Meet the City Council’s New Members: Laurie Cumbo

Laurie Cumbo’s Brooklyn district is one of striking affluence and glaring poverty. This dichotomy was recently portrayed in vivid detail by The New York Times’series about a homeless girl named Dasani. 

“I feel very challenged when I see extreme wealth in our communities, and then I also see what’s happening at the Auburn homeless shelter with a family like Dasani’s right here in the district,” explained Cumbo. “I want to change that dynamic and I really want people to see that there is a value in all of us.”

One of the ways Cumbo is hoping to address this economic disparity is to push for the equal distribution of funding across the city’s 51 Council districts—and not just the Council members’ pot of discretionary dollars, a change that has been widely discussed of late, but also the city’s capital funds and the monies distributed by its various agencies.

As the founder of the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts in downtown Brooklyn, Cumbo is well familiar with the funding challenges the city’s nonprofit institutions face, and she wants to use her firsthand experience to improve the system.

“There are all of these great not-for-profit organizations that are doing everything from food pantries to our reentry work to our libraries to our culturals and on a year-to-year basis they have no idea if they are going to be in business the following year,” said Cumbo. “You have to make a choice on a regular basis of whether you’re going to play the budget dance, or you’re going to give a tour to a group of 30 students that are here to learn about their history or their culture. Or you have to decide if you are going to be at an after-school program to make sure it’s running correctly, and that the students have all of the tools that they need, and that the principals and the teachers have buy-in, and that the parents know about the program, or you have to be on the steps of City Hall fighting for resources. So I want to end that process. I want to give organizations across the board … the stability that they need to plan for the future, to be able to know that year after year that they are of course going to be evaluated, but at the same time that they are going to be rewarded for providing incredible and important resources to our community.”