[YI Northeast Regional Director, Sean Miller, left; YI NY Young Advocate Gabby Lerner, right,
at the New York City Hall Council Chambers]

On May 15th, the New York City Council Committees on Finance, Education, and Higher Education held a joint hearing to discuss the city’s preliminary budget for Fiscal Year 2025. While the NYC budget is not due until the end of June, there were already mentions of significant budget cuts to NYC’s public universities, the City University of New York (CUNY), including essential services that students rely on, such as ASAP/ACE,  CUNY Reconnect, and CUNY CARES. With decreasing enrollment at CUNY and young adults struggling to meet their most basic needs, Young Invincibles NY testified before Committee Chairs Rita Joseph, Justin Brannan, and Eric Dinowitz and members of the NYC Council to advocate for investments in crucial programs, policies, and budget items for young adults.

Here is what YI-NY had to say to the Council: 

• Gabrielle Lerner, a SUNY Empire State graduate student and member of our Spring 2024 Young Advocates Program, testified about the exorbitant cost of living in NYC, especially housing costs, and expressed her support for the Fairness in Apartment Rental Expenses Act (FARE Act, Int 1105). This consumer protection bill would require that when a landlord hires a broker they pay their fees, rather than pushing the fee onto tenants, creating an unfair and significant barrier for young adults to attain affordable housing. 
  • Read Gabby’s full testimony here. Watch her live testimony here.
    
    
• Sean Miller, YI-NY’s Regional Director, testified broadly in support of key education investments, not further budget cuts. This included the New Deal for CUNY, which would allocate just ~0.26% of the city’s $112 Billion annual budget for 5 years ($300 million per year) to fixing dangerously broken and often IDEA-violating CUNY buildings, hiring a sufficient number of full-time faculty, academic counselors, and mental health staff, and making CUNY tuition-free as it used it to be. His testimony also included YI NY’s support for defending and expanding the CUNY ASAP and ACE Programs funding, CUNY FAST (Financial Aid Support Team), and life-saving basic needs services, such as the CUNY CARES pilot program, hiring housing liaisons to support housing insecure and homeless students, and streamlining outreach and auto-enrollment in SNAP for eligible students to address food insecurity.
  • Read Sean’s full testimony here.

[Panel of CUNY student and faculty leaders testifying before New York City Council Committee Chairs, Council Members Justin Brannan, Rita Joseph, and Eric Dinowitz]