While many businesses in the Far Rockaways still remain shuttered after superstorm Sandy, a glimmer of hope is emerging: a group of local residents, long shut-out of business ownership in their own neighborhoods, are preparing to create their own worker-owned businesses in the wreckage of hurricane Sandy. In just three weeks, twenty residents begin a series of intensive workshops to continue developing their newest business ideas: a juice bar, a screen printing workshop, and a landscaping company.

 

These residents are taking part in the Worker Owned Rockaway Cooperatives (WORCs) program, a training and business incubation program hosted by non-profit The Working World and organizers from Occupy Sandy. The program was created to give community members the tools and resources to open small, worker-owned companies that fill a need in their community. “The benefit that we receive as a company [from the training] are also benefits to the community and city, and we’re all able to grow together in harmony,” says Manuel Escobar, one of the worker-owners from Roca Mia Construction Cooperative, one of two business that were started through the WORCs program last year.

Since Roca Mia Construction opened its doors, they have already renovated ten houses. In comparison, by April of this year, only nine houses had been reconstructed with funds from New York City’s ‘Build it Back’ program, a number that has only grown to 150 with a pledge from Mayor Bill DeBlasio to resuscitate the program. Over 90% of applicants still haven’t received anything at all–that’s 14,000 homeowners. Meanwhile, worker-owned Roca Mia continues rebuilding the Rockaways, providing desperately needed services while growing a local business in an industry that is mostly dominated by outside competition. The upcoming round of businesses will provide another injection of jobs and economic activity to the Far Rockaways, giving residents a new possibility of rebuilding their lives and their communities.