Make the Road by Walking Make the Road by ...

"MIKE, DON'T BE A TURKEY!" reads a leaflet handed out last Tuesday in Battery Park, where handmade placards also displayed photocopied turkeys bearing the mayor's face.

The protest, organized by an 800-member Bushwick-based organization called Make the Road by Walking, was carried out in support of Intro 38A: The Equal Access to Health and Human Services Act, a bill that would require the city's Human Resources Administration to recruit more bilingual caseworkers and translate written materials into more languages. Four years ago, the Federal Office for Civil Rights found NYC's HRA to be violating immigrants' civil rights, yet the city has not remedied the problem. While most of the City Council, including Speaker Gifford Miller, and more than 100 community organizations support the bill, Mayor Bloomberg thus far has refused to sign on.

The campaign for Intro 38A is part of Make the Road by Walking's Economic Justice and Democracy Project, which works to demand greater government accountability and equal access to government services and health care for immigrants and New Yorkers with limited English proficiency. Make the Road is composed of several such projects, including Workers in Action, Youth Power, Parents in Action for Education, an environmental-justice project and GLOBE: Gays and Lesbians of Bushwick Empowered.

Dee Perez, a trans person in her 20s, started GLOBE?the neighborhood's first and only group for queer youth and their allies?in 1998, out of a desire for young queer people in Bushwick to have a safe space in their community. GLOBE's work involves raising awareness around issues of HIV and AIDS and fighting the harassment and invisibility of LGBT people in Bushwick. Says Perez, "We should all respect each other. No one should tell me how to dress, what to put on my face or my feet, or tell me how to live my life." For two years, GLOBE has conducted a safe-schools project, in which it holds sensitivity workshops with teachers and staff and visits classrooms to talk about hate and homophobia. "In the beginning, the kids giggle a little," says Perez. "But once I start to talk and they know where I'm coming from, their whole aspect changes."

With Make the Road's Parents in Action project, Placida Rodriguez also advocates for youth, but from a different angle. At I.S. 291 in Bushwick, reading scores are abysmal, and the number of kids repeating grades is embarrassing. Communication between parents and educators is essential, but the principal, parent coordinator and PTA representative don't speak Spanish?though 65 percent of the students do. "There isn't even an answering-machine message in Spanish at the school," according to Rodriguez. "Parents can't resolve problems."

Parents in Action addresses these and other concerns. They have successfully pushed for the resignation of Superintendent Felix Vasquez for failing to raise the quality of education in District 32. In addition, they are organizing to find space in Bushwick classrooms for 1600 students who stand to be bussed to other neighborhoods because of the closure of failed schools. The group also took part in creating the Bushwick School for Social Justice, a high school that opened this fall.

These efforts and campaigns represent a fraction of the work that occurs under the umbrella of Make the Road by Walking. Cofounder Andrew Friedman describes the motivations he and Oona Chatterjee, both activists and anti-authoritarians, had in forming the organization: "We were disenchanted by options for nonprofit lawyers, uncomfortable with speaking for other people, uncomfortable that major public policy decisions are made by judges. We wanted models to engage with public policy that were different."

The two started out offering legal services and training to people reeling from the new welfare laws, and slowly Make the Road formed in a Bushwick church, with the needs of the community determining the emergence and evolution of projects. Each Make the Road project makes strategy and tactics decisions in weekly meetings, and the staff collective operates by super-majority voting. Individual projects elect a representative to the Board, which makes decisions as to long-term program and strategic planning, budgeting and staff supervision. All Make the Road members pay dues: $100 for life, payable over two years or before a person's 23rd birthday.

A hierarchical culture could easily have developed around Friedman and Chatterjee, for their position as founders, neighborhood outsiders and lawyers. Yet the implementation of directly democratic structures means that they remain crucial but arguably no more so than any other staff person. Make the Road is a thriving example of anarchist ideals in practice?individual democratic collectives working in consort to achieve greater goals, with a remarkable lack of hierarchy.

The very name of the organization reflects the ethos of self-determination. Poet Antonio Machado wrote, "Searcher, the path is our footprints, and nothing more. Searcher, there is no path; we make the road by walking."