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On Saturday, September 6th, the Open Buffalo Emerging Leaders Class of 2025 boarded a Buffalo Limousine executive coach at 9:00AM and spent the next 8 hours traversing the city, examining the resources we have in our neighborhoods as well as the deficits left by decades of redlining, neglect and disinvestment. The tour highlighted the ingenuity and resourcefulness of Buffalo’s Black and Brown, Immigrant, and Working-Class communities and their legacies of community and labor organizing, campaigning, and winning change.

The tour began with a small circle through the Cold Springs neighborhood immediately surrounding Open Buffalo’s office at Jefferson and Utica before circling outward through the Broadway-Fillmore area. The leaders visited the Foundry, where current cohort member Drew Brotz, FoundryMade Manager, shared information with the group about the Foundry’s Youth and Workforce Development programs, Maker Spaces, and more. We then proceeded to Central Terminal, where Emerging Leaders alumni Donna Latham Edwards (2016) and Jimmy Darby (2017) met up with the group to talk about their organizing experiences around policing issues, the looming issue of the new police training facility being constructed in the neighborhood, the restoration and repurposing of Central Terminal, and Food Justice.

The group visited the future site of the Open Buffalo Urban Ecology Campus & Climate Resilience Hub in the Broadway-Fillmore neighborhood, where Athenia Cyrus, current Emerging Leader and founding member of the Open Buffalo Eco Collective, led the group in imagining the Climate Justice oasis Open Buffalo is working to build. We examined the division of the once-prosperous Hamlin Park neighborhood as we rode from MLK Park at Fillmore & Best up the NY-33 and Scajaquada Expressways to the Buffalo History Museum. A tour of the museum’s research library introduced the leaders to materials in the collection illustrating the history of justice movements in Buffalo.

After lunch on the museum’s portico, the leaders rode through the West Side, viewing one of the last remnants of Buffalo’s Olmsted Parkway system and talking about Eco Justice projects and PUSH Buffalo’s resident-led housing justice work. We visited Freedom Park where Sabriyah Lailla Smith (EL 2024) led us in a libation ceremony honoring the ancestors who lost their lives crossing the Niagara River to freedom. The bus then headed down Niagara Street while cohort member Maritza Vega, Vice President of the Hispanic Heritage Council of WNY, shared with the group about the creation of the Hispanic Heritage Corridor. We visited Tifft Nature Preserve, drove through the Irish neighborhoods of South Buffalo, and took a walking tour around several of the anchor sites of the Michigan Street African American Heritage Corridor.

On the way back to Open Buffalo, the tour took us past workforce development sites, such as Northland Workforce Training Center and Viridi Parente, which offer job training and employment opportunities on the East Side. The leaders learned about Open Buffalo’s soil sampling work in the neighborhood and discussed barriers to accessing workforce development and the realities of living in neighborhoods with brownfields and industrial sites.

Eight hours on a bus is a very long day, but leaders disembarked from the bus energized to begin putting their ideas to work in their campaign to bring resident input to the forefront of the Buffalo City Charter revision process.