ABSTRACT
The Alliance for a Greater New York, ALIGN, formed in 2012 as a merger of two leading New York City labor community organizations, Urban Agenda and New York Jobs with Justice. As an organization, ALIGN occupies a critical niche in the city's broad advocacy infrastructure through its identification and development of strategic policy campaigns that leverage the power of multiple union and community organizations. The organization promotes and upholds a strategic framework embodied in its mission title, “economy, environment, equity.” That is, the city-based campaigns that ALIGN initiates understand the imbricated interaction of economic development decisions with environmental and social justice outcomes for New York City's communities. Part of their work focuses on specific sectors of New York infrastructure, such as transit and sanitation. There, ALIGN unites unions and community members to secure greater public funding and effective oversight for these critical urban functions, while providing research and advocacy to advance ecologically sustainable policies for how such infrastructure should be organized in the city. ALIGN also works in coalition with other groups to advance a slew of city and statewide programs aimed at green jobs and green energy.
