New York Communities for Change
advocacy organization
New York Communities for Change (NYCC) is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit focused on issues including housing, education, and wages for low-income New Yorkers.
History
In 2010, Jon Kest, previously the lead organizer for New York's affiliate of the national Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now organization, started New York Communities for Change after ACORN's demise. After Kest's death in 2012, Jonathan Westin succeeded him and currently serves as the executive director.
Issues and actions
Push for NYC pension funds not to invest in BlackRock
In 2025, NYCC representatives voiced frustration with New York City Comptroller Brad Lander and the New York City Comptroller's Office in regard to helping keep solvent three pension funds for retirees of various New York City employers: the New York City Employees Retirement System, the New York City Teachers Retirement System, and the New York City Board of Education Retirement System. The Comptroller's office is supposed to determine which asset management companies are environmentally friendly and reject investing city employees' retirement funds in companies that have a poor record. NYCC and other environmental groups argued that Lander was stalling his office's investigation into controversial investment company BlackRock in order to delay divesting from it. NYCC threatened to stop endorsing Lander in his next campaign because he missed a September 2025 deadline to respond to its representatives.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “New York Communities for Change” as advocacy organization. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as advocacy organization. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q28228245. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2010, 2012 and 2025.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
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Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
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- Expand the search: follow New York Communities for Change primary sources, New York Communities for Change archive and York research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “New York Communities for Change” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.