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It’s a Friday, and I’m getting a tour of a building at the corner of Broadway and Hart, right at that sweet spot in Brooklyn where Bushwick and Bed-Stuy overlap. A man walks in to drop off a ladder, which I soon discover he’s donating to the space. He’s never been here before, and the team doesn’t know him, but everyone is all smiles, thrilled they have a new, sturdy piece of equipment for their work.
This is an average day at Collective Focus, the playfully painted community space that, just last Friday, celebrated one year of distributing food to locals and offering a physical space for them to gather at 1046 Broadway. The location is outfitted with a recording studio, an open closet, a marketplace of local vendors, and, of course, a makeshift kitchen. Over the last year, the hub has distributed more than $268,296 worth of clothing and since August $203,613 worth of food. It’s all for free, and this group of organizers is just getting started.
Sarah Rooney and Briana Calderón Navarro met at a mutual friend’s rooftop in July 2020. “We were at a Paperboy Prince party, and we just instantly hit it off,” Rooney shares. Both had thrown themselves into the food-rescue and organizing community at the onset of the pandemic, and eventually they began driving around together, delivering surplus food to community fridges across Brooklyn and downtown Manhattan. With neighbors struggling to qualify for unemployment or stimulus funding, the community of what Rooney calls “folks doing fridge work” was rapidly growing.
With time, it was clear to both Caldéron Navarro and Rooney that a physical space could really anchor their work and establish it as a long-term project. At the time, there were plenty of mutual-aid groups occupying abandoned commercial buildings or gardens, but they were often met with city bulldozers or eviction notices. So the activist duo—backed by a large community of mutual supporters—started pitching local landlords. Met at first with laughs and resistance (which they attribute to aspirational anti-capitalist goals and being a women- and queer-led community), the group eventually got the keys to their new home base on April 1, 2021. They called it Collective Focus, hoping the name would highlight how together they could recenter the basic needs, professional aspirations, and personal joys of their neighbors.
From day one, the collective’s intention was to build out a colorful, vibrant, inviting space. The goal was for the space to starkly juxtapose the lead paint coming off of the J train’s infrastructure and other objects of Broadway that, by government design, have been neglected. So the team started painting—and that’s when they started catching eyes.
Last spring, creative Baron Davis was walking past and started chatting with volunteers creating murals outside. “They invited me back to paint the [nearby] benches,” he recalls, “and I’ve been involved ever since.” Beloved local Terry Lee—dubbed the godmother of Collective Focus—was similarly taking her routine stroll when she first encountered the space. In her 63 years living in the neighborhood, Ms. Terry, as she’s known, has seen this space exchange hands countless times, though she’s never seen such a positive reception from community members. She attributes that trust to the 40 hours each week that the space remains open to the public, as well as the warm comportment of the volunteer staff: “We let [everyone] know that they are just as important as we are,” says Lee. That’s because the goal of the space was always that it be supported, conceptualized, and fostered by the entire community, which is why Rooney and Caldéron Navarro don’t claim any sort of CEO status—everyone is equally behind the aptly named entity.
When you walk up to the corner, you immediately spot orange and purple fictional characters adorning four fridges, with flowers hand-painted by local eight-year-olds that, like Davis, joined in the fun while passing by. Hart Street’s wide sidewalks have allowed Collective Focus to host events, which is how local performers and creatives like Crystal Hart got involved.
“It’s from our instinct to create that we all got together,” Hart says, sitting across from me in the space’s recording studio. Hart lives right next door, and she says Collective Focus sprung up at just the right time. “I got curious,” she continues, “and I came and read poetry for the first time at an open mic almost exactly a year ago.”
The recording studio has become a safe haven for many neighborhood artists, like Asia Fletcher who, in collaboration with other volunteers and community members, is currently recording a spoken-word album in tandem with her day-to-day volunteer duties. Fletcher says she came to the space in need of support and has since stuck around to provide that same solace to her colleagues. “This space brings me so much joy,” she smiles, “and I have loved sharing my stories while encouraging others to do the same.”
Next to the studio you’ll find the community closet, filled with clothing racks, home goods, books, and even kids’ toys. “There’s a deep anti-capitalist satisfaction in giving people really good stuff,” Caldéron Navarro says. According to Rooney, the closet has especially become a safe space for local immigrant families. Here they don’t feel surveilled (no one is writing down information on who comes in the space) and can connect with present staff, many of whom speak Spanish. While clothing is a need-based item, Collective Focus has worked hard to make its closet one that stimulates expression and validates the dignity of people coming in and out of the space.
The third main hangout room is a classroom meets workspace where both volunteers and community members can brainstorm new ideas for their respective entrepreneurial endeavors and even teach workshops across mediums to benefit the community. For Jean Paul Torre, whose background is in engineering, that medium is 3D printing. “My background is unique to the space since most folks are artists,” he shares as we sit in the classroom covered in large geometric shapes in pink, yellow, red, and blue. Part of Torre’s goal is to bring tech more proactively into the community via workshops and an in-process digital fridge map that will allow folks to easily find community fridges.
This knowledge exchange and skill sharing is integral to the mission of Collective Focus. Davis, who has his own clothing line, says he loves coming in and collaborating with fellow artists. Ultimately, he says, “we’re here to help each other build our own economy.” That economy spills over into Collective Focus’ marketplace, a wall and counter space in the so-called lobby of the building that features local vendors’ frames, ceramics, handwoven jackets, and more. The next phase of the marketplace is to go digital to get more money in the pockets of these artists.
The last stop on the tour is the kitchen, stocked with food that comes from fellow pantries and programs, with surplus from local movie sets or photo shoots, restaurants, and warehouses. It’s most busy on Tuesdays and Saturdays, when food distribution is planned, but the team finds themselves making food for each other and folks who come in asking for a meal. The catch? They don’t have an oven or a stove. Rooney says they have chefs who have been involved since the beginning that they’d like to have on more full-time when they can pay stipends or salaries. For now, volunteers get creative with a microwave.
Basically, Collective Focus has thought of…everything. But what sets them apart is their commitment to fostering joy. That’s why their year anniversary celebration amalgamated DJs, poets, and drag performers. That’s why they’re planning on hosting a wellness fair next month to celebrate local food heritages with free sound baths and 15-minute massages.
But as Collective Focus moves into its second year, the hard work is far from over. “We’re still operating month to month, having to dig our hands elbow deep into bags of partially rotting foods to be able to sort out the good stuff,” Caldéron Navarro says. What doesn’t help is the city’s decision to shut down the program Collective Focus depends on for food, known as the Pandemic Food Reserve Emergency Response (P-FRED). Over the past few weeks, Collective Focus has received a fourth of the amount of food with the same number of folks lined up around the block. In trying to inquire into next steps for the budget, they’ve gotten little to no response from the city, which seems to be quietly trying to close P-FRED down.
But this community is determined to keep Collective Focus up and running. They even just qualified as a 501(c)(3) to open them up for funding. “We aim to build this space into something that’s self-sustaining and cooperatively run by our communities,” Rooney says of what’s next. If this is what they’ve done without funding, one can only imagine all that’s to come.