September 1, 2005 | Read Time: 2 minutes
The Community Service Society, a New York advocacy group, is starting a new Web site, Turnstile, which it hopes will bring together community activists, policy advocates, and members of the public to debate important social and economic issues facing the city.
Each week Turnstile — which is scheduled to officially start in mid-September and is currently online in a test version — will feature commentaries by experts on topics such as voting rights and graduation rates for minority youths. Visitors to the site will be encouraged to discuss the points raised in the articles.
The organization hopes that the Web site will both help lawmakers and journalists get a better understanding of the issues that low-income people face, and spark a dialogue between antipoverty activists and low-income people.
“What we’ve found was missing in the discourse is a conversation between those individuals who are identified as leaders in certain areas and the people who they purportedly lead,” says Walter Fields, the nonprofit organization’s vice president of political development.
In coming months, the Community Service Society plans to add sections to the site that will allow visitors to share issues of concern in their neighborhoods, connect with others, and start their own advocacy campaigns.
Mr. Fields says tools will be available that will allow activists to create fliers, start e-mail lists, and do other organizing activities. The organization also plans to post civics information to help explain how government works, and give visitors to the site the ability to send e-mail messages to elected officials from the site.
The charity chose the name Turnstile, says Mr. Fields, because it hopes the new site will have some of the same characteristics as a public transportation system
“In any urban environment, the one place where all people, regardless of race, age, or income, meet is at mass-transit systems,” he says. “That turnstile represents movement toward a predetermined destination, and our predetermined destination is a better New York for all people.”
To get there: Go to http://turnstile.cssny.org.
