weave News reporter Julianne DeGuardi details Juan’s story of moving among a number of different work opportunities in New York, Vermont, and Kentucky. Read Part I.