Steve Peraza speaks with James J. Coughlin, a public historian and author of the 2023 zine, City of Distant Neighbors: The Proliferation and Entrenchment of Residential Segregation in Buffalo, New York (1934 to 1961).

On August 19, 2024, New York State Governor Kathy Hochul delivered a spirited speech in support of the presidential hopeful Kamala Harris at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois. Quite surprisingly, Governor Hochul raised the specter of runaway child care costs as a common issue facing middle class Americans, which, in turn, raised questions about what the governor of New York will do to lower these costs here in the Empire State.

On Sunday, August 5, 2024, Fitz Books and Waffles in Buffalo hosted the Vintage and Vinyl Pop Up, where community members enjoyed free music from local DJs and connected with a wide range of vendors selling vintage clothing and vinyl records.

It’s August now, and all the flower fans who visited Buffalo’s 30th annual Garden Walk Buffalo festivities are somewhere enjoying the hundreds of pictures they undoubtedly took walking in neighborhoods like mine. I live in the Bryant neighborhood, where the founders of Garden Walk live on the appropriately named “Garden Walk Way.”

On Sunday, July 28, 2024, Burning Books bookstore hosted their third annual community block party at 420 Connecticut Street on the West Side of Buffalo, NY, raising awareness for local social justice campaigns and providing family recreation for West Side residents. Over 100 Buffalo residents braved the scorching 90-degree late July heat to enjoy the various attractions, including a giant bouncy house obstacle course, dunk tank, and community tables and booths hosted by progressive community organizations like PUSH-Buffalo, Democratic Socialists of America, and Urban Roots.

One of the great joys of being an academic is watching people go from beginner to trailblazer in a field of study. As a writer for Weave News, not only do I get to watch emerging rock stars like Ms. Song Lee ‘do their thing’, but I get to share their voices with the world. In this Interweaving conversation, I am pleased to introduce you to Ms. Song Lee, High Road Fellow and Child Care Community Advocate.

Journalists are credited with writing the first draft of history. As a professionally trained historian and budding journalist, I take pride in documenting people, places, things, events and ideas. Just as honorable, to me, is highlighting the primary sources that will help students of the moment and students of the past understand the complexities of right now. Primary sources are data for historians – they are artifacts produced in the time period one is studying that bear direct relation to the topic under investigation.

At 6pm on July 18, 2024, Western New York Child Care Action Team (WNYCCAT) hosted a community celebration for the child care industry’s rank and file. WYNCCAT is an activist organization whose mission is “to educate, investigate, plan, strategize, advocate and provide swift actions that lead to productive, long term, results and solutions that positively impact the child care community across all modalities.”

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.

It’s been more than a month since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023. In that month, I carried on with my day-to-day activities albeit with a heavy heart for the victims of the war. The officials and military combatants are not at the center of my thoughts and worries – the civilians are. Before the attacks, they bore the brunt of the war and terror in the region, and for decades after they will, too.

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.

The East Side Garden Walk brochure strikes me as a rich primary source on cultural politics, nonprofit orientation, and community power in Buffalo. I’m a historian, so I imagine this brochure being useful to a young scholar in 2050, when she’s trying to understand how the Buffalo Renaissance of the early 2000s transitioned into the re-urbanization of the city.

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.

One April morning in 2021, I snapped a cell phone picture of a peony that was growing outside my mom’s house in Amherst, New York, a suburb of Buffalo. It was toward the end of the COVID pandemic. The term “new normal” was all the rage. I didn’t know it, then, but I was searching for love, and I had found it. This morning, the sun was beaming; the flowers were stretching for sunlight; and I was falling head over heels for the flowers of Buffalo.