Hostos Community College
In 2015, the Barretto Bay team helped New York Restoration Project craft a plan to connect residents of the Mott Haven section of The Bronx with a new bike-ped pathway to Randall’s Island, one of New York’s premier recreational destinations, and improve access to other green spaces in the area. Barretto Bay planned and implemented three visioning workshops for residents, public officials, and local business leaders and assembled a coalition of neighborhood stakeholders to advocate for an on-street network of designated bike lanes and pathways as well as a string of new waterfront green spaces. The workshops and regular engagement with community leaders yielded the Haven Project, a comprehensive wellness, open space development, and parks connectivity project that launched in 2016.
New York State Energy Research and Development Authority and Transportation and Climate Initiative of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic States
New York State Energy Research and Development Authority and New York State Department of Transportation Green Loading Zone Study
OLIN and PennDesign
Two respected design and landscape architecture practices engaged Barretto Bay to help embed local imperatives in a resiliency plan for the Hunts Point peninsula and the world’s largest food distribution center that was submitted to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Rebuild by Design competition. During the second half of 2013 and early 2014, Barretto Bay worked intensively with organized labor locals, food wholesalers, small businesspeople, neighborhood advocates, and the local non-profit community to elicit local solutions to longstanding resiliency challenges in Hunts Point. The findings from this consensus-building, community research, and engagement process ultimately informed the PennDesign-OLIN team’s successful Rebuild By Design application, yielding an initial award of $20 million--which was subsequently matched by the City of New York.
From Hostos Public Conversations event, 2015. Barretto Bay conceived and implemented the Public Conversations series on behalf of CUNY’s flagship in the South Bronx.
Hostos Community College Center for Bronx Non-Profits
In 2013, The Hostos Center for Bronx Non-Profits asked Barretto Bay to enhance its public engagement strategy and raise its profile among policymakers and the borough’s non-profit community. Barretto Bay responded with an implementation plan for a Public Conversations Series featuring quarterly field-building discussions on emerging paradigms in public policy and non-profit practice. Since its launch in January 2014, the series has highlighted the innovations of Bronx practitioners--their successes as well as disappointments—in a number of practice areas, including economic development, healthy food access, criminal justice reform, and LGBT advocacy. These convenings have become a vital forum for the borough’s non-profit leaders as they grapple with new challenges in their communities and begin to road test pioneering approaches to longstanding public policy issues.