Please Donate To Roosevelt Island FDR Hope Memorial Sculpture Depicting President Franklin D Roosevelt Sitting In His Wheelchair - Help Show The Disabled Are Enabled
You Tube Video of FDR Hope Memorial Rehearsal Mock Up Interview
Are you looking for a last minute Christmas present idea or to make a contribution to a worthy Roosevelt Island cause? If so, please consider making a donation to the FDR Hope Memorial.
FDR Hope Memorial Chair and Roosevelt Island Disabled Association (RIDA) President Jim Bates explains:
RIDA adds:
The FDR Hope MemorialClick here for more information and to make a donation.
We are enabled.
Help us build the first memorial to FDR that focuses on his disability. We need to build this monument because people with disability, while loved, are pitied because it's believed they cannot achieve anything substantial or independently. We need to dispel this belief which can even afflict people who are disabled themselves.
We are a group of people who live or work on Roosevelt Island in New York City — some of us are disabled, some are doctors, therapists, and others involved with the disabled. We have come together under the auspices of the Roosevelt Island Disabled Association to create a monument to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who is a hero to our community: a man who, despite being crippled by polio, became a four-term president of the United States.
We have reached the following milestones and now ask for your support which we need to bring this project to fruition.
Why Portray FDR as disabled?
- We have been awarded a site for our monument in Southpoint Park as you approach Four Freedoms Park.
- We have raised $263,000 from Four Freedoms Park, New York City and New York State.
- We have commissioned artist Meredith Bergmann and approved a design based on half-height figures.
- The artist is now working on the full-size figures which will be cast in bronze; the finished monument will be beautiful and inspiring.
- You will be helping us erect a monument not just to what one man has done but to what all of us --enabled not disabled-- can do.
FDR hid that he had polio because he didn't want his disability to limit himself or his aspirations to change the world. We live today, in part thanks to him, in a different kind of society, and portraying his disability honors him today in a way in which it couldn't in the 1930s.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was one of the greatest presidents of the United States of America. FDR served four terms and presided over the war that shocked the world: World War II. FDR had polio - a life-threatening and physically mauling disability.
The message of his life is that regardless of the struggle, the disadvantage, the disability, you can do great things. Through our memory of his life the disabled are enabled. The purpose of this memorial is to remind and inspire all, especially those with disability: You can do great things. You are enabled and free to pursue your dreams. The purpose of this call for support is to make this memorial on Roosevelt Island a reality and raise a beacon of hope and truth for years to come. Please give.
How You Can Help
We need to get to $300,000. We are asking for gifts of any size: $10, $20, $100, $350,or even ten thousand. But even it it's a dollar, and you add your name to the list of people who support this project, your support will be invaluable. You will inspire us, and show other people we approach for help that our dream has won the support of many people...
More information on the FDR Hope Memorial at previous post.
4 comments :
Really.do you really think people care on this island. They got rid of the disabled building in eastwood as these people die off the disabled person will not be replaced.Really
When you write "they got rid of..." you are accusing all people on this island for getting rid of the disabled building. Since I am one of the 12,000 plus people on this island, you are accusing me of getting rid of the disabled building. How dare you accuse me!
Bill has a point: When Eastwood exited, how much input did the residents of RI have in the negotiations with RIOC/ESDC/etc.? Zero. The deal was presented to the community as a fait accompli. Belson might as well have ripped out the senior meeting rooms at 546 then and there since that portion of Eastwood - as a disabled/senior friendly building - was doomed.
Bill is saying that RIRA certainly didn't rally to lead any protests over the loss of 546 as specifically and for all time set aside for seniors/disabled persons.
RIRA - influenced then as now by RIOC interests - simply turned its back on seniors/disabled in this disgraceful sell-out of a significant and politically engaged (since they tend to vote) sector of the population: Seniors/disabled.
Then as now, RIRA is less than useless, since it's continually manipulated to apply the fig-leaf of community consent/approval on deals that are often not particularly community-friendly (in this case, not particularly friendly to the senior/disabled community).
If RIRA is said to represent all the 12,000 or so residents of RI, then Bill is right that "...people on this island" care little for the disabled/elderly on RI.
Certainly, they didn't raise a ruckus when Belson managed get 546 "blended" into the rest of Eastwood, i.e. no longer set aside for disabled/elderly residents. Certainly, even today, funds are just trickling in for the monument. Whey weren't the funds raised from the Easter Egg Hunt and Cherry Blossom Festival directed to the FDR monument? Instead, word has it that money RIRA raised in 2013 in its fund-raising activities is going to walk off the island to benefit the American Red Cross in its NYC Sandy relief efforts. That's an excellent cause - but don't we have a cause just as excellent here on RI: Getting some funding for the FDR monument?
RIRA was asleep at the wheel when Eastwood exited. You can thank the RI "Brahmin" class: the Margie Smiths, the Matt Katzs - all the so-called community activists and leaders tied in to professional political class such as the Micah Kellners - who are in general all-too-happy to go along with whatever Albany says - for that particularly shameful sellout of the disabled/senior sector of the RI community.
I'd love to cover this for DNAinfo.com, but I can't find any contact information for the Roosevelt Island Disabled Association. Can you email me at larmstrong@dnainfo.com? Thanks!
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