Richards appoints diverse class to Queens community boards
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Queens Community Board 1 meets via Zoom during their February full board meeting. Screenshot via livestream
By Jacob Kaye
The Queens borough president appointed nearly 350 Queens residents to their local community boards last week, marking what is likely the most diverse class of community board members in the borough’s history.
The 345 appointees named to the borough’s 14 community boards were selected from a pool of 884 applicants, the second most applications received in the office’s history – the record was set the year prior. Ninety-four of this year’s appointees are first-time members.
The new appointees’ term, which will last for two years, began on April 1.
“I could not be prouder to appoint such a dynamic, diverse class of public servants to our network of Queens community boards, as we continue steadfast in our effort to build a government that is truly reflective of the borough it serves,” Queens Borough President Donovan Richards said.
“Queens is leading the way out of the COVID-19 pandemic and toward a stronger, fairer future for all our families, and I’m both deeply grateful and excited for the work these 345 qualified community leaders will do on behalf of The World’s Borough and all who call it home,” he added.
It was the second round of appointments for Richards, who vowed to diversify the government bodies on the campaign trail. This year’s appointees are generally younger and more ethnically and racially representative of the communities they now represent when compared to years past.
Of the first-time appointees, nearly 48 percent are under the age 40 – three appointees are in their teens. In December 2020, prior to Richards taking office, less than 12 percent of sitting community board members were under the age of 35 and nearly three-quarters were over the age of 45.
In 2020, no community board in Queens had immigrant membership that exceeded 14 percent. Some community boards, including CB4, didn’t have a single person on the board that identified as an immigrant, according to a 2021 report from the borough president’s office.
Of the new members appointed by Richards last week, around 19 percent identify as immigrants, up around two percentage points from last year, when Richards raised the percent of immigrant members by more than double.
Immigrants make up roughly half of Queens’ overall population.
The new class also sees a bump in what was one of the least represented populations on the board: Hispanic members.
Around 27 percent of 2020 Census respondents in Queens said they were Hispanic, though, in 2020, Hispanic members accounted only for 8.6 percent of community board members.
This year, 17 percent of the new appointees identify as Hispanic, according to Richards.
Also seeing an increase this year were Black members and people who identify as LGBTQ+.
The number of Asian members was largely unchanged – around 11 percent of this year’s appointees identify as East Asian or Pacific Island and nearly 12 percent identify as South Asian. In the past 10 years, the growth of the Asian population in Queens has outpaced the growth of the overall borough population.
This year’s class of appointees also marked a shift in community board members’ housing and transportation habits. The majority of this year’s appointees are renters and over 50 percent regularly use public transportation, according to the borough president.
The shift in diversity wasn’t a coincidence. In the lead-up to the appointments, Richards sent out a communication to city councilmembers, who together recommend half of the borough’s community board members, in which he laid out the demographic disparities among some of the boards. The recommendations included specific age ranges, races and ethnicities.
“There was no directive or mandate to councilmembers about the demographic backgrounds of their nominees for appointment, but rather the Queens borough president’s office identified demographic disparities on community boards in relation to the neighborhoods they serve, which every single Queens member of the City Council was made aware of in the nomination process,” a spokesperson for the borough president’s office told the Eagle.
“Every councilmember also received every single community board application our office received for boards to which they can make nominations for, and the councilmembers can submit nominations for whomever they want,” the spokesperson added. “The BP has not and did not remove anyone from a board for demographic reasons, but instead focused on filling vacancies with people from diverse backgrounds to continue the process of correcting historic demographic disparities across the boards.”
Each community board, made up of 50 unpaid members who live or work within the community district lines, makes advisory recommendations on land use issues and holds educational sessions to keep their neighborhoods informed about community issues.
