About Harlem 2032
Harlem 2032 is a community-wide initiative, starting on our campus, to imagine a better future with our Harlem community.
It builds on the expertise of our larger community and pairs it with existing community-engaged work of City College faculty and staff.
The core focus of Harlem 2032 is to strengthen our engagement with our local community around environmental, social, and spatial justice to address the intertwined problems caused by the crises of climate change and inequality.
About the Office of Community Engagement at CCNY
Headed by Associate Provost Dr. Vanessa K. Valdés, the Office of Community Engagement was created in Summer 2022 with the explicit purpose of highlighting the exciting work taking place in our greater Harlem community, both on campus and off, and building and strengthening relationships with our neighbors.
Our Guiding Principles
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The City College of New York is part of a larger Harlem ecosystem; it is not separate from it.
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Each member of our community possesses knowledge that is recognized and respected by all.
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Given the rich expertise that surrounds us, it is necessary to cultivate, build, and strengthen relationships with community members in a manner that is beneficial to our entire Harlem community.
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The CCNY Office of Community Engagement is grounded in a foundation of collaboration and alliance-building; our partnerships begin from a space of service to our surrounding Harlem community, centering its needs and focused on its empowerment.
Dr. Vanessa K. Valdés
Associate Provost for Community Engagement
(she/her/hers)
Meet our Team
Dr. Tony M. Liss
Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs
Dr. Tony M. Liss, an internationally known physicist with research experience at the world’s highest energy accelerators, has served as the Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs of The City College of New York since March 2018. Dr. Liss joined CCNY in the fall of 2013 as the first Martin and Michele Cohen Dean of Science. Before coming to CCNY, Dr. Liss was a professor of physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, whose faculty he joined in 1988. A native New Yorker, he is deeply committed to the Harlem community, and is the founder of the Harlem 2032 Initiative.
Dr.Vanessa
K. Valdés
Associate Provost for Community Engagement (she/her/hers)
Dr. Vanessa K. Valdés served as the Associate Provost for Community Engagement at The City College of New York from 2022-2024.
Fariha Haider
Harlem 2032 Mapping Initiative Intern
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Fariha Haider is a Muslim Bangladeshi-American, born and raised in Queens, NY. A member of the Class of 2025 at The City College of New York (CCNY), Fariha is majoring in psychology on the pre-med track. Fariha has conducted behavioral health research, has experience in community health outreach, and shadowed child and adolescent psychiatrists at her local hospital. She hopes to help youth as a psychiatrist herself one day, while advocating for health equity and improving healthcare access in underserved communities.
Dehaan Rahman
Harlem 2032 Mapping Initiative Intern
Dehaan Rahman is a graduate of the Master's of Architecture program at the Spitzer School of Architecture of The City College of New York; he has a bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering. He is passionate about increasing accessibility throughout the city for people such as his elderly parents who struggle with walking up the stairs. His time in the Harlem Mapping Initiative has focused on accessibility in the public realm, starting off with parks and public transportation. He hopes to pursue a career that would involve designing adaptable accommodations for a more diverse population of New York City.
Shakira Browne
Harlem 2032 Mapping Initiative Intern
Shakira Browne is a graduate student in Early Childhood Education in the School of Education at The City College of New York. She loves animals, coloring, traveling, gardening and snowboarding. She's not a huge fan of vegetables but has read about them. She noticed as things change people adapt but always wondered what things will be like in our future. Within the Harlem 2032 Project she found parks in Harlem and visited to see how accessible they were, while also looking at stores within the community and their locations to see how beneficial they were."
Tiffany S. Gong
Harlem 2032 Mapping Initiative Intern
Tiffany Gong is an aspiring future architect based in New York City. She’s passionate about unearthing different historical narratives in her research and learning the meaning behind the built environment around her. She intends to continue her explorations of urban cities and natural landscapes by documenting and sharing her findings in process.
Kendrick Roy
Harlem 2032 Research and Social Media Coordinator
Kendrick Roy is a Bengali-Russian American, born and raised in Queens, NY. He is a City College of New York (CCNY) student in the Advertising and Public Relations major, graduating in the Spring of 2024. Kendrick is an avid writer of fictional stories across multiple mediums, such as typed scripts and book manuscripts. His passions also extend into the real world, where he loves to learn about current world affairs and write about his ideas. Kendrick strives to influence modern society to become more equitable, to coexist with nature, and to banish the existence of bias, either through his writing or through the realm of advertising.
David Castaño
Harlem 2032 Mapping Initiative Intern
Rondela Spooner
Harlem 2032 Mapping Initiative Intern
Tara Hernández
Harlem 2032 Mapping Initiative Intern
Ayesha Khan
Harlem 2032 Mapping Initiative Intern
Bebel DeMoura Nilo
Harlem 2032 Mapping Initiative Intern
