Voices Of Community Activists & Leaders (VOCAL-NY)

This is the last week of the State Legislative Session, and our Homelessness Union member-leaders are still making calls to legislators demanding that they pass our bill. In 2026, internet access should be a human right!

We cannot continue to allow homeless New Yorkers to be left out of NY State's effort to bridge the digital divide. We need the connectivity to find permanent housing, jobs, to access benefits, seeking medical care, and to be in communication with family and friends.

We will continue our fight until this bill is passed and the Governor signs this legislation into law.

📣 Access, Access, Access to the WiFi!
📣 Password, Password, Password to the WiFi!

Our Homelessness Union alongside Coalition for the Homeless rallied with our bill sponsors & demanding passage of our bill before the end of the legislative session on June 4th.

The Empire State Development Corporation allocated $20 million to support installation of WiFi in shelters statewide. Our legislation will require the following:

1. Data protections so that no one monitors your Internet usage.
2. Establish broadband requirements so that residents aren't stuck with crappy Internet speed.
3. Mandates WiFi in shelters

Yesterday we hit the Capital building in Albany to push for the passage of the Challenging Wrongful Convictions Act. Formerly incarcerated New Yorkers, wrongful convictions attorneys and law makers came together to call on the legislature to act. After 6 years of drafting, rallying and building public support it’s time for Albany to pass this bill.
The challenging wrongful convictions act would create a legitimate path for wrongfully convicted New Yorkers to get back into court to make their case for exoneration. It would provide access to counsel, a right to a hearing, discovery and appeals, the removal of procedural bars and the guilty plea bar, and would require data collection and transparency. New Yorkers are being failed! It’s time to act.

CityFHEPS is the second largest rental voucher program in the country — and it works. Record numbers of New Yorkers have moved out of shelter and into stable housing because of it.

Mayor Mamdani’s executive budget, released this week, doesn’t include funding to expand the program — despite the City Council passing expansion into law in 2023 and Mamdani promising to implement it as a candidate.

The administration is working on reforms to make CityFHEPS run more efficiently. We support that. But reforms and expansion aren’t either/or. New Yorkers experiencing homelessness deserve both.

VOCAL-NY member Milton Perez said it best: the program exists to fight homelessness AND prevent eviction. Right now, only half of that promise is being kept.

📰 Full story: (link in stories)

New Yorkers rallied across the state today — from Buffalo to Long Island — in honor of incarcerated mothers and their loved ones, calling on the state to pass Elder Parole and Fair & Timely Parole to give people a chance to make their case to the parole board.
We are fighting for hope, not despair!
Women inside deserve to have a future!
❤️

In 2021, VOCAL-NY members who had lived through homelessness went to Albany and fought for the Housing Our Neighbors with Dignity Act (HONDA) — a law to convert vacant buildings into permanently affordable homes. It took years of organizing and grassroots persistence. And it won.

This week, Governor Hochul announced that Gateway Apartments in Rochester is breaking ground — 129 affordable homes in a building that sat empty for 20 years. It’s the first HONDA office-to-residential conversion outside NYC.

Organizing is slow work. But it moves us toward the world we want.

Today, with the leadership of Council Member Pierina Sanchez, Speaker Julie Menin, members of the Progressive Caucus & Black, Latino, and Asian Caucus stood with our Homelessness Union to reiterate our two-fold demand:

1. Mayor Mamdani must drop the CityFHEPS lawsuit
2. And expansion funding must be included in the FY27 budget

42,000 families have been evicted from their homes since July 2023, when the Council first overrode then Mayor Adams' veto—and 25,000 of these evictions could have been prevented.

More than 100,000 people are now sleeping in NYC’s shelter system each night, many of whom remain ineligible for CityFHEPS while the lawsuit drags on. The most marginalized New Yorkers need CityFHEPS to access stabilized housing and prevent eviction.

No more waiting, no more delays, expand !