Jul 13, 2021

For more than three decades, Mark Winston Griffith has led a combination of social justice organizations, cooperative institutions, community organizing campaigns and economic justice projects in Central Brooklyn. A second-generation Jamaican-American and third-generation Central Brooklynite, Griffith was the founding executive director of the Central Brooklyn Partnership and co-founder of the Central Brooklyn Federal Credit Union in the early 1990s.

Today, as the executive director of the Brooklyn Movement Center, he oversees a series of what he calls “campaigns” against street harassment—and for environmental justice and police accountability. His Brooklyn Deep project at the BMC is a citizen-journalism platform dedicated to telling stories about neighborhood change in Central Brooklyn. There he leverages his own background as a journalist on the BMC podcast “School Colors,” which he co-hosts with fellow local journalist Max Freedman Together, they  dig deep into the region’s history of race, class and education.

Griffith has been an adjunct professor of urban reporting at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and is a frequent guest on WNYC. He still teaches a graduate course in community organizing at CUNY’s Murphy Institute.

He’s  also a founding board member of the Central Brooklyn Food Co-op. The mission: “To utilize our collective strength to ensure access to affordable and fresh food within the mostly-of-color, low- and moderate-income communities of Central Brooklyn.”