Forest Hills Group To Host Black-Voter-Focused Candidate Forum

FOREST HILLS, QUEENS — A Black political and civic action group in Forest Hills is organizing the first-ever Queens Borough President candidate town hall dedicated to issues that affect Black residents in the borough.

Color of Justice (COJ), the newly formed Black advocacy group, is organizing the candidate town hall, which will be held over Zoom from 7:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. on Thursday, June 10 — two days before early voting begins.

All three Democratic candidates running for Queens Borough President — Jimmy Van Bramer, Elizabeth Crowley, and Donovan Richards — were invited to the event, and Richards is the only one who hasn’t yet confirmed his attendance.

This will be COJ’s second meeting since they kicked off last month, and the group’s president, Titi Yasukawa, told Patch that hosting a candidate town hall is an important way to “keep the discussion going about how to get involved in local politics,” which is central to COJ’s mission.

In the spirit of political engagement, the group is also hosting a virtual half-hour informational session about ranked choice voting before the town hall begins.

“We thought that the ranked choice voting session was a good opportunity for people that may be interested in joining the town hall to understand that when we go to vote this is the process that’ll happen,” said Yasukawa.

COJ chose to focus on the Queens Borough President race, instead of another local election, since the group thought voters might not know as much about the candidates, Yasukawa explained.

“We felt that people may have already heard from City Council candidates, and have seen less from the Queens Borough President race,” she said, adding that she imagines the event will have a broad appeal since it is a borough-wide position.

In addition to getting to know the candidates, the event will focus on Black-specific issues, including low political and civic engagement in the Black community and systemic racial inequities in education, schools, housing, health care, small business, lending, wealth creation and the criminal justice system, according to a COJ news release.

“We want to see how each candidate would address the issues,” explained Yasukawa, adding that for many Black New Yorkers the pandemic and COVID recovery is top of mind since “we were disproportionately impacted.”

But, like the group’s general meetings, allies are also invited to attend.

“The focus is around Black issues, but I think that when they [Black issues] get solved from the Black perspective the benefit actually goes to everybody,” said Yasukawa.

This is COJ’s website, and you can RSVP for the ranked-choice voting session here, as well as the Queens Borough President candidate town hall here. There’s space on the candidate town hall RSVP to submit questions in advance.