Talk Bronx New York

NEW YORK - The New York Empowerment Zone Corporation Friday approved funding totaling over $2 million for five programs aimed at stimulating economic growth in the Bronx and upper Manhattan.

Among the programs approved were:

* $250,000 to the Ghetto Film School for construction costs associated with the build-out of administrative offices and editing suites supporting the media production facilities at the school’s Digital Bodega film production studio.
  * $678,193 to support the Hispanic Federation Inc.’s direct and indirect costs for incubating the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance and supporting its operating costs.
  * $500,000 to help the Manhattan Neighborhood Network renovate a historic East Harlem-based firehouse into a media arts and broadcast center.
  * $442,921 for the Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial and Education Center Inc. for technical assistance, workforce expansion and associated organizational capacity-building activities.
  * $150,000 to the Opus 118 Harlem School of Music to implement key recommendations of a prior organizational assessment.

Created to revitalize Upper Manhattan and the South Bronx, the New York Empowerment Zone Corporation uses public funds and tax incentives to encourage private investments in these areas. Since its formation, the empowerment zone corporation has disbursed $211,381,364 to support businesses and community groups in the zone. Read more..

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 A new German student exchange program was launched in the Bronx Friday - a year after a German military video showed an officer ordering a soldier to imagine shooting blacks in the borough.

Four Bronx high school students were selected to spend three weeks in Berlin, where they will stay with local host families. German students will also travel to the Bronx.

The 90-second video clip, shot in a German army compound, features an officer instructing a trainee to shoot and shout obscenities at his imaginary target - a group of Bronx African-Americans.

The exchange program will help rebuild the cross-cultural relationship destroyed by the video, educators and officials said.

“This will show the community that we don’t accept ignorance,” said German Consul General Dr.Hans-Jurgen Heimsoeth, who helped fund the students’ travel expenses.

Bronx Assemblyman Michael Benjamin (D-Morrisania), who created the program with his wife and chief of staff, Kennedy Williams-Benjamin, said the experience will teach students the acceptance of other cultures.

“They’ll learn that even though we all speak different languages, we’re all made the same,” he said.

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