Our Time PressThe Local Paper with the Global View

By Kara I. Stevens
You did everything that you were supposed to do. College degree. Good job. Benefits. Yet it is still difficult for you to get a handle on your finances.  Lately, you might have found yourself asking, “What is at the root my money problems?” and “What can solve them?” Luckily, the answer to both questions is “You!”
The impulse buys, lack of saving, frequent trips to the ATM, unwise loans, late payments, postponed meetings with your financial advisor, and other financial mishaps can directly be attributed to your underlying and subconscious values, understanding, and beliefs about money. The good news is that you can redefine your money mindset through these good old-fashioned soul-searching guidelines and wealth accumulation tips.
1.  Figure out why you spend. The survival of a capitalist economy relies on high levels of consumption. Big business relies on the media to assist in achieving this end.  Newspapers, magazines, television, radio bombard consumers with images of products, services, and goods in an effort to convince them that they would be happier, more interesting, smarter, and sexier once they purchase, invest, and consume. Essentially, the media attempt to reprogram the average consumer to believe that material items will make them complete and at peace.
So before you go on your next shopping spree, here are some questions to ask yourself about your sense of worth as it related to the acquisition of material items:
1.    Am I just as good as (person’s name) because he/she can (or seems) like she/he can afford (material item)
2.    Do I shop because I think things (clothes/electronics/music) will make the people that I want to attract like me more?
3.    Do I feel empty when I can’t buy something new or expensive?
4.    Does buying expensive things make me feel better than others that can’t afford to buy those things?
2. Make it a group effort. Tell your closest friends about your financial recovery plans and get them involved. You are probably not the only one going through this transition and the support of like-minded people will optimize your chances of successfully attaining your goals.
3. Live at home for as long as you can. Are you eager to move out to show (or convince) your friends that you have made it by getting your own place? Instead of paying rent or splitting it in thirds with roommates, stay at home until you have enough saved to afford to purchase your own residence. Those eager to move out without a clear financial plan, often end up moving back home.
This concept is not new to the black community. It is part of our history. Throughout the Caribbean and the Americas, newly-freed enslaved Africans formed communities, collectives, and extended living kinships as a way to pool resources, reduce expenses, share advice, and protect one another from external threats. This is a timeless system and approach.
4.  Rethink the big wedding celebration for your 5th anniversary, not your first. This is not to say that being newly married is not something to celebrate, because it is. However, what is greater than being happily married for one year is being married for five years and even better, 10 or 20 years. Too many young couples go into debt preparing themselves for one day and do not plan for the everyday financial trials of martial partnership. At least with this approach, there is something to look forward to every 5 years and you’ll be more in a financial position to pay for it.
5.  Prioritize your debt.  Open up the bills and get a reality check.  See how much you really owe. It may seem overwhelming, but this is the first and most important step in getting you toward financial freedom.
After that, start paying. The two most popular strategies for tackling debt are the “high-interest” approach and the “smallest balance” approach. One is no better than the other. Use whichever makes you feel as if you are making the most progress toward your $0-balance dream. With the former, you pay your bills with the highest interest first. With the latter, you pay the bills with the smallest balance first.  Some prefer to pay off the highest balance first to get the most financially draining bill out of the way. Others chose to pay with the “smallest balance” approach because there is an immediate sense of accomplishment when one bill is completely accounted for.
6.  Figure out how much you are spending and create a monthly saving plan.  There is no way to get around it. Without a financial blueprint, that is, your financial plan, you will make little headway in securing your financial freedom. A basic budget begins with dividing your expenses into two broad categories: fixed expenditure (i.e. housing, transportation, food, insurance, tuition) and variable expenditure (i.e. standing nail/salon appointments, gym memberships, entertainment,). Determine which variable expenditures can be eliminated either temporarily or permanently until you have made some headway with paying off your outstanding debt.
7.  Create a FFF (Financial Freedom Fund) bucket. It is your choice. It could be an old vase, an old wastepaper basket, or a mini-trash can. Label it “My Financial Freedom Fund” Decorate it. Start by throwing all of your loose change in there at the end of each day. If you live in a big house, have a few these FFFs around high-traffic areas. (kitchens, bedrooms). When necessary, combine all of the money into the central FFF. After it has reached its capacity, redeem your coins for cash. You may not think so, but those pennies add up. This extra money could be used to pay off some debt or money that could be airmarked for a stock, bond, or mutual fund purchase.
8.  Get a hustle (or maybe even two or three).  Use your creativity to increase your income. If you are good at organizing, place an ad to clean-out garages, run errands, and organize closets and yard sales throughout the neighborhood. If you have a computer and can type pretty quickly, solicit editing/typing/revising gigs. Clean out your closets and put those items up for sale at a garage sale, E-bay, or on consignment at a local second-hand store. Good with pets and plants? Walk and water them for a fee!
9.  Go shopping in your closets before you make your way to the mall. If you have a problem with shopping and are thinking that you need a new black pair of slacks or a 2-inch pump, check your closets. You’ve probably bought them. (maybe even twice.) If not, check in your best friend’s closet.
10.  Pick up a book and empower yourself about money (or borrow it from the library).  Read and internalize straightforward, practical advice from African-American personal finance experts like Michele Singletary, Lynette Khalfani, and Glenda Bridgforth. These women are present-day pioneers in counseling and educating the black community about their financial hygiene.

1943-2007
St. Clair Bourne was a passionate and brilliant filmmaker, an organizer and a race man.
Saint prospered in the tough world of a principled documentarian of the African-American experience with his gentlemanly intelligence and his love for his people.
Saint had a lot more stories to tell and we will miss him.
St. Clair Bourne was born in Harlem on February 16, 1943, and was raised and educated in Brooklyn, New York in his early years. He entered Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. after graduating from Xavier High School in New York and was aiming for a career in the Foreign Service Diplomatic Corps. But the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s got in the way when he was arrested during a sit-in in Arlington, Virginia in his junior year and left school.
Suddenly adrift, he joined the Peace Corps and served as a volunteer in Peru for two years, helping to publish a local newspaper that became a national award-winning journal during his tenure. Word of the activist reached Ebony magazine, resulting in a ten-page spread on Bourne and he became something of a Peace Corps celebrity. When his two-year term ended, he entered Syracuse University on a work-study scholarship program, earning a dual degree in journalism and political science while teaching Peace Corps trainees. He also started the Student African-American Society, which is now a campus-affiliated student organization.
After graduating in 1967, Bourne won a scholarship to Columbia University Graduate School of the Arts to study filmmaking.  Again, he became politically involved with the radical Black Student Movement and was among those arrested for taking over the administration building on the campus in 1968. Although this got him expelled again from school, one of his professors recommended him to the executive producer of a new series for public television called Black Journal, the first Black public affairs series in America. Within two weeks after leaving school (and an overnight stay in jail for his campus activities), Bourne was hired as an associate producer.  Five months later, he was promoted to a full Producer and spent the next three years making films for that series, helping the staff win an Emmy Award and winning the John Russworm Citation for himself for excellence in broadcasting.
Seeking more creative freedom, Bourne left Black Journal in 1971 and formed CHAMBA, his production company. Soon, four colleagues from the series followed him out the door and CHAMBA became a collective, working on a variety of advocacy-oriented projects. Two years later, his partners left for more conventional film jobs and Bourne was on his own.  He was then commissioned by a group of Black ministers to create a film on the African-American religious experience and the result was a narrative documentary, Let The Church Say Amen!  It was an immediate success, winning festival screenings, prizes, critical and popular acclaim. It became the first Black-produced film to be shown at the prestigious New “American Filmmakers” series at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York City, one of the major independent film showcases.
In 1975, Bourne was invited to come as a guest lecturer in the UCLA Film Department and so moved to Los Angeles. At the same time, he was named the North American Film Coordinator for the upcoming Festival of African Arts and Culture (FESTAC) in Lagos, Nigeria, and thus traveled frequently between classes. After his academic appointment was completed, he stayed in Los Angeles, made three more documentaries for KCET-TV, the local PBS station, became a member of the Los Angeles Film Exposition (FILMEX) selection committee and worked with the American Film Institute’s Independent Filmmaker Program as a judge. He was also signed by producer Norman Lear to develop and produce Bourne’s first feature film, a project that never came to fruition because the screenplay was considered too radical.
Bourne spent five years in Los Angeles before he decided that the kind of work he wanted to do was best done in New York at that time. He returned there in 1980 and almost immediately signed to produce and direct Big City Blues, a film on the contemporary Blues scene in Chicago for CBS. Directly on the heels of that production, he produced a major segment of an NBC WHITE PAPER SPECIAL, “AMERICA: BLACK AND WHITE” in 1981 and was the only independent producer on that network project. The film won the Monte Carlo TV Film Festival’s Best Documentary Award.
Bourne then returned to producing his own self-originated work and started a film of the radical Black poet/activist Amiri Baraka (also known as Leroi Jones). The result, In Motion: Amiri Baraka, was broadcast nationally to controversial but glowing reviews. On the last day of shooting on that project Bourne was told about a group of Black activists who were going to Belfast, Northern Ireland on a fact-finding tour. Within a month, he organized a crew, raised the necessary money and left to film the trip. That film, The Black And The Green, has been screened internationally and gives a different perspective to that 800-year-old struggle.
Bourne remained busy. On The Boulevard, a short drama he developed for public television, is a bittersweet love story between two aspiring entertainers in Hollywood affected by economic pressure. Langston Hughes: The Dream Keeper a “narrative performance” documentary was commissioned for the PBS “Voices And Visions” series. Selected for the Berlin, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Hawaii Film Festivals, the film describes the life and times of America’s most beloved Black poet/writer. He completed two films for the National Geographic Society’s “Explorer” TV series: Gullah, about the impact of tourism on the African-based “Gullah” culture of the South Carolina Sea Island people; New Orleans Brass, about the brass street bands in New Orleans and Heritage of The Black West, an educational documentary about the role of African-Americans in the American West.
His acclaimed narrative documentary about the making of Spike Lee’s controversial feature Do The Right Thing, filmed in Brooklyn, was invited to the Munich, Hawaii, Los Angeles, Amiens France, the Festival Dei Popoli and Turino, Italy Film Festivals but even Bourne was surprised when his film was picked up by First Run Features distribution company and received a national theatrical release, something unusual then for a documentary. Bourne then produced two one-hour documentaries for a six-part BBC series with Catalyst TV, a London-based production company. Entitled “Will To Win”, the series explores the political impact of Black athletes on the international sports scene.
Bourne broke new ground as the director of John Henrik Clarke: A Great And Mighty Walk, a feature-length documentary about the respected historian and Pan-African activist. The executive producer and narrator is actor Wesley Snipes. The film has been invited to the Toronto, Carthage (Tunisia), Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso, Africa) and Sundance film festivals. He then was hired to direct Paul Robeson: Here I Stand! for the PBS “American Masters” series. He then produced a documentary about photo-journalist/filmmaker Gordon Parks for HBO, which garnered 3 Emmy nominations, followed by Melvin And Mario At Sundance, a documentary short he produced and directed about the Van Peebles father-and-son partnership at the Sundance Film Festival for the Sundance Channel. For the last three years, Bourne is shooting a documentary series on the rise, fall and legacy of the Black Panther Party and most recently started shooting a docu about Memphis-based veteran photographer Ernest Withers, whose work includes the assassination photos of Martin Luther King.
In addition to his own projects, St. Clair Bourne has been the executive producer for four documentary films. A Question Of Color, by Kathe Sandler, explores beauty standards and skin color discrimination within the Black community. The film premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, had a two-week theatrical run at NYC’s Film Forum Cinema and was broadcast over the PBS network. Ben Brand and Jonathan Mednick’s Opposite Camps, a humorous and thought-provoking look at race relations, chronicles six weeks at a New England summer camp where white counselors and Black campers try to create a new community. Innocent Until Proven Guilty by Kirsten Johnson, a portrait of a young public defender in Washington, DC, James Forman, Jr., gives an insider’s perspective on the American criminal justice system as Forman struggles to help three of his juvenile clients turn their lives around. Twelve Disciples Of Nelson Mandela, by Thomas Allen Harris, is the latest film that Bourne has executive-produced. It had its world premier at the Toronto Film Festival, has been nominated for a Spirit Award and won Best Documentary at the LA Pan-African Film Festival.
Bourne was currently executive producing Visitors, a documentary by Turkish filmmaker Melis Birder about New York City women who visit their loved ones in upstate NY prisons each weekend.
In addition to his production experience, Bourne has designed and taught film courses at Cornell University and CCNY-Queens College, served as guest lecturer at UCLA’s Film Department and Yale University. He has given filmmaking seminars at various universities and media art centers. Invited by the Canadian Film Board, Bourne gave a weeklong seminar on documentary filmmaking for the Canadian Black Film/Video Network. In Summer 2006, he curated a special film program, Class in America for the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival.
Although Bourne continued making documentaries, theatrical feature films were to play a larger role in his activities. He was developing two dramatic feature film projects: The Bride Price, a contemporary thriller set in Senegal about a romance between an African-American businessman and an African holy mans daughter, and The Visitor about an African Muslim filmmakers visit to an African-American counterpart when 9/11 erupts.
Overall, Bourne’s films concentrated on changing cultural and political trends, a theme he continued to explore in his work.

Mimi Rosenberg interviewed Fred Brewington, the day after Christmas, for the WBAI program, Wakeup Call (99.5FM).  Mr. Brewington is the attorney for John White, recently convicted of manslaughter while defending his family in Suffolk County. White remains free on bail until sentencing, when he could face a prison term of five to 15 years.

If you’ve read the listing of the thousands of African-Americans lynched and murdered by white mobs in the December 16th Our Time Press, then you can put yourself in the place of a man confronted by what Attorney Brewington  describes.  (Also available online at wbai.org, Wakeup Call, Archive, Wednesday, December 26, 8:00am.)
Mr. Brewington: Back in August 9th of 2006, Aaron White, the son of John White, who at that time was 18 years or 19 years of age, was home from college and went out to dinner with a friend of his. After dinner, they decided they were going to look for a party, and they called around and they found out that there was a party at the home of a young man by the name of Craig Martin.
They went to the house and the party had underage drinking going on and people were to a level of inebriation where Aaron testified that people were stumbling around.
He happened to be the only African-American there at that party in Suffolk County. The sister of the host said to her brother and to Daniel Cicciaro, Jr. that she didn’t feel comfortable with Aaron being there. It turns out that one of Aaron’s friends and another young man had done a prank using MySpace to put up a fake MySpace, to put up a fake profile on this young lady’s MySpace indicating that Aaron wanted to do bad things to her in a sexual way. It was not true. Aaron had denied it, and this had happened some 8 months before. For whatever reason, this young lady decided that she wanted some attention, and then made a big stink that Aaron should leave the party and Aaron was asked to leave the party by Daniel Cicciaro and he left.
Mimi: Fred, this posting that you’re talking about was 8 months before the party?
Mr. Brewington: Absolutely. And it was known and clear that it was not Aaron who had written this, it was another individual who claimed to be his friend and did it as a prank. But even so, it still continued to resonate during the party. One of the things that’s important is that this young lady had seen Aaron at least two times before at a shopping mall and at a basketball game and said nothing to anyone about this incident. But apparently, this young lady, who happened to be about 4 years younger than everybody else, either wanted attention or whatever her reasons for this comment. Now you should know that not only was Aaron the only African-American at this party, but the young lady that made this comment was a young white girl.
So anyhow, Aaron was asked to leave the party. He left with no concerns. He did not argue. He said, This is not my home so therefore I will respect your request. He said he didn’t understand why, because he was not told why at the time and went home. Immediately after leaving, apparently the alcohol started taking affect on people and name-calling started to occur. And we know this because one of the people who came to the party with Aaron remained there, a young white man, and he was able to tell Aaron that they were referring to him using the N-word. They were saying that they wanted to kick his behind, using another word of course. And then he called Aaron saying, “Don’t come back to this party  because they’re gonna jump you. They’re going to beat you up. They’re talking about ganging up on you.”
Well, this young man, Daniel Cicciaro, asked for the number of Aaron, was able to get it, called Aaron on the phone and threatened him, telling him that he was going to kill him and how dare he; who did he think he was making these types of comments. And he called, he said she was his sister, even though it really was not his sister, he was now taking on that mantle of protecting this young woman’s virtues against this African-American man.
Two carloads of young men ended up going to the home of Aaron White at 11:30 at night. They drove up and down the cul-de-sac where he lived, roaring their engines using the modern-day muscle cars as though they were horse-drawn wagons, making all types of noise, driving the cars up into the driveway, one of the cars’ headlights beaming onto the house, and called on the phone again and basically told Aaron, “Come out the house. If you don’t come out the house we’re gonna kill you” and a number of comments to that affect.
Well, in the house Aaron was scared to death. He woke his father up. He told his father, John White, that “These guys are coming here, Dad. They’re going to beat me. They’re going to kill me.” And John White was dead asleep, and when he woke his father up and eventually stirred him, John said, “What’s going on?” And he said, “Dad, these guys are coming here to kill me.” And John immediately jumped up, saw lights beaming on his house and went to his closet first to get a shotgun to chase them away. He decided the shotgun was not appropriate. In his testimony, he said that it was just too much. He didn’t want to go out there with a big long gun like that. And then he started to go out the house, and as he was going out he reached on the top shelf in his home, in the garage, for a small handgun to use to chase these gentlemen away.
Unbeknownst to him, Aaron had also picked up the shotgun and went behind him and as he went down the driveway he noticed that Aaron was standing behind him. Aaron indicated that he did not want his father to go out alone, he claims because he was old and skinny and was afraid that these boys would hurt him. The situation then went to the point where when they walked down the driveway of their home, that these young men began to holler and scream racial epithets, referring to Mr. White using the N-word saying that they were going to kill him, that they were going to rape him and his wife, telling Aaron that he was an f___ing n and other types of things, threatening them physically. Mr. White continually said “Leave.” These young boys told Mr. White, who at that time was some 53 years of age, “Who the hell do you think you are?” And they gave him no respect. They gave him no indication that they recognized that he was an adult figure. Mr. White eventually was able to view this as being something that he was going to wait for the police to come because as he had left the house he asked his wife Sonya to call the police. She, unfortunately, was in such a state of mind that she was so afraid she says that she did not hear him say that, although Aaron, who was in the house at that time, did hear him. So as he turned to go back in the house, this young man, Daniel Cicciaro, who was screaming and hollering and apparently was the flashpoint for this situation, was the instigator of everything, began to stalk Mr. White as he went up the driveway, reached for the gun, tried to grab it out of Mr. White’s hand as it was pointed down toward the ground and when he pulled it back toward him the bullet was ejected from the gun hitting Cicciaro in his left cheek and the bullet went up and lodged into his brain slightly above the right ear.
It’s a very unfortunate, tragic situation. But in this situation, Mr. White, who had a history in his family of people being lynched and the Ku Klux Klan coming to the home to burn people out, really thought that in the isolated situation that he feels on Miller Place in Suffolk County, that he and his family were in danger. And the jury failed to recognize any aspect of that. His history, his knowledge, his feelings, his concern for his family were of no importance to them because they essentially just wiped out 400 years of history.
Mimi: How can people be supportive of Mr. White and his family?
Mr. Brewington: Well, two things: One, I think that people should know that John White has enormous expenses in terms of buying transcripts; in terms of dealing with the costs involved with this. So there is a defense fund: The John White Legal Defense Fund, or John White LDF, and they’re accepting contributions. Anybody who would like to do that can mail it to my office and I will get it to the accountant who is overseeing the legal defense fund. My office and my name is Fred Brewington. The address is 50 Clinton Street, Suite 501, Hempstead, NY 11550.

The good news is that African-American Brooklynite architect/businessman Carlton Brown of Full Spectrum, was named developer of the $85 million Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) cultural district’s residential tower and dance space in Downtown Brooklyn on land owned by NYC.  Full Spectrum’s Brown has crossed the real estate divide, which has excluded NYC’s  people of color from big-league real estate development participation. This is a quantum leap!  Construction of the BAM tower begins next spring.
Last month’s landmark announcement about the Brown/BAM project had lots of chefs stirring the pot:  the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, NYC Housing Preservation and Development,  NYC Councilwoman Letitia James  and a constellation of Brooklyn groups advocating for a Brooklynite developer as opposed to Manhattan moguls who monopolize most big  NYC real estate deals.  The history of the  $300 million Downtown Brooklyn renovation is long and rife with political undertones and bureaucratic stagnation. The announcement begs more than a few questions. Who is Carlton Brown? What is Full Spectrum? How did Brown’s Full Spectrum team, whose original proposal was rejected in 2006, eclipsed the competition.
Co-founded in 1988  by Carlton Brown, COO, and Walter Edwards, CEO, Full Spectrum is a Harlem-based, African-American-owned sustainable real estate company which focuses on the development of mixed-use, mixed-income green buildings in emerging urban markets.  Brown, architect and green leader, says,  “Full Spectrum’s two Harlem condominium buildings, at 1400 Fifth Avenue and the Kalahari Harlem, on West 116th Street, under construction, exemplify our mission.” He adds: “1400 Fifth,  which was first occupied in 2004, is our flagship mixed-income residential green building,  and it gave us lots of national visibility to do something different and helped broaden our client business base, which now includes Jackson, Mississippi, where Full Spectrum has an office, and where it is developing 4500 homes and in New Orleans, Louisiana, where we will  develop 275 hotel rooms, 200 condos and 200 homes.  Our out-of-town business is directly related to our philosophy and strategic approach to work, something to which  municipal leaders across the country resonate.  All  of our buildings will be green and cost-effective.”
Full Spectrum, along with a variety of partners, is becoming a household word, which  has developed  both residential and commercial real estate properties from a facility upgrade at the UN Plaza Hotel to project management at Jacobi Hospital and at the Trenton Town Center in New Jersey. We were a consultant to  The Solarium in Battery Park City, Manhattan, best  known as one of the nation’s first environmentally sustainable residential buildings.
The Full Spectrum’s management philosophy and practices are indistinguishable from Carlton Brown’s. An affable, scholarly, pragmatic manager, Brown is the ultimate multitasker who can conduct an in-office interview while teleconferencing in another city and mapping real estate strategies for yet another city.  A 30-year-plus Brooklyn resident who is married with children, Brown is a member in good standing within  the borough’s  rich, vibrant African-American cultural community. He chairs the nonprofit ARTS 651, a local organization which focuses on art produced  by descendants of  enslaved Africans, lectures at Pratt Institute, and in 1990 led  a multidisciplinary group which developed an approach for sustainable development projects for Cape Verde, a West African nation.
Born in Charlotte, NC, Brown  was raised in  Jackson, Mississippi, where his parents were professors who taught chemistry and choreography at Jackson State University, an HBCU and  who were active in the civil rights movement.  “Our family engaged in the world of ideas beyond the reality of  Mississippi in the 50s and 60s,” says Brown. He graduated from Princeton, where he majored in Architecture and city planning and wrote a thesis on “Neo-African Architecture,” about the historic impact of 400 years of European dominance of African  peoples and Black architecture imperatives, which should be more African referential and less duplicative of Western influences.
In 1976,  ATT hired Brown as a district manager for its NY real estate group, where he acquired experience in  corporate planning, site acquisition, facilities development, project design and leasing for high-performance labs, data centers and office facilities. During his decade-long  ATT tenure, he directed the development and construction of more than $2 billion in real estate property for the corporation. He also studied real estate finance at NYU.
When Carlton Brown, former American Institute of Architects board member, starts talking about architecture, he gets an adrenalin rush. He defines himself by his Africanness, saying, “That’s who I am and that’s how I process words.”  He insists that most people misunderstand architects.  “Architecture,” he concedes,  “is about the power of the elite and the ruling classes and their ability to finance buildings and erect monuments to themselves.” He laments that Blacks in general do not enjoy that access. He says:  “Architects are not just designers, as some conjecture who are on steroids, we are the stewards of the earth’s resources, stewards of environmental health,” which would explain his attraction to greening. He admits that architecture is about pattern, color, shape and texture. “For the  Kalahari Harlem, we hired African-American architect John Travis who deftly introduced numerous African references to the design model such as Adrinka and southern African symbols. He enthuses, “We wanted a distinctive building which would introduce pattern and color in a way unusual for NYC.”
Brown  is ecstatic about being named developer of the “jewel in the crown” portion of   the rejuvenated BAM  cultural district project, its residential tower,  which encompasses 187 units of mixed-income housing, half of which are designated for low-to moderate-income tenants. Full Spectrum will work with two architectural groups on the BAM residential tower, the Germany-based Behnisch Architects and the New York-based Studio MDA. In explaining the  tower’s architectural  design scheme, he recommends “envisioning Downtown Brooklyn as a horizontal community turned on its end, 5 cantilevered blocks of apartments which allows natural light and abundant air to circulate.”  He adds, “We haven’t  determined which African design scheme will interplay with the basics.”   Brown’s  big challenge is securing financing for the behemoth  Downtown Brooklyn real estate project.  He allows, tongue in cheek,  that being named developer was the easy part, phase one of a multilayered process.
It appears that Full Spectrum has much to celebrate as it approaches 2008, its  20th Anniversary!

(Editors Note: For a future issue, Our Time Press will be asking many downtown Brooklyn developers, how their contractor/workforce profile measures against the local standard of the Community Benefits Agreement with Forest City Ratner.)

The staff of Bedford Academy High School reveals that its successful formula-which earned the school the honor of being only one of two schools in the City to receive an A marking-consists of a commitment to each student’s academic success and personal enrichment.
For Principal George Leonard, the passion for helping each child to succeed also stems from the lack of nurturing that he received in school.  “I attribute [the way the school is run] to the way that I was miseducated in school,” he said.  “I resented that the other kids knew more than I did and that their hands were always up.”  He was also displeased with the lack of concern that his teachers in Harlem exhibited.  “They didn’t realize that encouragement was important,” he said.  “I made sure that I didn’t make the same mistakes.”
Thus far, he certainly has not made the same mistakes.  In its five years of existence, Bedford Academy touts a Regents passing rate of approximately 95 percent.  Additionally, the 96 graduates of the 2005 class received a combined total of 202 college acceptance letters.  In part, this high success rate is due to the high standards that the students are required to meet.  Leonard said that 65 was an acceptable grade when he was in school, but he makes it clear that more is expected of Bedford Academy students.  “We want to see 80 to 100 for classes, report cards, and the Regents,” he said.  “Failure is not an option.”
Although Leonard is proud of the school’s accomplishments, he made sure to note that he is not solely responsible for them.  “I couldn’t have accomplished it by myself,” he said.  He gives the credit to his Bedford Academy staff, who also shares his vision of academic success.  Yet, Assistant Principal Niaka Gaston acknowledges that productivity in school goes beyond classroom lessons.  “Schools tend to forget the human factor,” Gaston said.  “You can’t treat them [students] like robots.  You have to know their uniqueness in order to meet their needs.”
Bedford Academy taps into the students’ uniqueness through the family groups, which are overseen by the faculty and administrative staff.  The faculty and staff also pinpoint and work with the students’ individualities by teaching them study skills.  Leonard emphasizes rewriting lecture notes and Science Chairperson Bev Thompson tells the students that the information in textbooks is someone else’s interpretation.  He advises the students to “make it personal to you” and “find someone of your like mind.”
However, the Bedford Academy staff does not limit its good works to its student body of 343.  Each Saturday, the staff tutors non-Bedford Academy students in addition to its own students.
In terms of furthering Bedford Academy’s success, Thompson would like to service a larger student population and have a larger school budget.  Leonard would like the school to encompass grades K through 12, as well as offer additional courses (African-American History, Black and Hispanic History, College Now, etc.).  Gaston wants to do “nothing short of revolutionizing education.”  With its track record, Bedford Academy is doing just that.