"Saturday Sweeps" events bring together neighbors, clean shared green spaces

Located in the heart of Greenpoint, Brooklyn is a park named for longtime neighborhood advocate Monsignor McGolrick, an Irish Pastor who became a major leader in the community in the late 1800s. These days, the Greenpoint area has a new community leader. Her name is Konstancja Maleszyńska.

She works for the Open Space Alliance for North Brooklyn, a non-profit that partners with NYC Parks to help “fill the gaps” that occur from underfunding and understaffing within the city department. One of her current projects is organizing monthly “Saturday Sweeps” of McGolrick Park, where neighbors can come meet one another and work together on picking up litter in the shared space.

“My role is not just to have people come and help in the park, which of course is a goal, but it’s more about creating a larger sense of community,” Maleszyńska said.

The northern boundary of Brooklyn is Newtown Creek, a small river that is an EPA Superfund site. According to Maleszyńska, Greenpoint is full of activists who have sought environmental improvement for a long time.

“I think the community waited for years for an acknowledgement of the effects of the oil spill,” Maleszyńska said. “Newtown Creek is a federal Superfund Site and we live right on it, it’s our waterfront here.”

Now, these neighbors have a chance to work together to beautify their green spaces like McGolrick and other parks. OSANB works to maintain 45 parks and playgrounds in North Brooklyn.

Greenpoint resident Erika Jozwiak frequents McGolrick Park. She said it made her “feel like less of a transplant coming into the neighborhood.”

“This park is one of the main reasons that I feel comfortable in New York City,” Jozwiak said.

Jozwiak volunteers with the Open Space Alliance whenever she can, including the Saturday Sweeps events. It’s a great way to meet your like-minded neighbors, she said.

“I certainly think that the people who go [to OSA events] are community minded and are wanting to take care of the space that we all share,”Jozwiak said. “I think that in some ways that goes hand in hand with environmentalism and being sustainably minded, but I also don’t think that everybody there is some green hippie person, they just really genuinely care about this place and that’s really beautiful to see.”

The next Saturday Sweeps will be August 13. Learn more about the Open Space Alliance for North Brooklyn at http://osanb.org/

Sign up for this event: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/mcgolrick-park-saturday-sweep-tickets-25781... 

Saturday Sweeps events are funded by the Greenpoint Community Environmental Fund. To learn more http://gcefund.org/