Best of WNY: Community Activism
A Formidable Team
Read More Community Activism StoriesBy Maria Scrivani
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“We are just two of many people who are doing what needs to be done,” says Goldstein, a community organizer and expert in urban environmental issues. “We keep it simple. We watch out for our neighborhood. No one should be afraid to speak out, to attend hearings, whatever it takes, when something is wrong.”
“We like working with people,” says DeVinney, a health care advocate and union leader. She is blunt in an appealingly soft-spoken way which has disarmed many an adversary. “My goal is, by the time I die, I want to see a national health plan in place.” That will come, she says, through grassroots actions, the kind she and her husband of fifteen years encourage and support.
Together, DeVinney and Goldstein make a formidable team, partners in political causes and marriage, as well as the parenting of daughter Risa, fourteen, a student at Buffalo Academy for the Visual and Performing Arts (she and her mother are both dancers), and son Bennett, twelve, who attends Bennett Park Montessori.
The kids are steeped in the ferment of an activist household, where political posters hang on the wall, union newsletters are stacked on a table, and a ringing phone might signal a call to a meeting, a request for an interview, or an invitation to a neighborhood party. What seems remarkable to a casual visitor is just life as usual here.
Goldstein grew up in Kenmore, the youngest of five children. After Kenmore West High School, he went on to Albany State, where he studied political science. He tried living in California for a while, but came back to the city he really loves, Buffalo, and went to work in his dad’s business, a small offset press. Eventually, he took over, running Rich Printing for some twenty years before technology decreed obsolescence (small businesses could easily do their own printing with the newest copiers). Throughout, Goldstein was heavily involved in environmental issues, organizing paper drives to encourage recycling back in the days before the city had signed on to any recycling program. He has chaired the local Green Party and ran on that line for an at-large Common Council seat (he lost, but the campaigning was fun).
Recently, Goldstein took a new job as assistant recycling coordinator for Erie County, a good fit for a man whose personal mantra is to “live lightly on the earth.” He preaches the gospel of “sustainable economic development,” pointing out that recycling is good not only ecologically but also economically. “How can we continue to produce so many single-use items and just throw them away?” He asks. “People need to be educated about this.”
DeVinney, who was born in Buffalo but grew up in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Massachusetts (her dad was on a transfer track with IBM), came back for college at UB, where she majored in American Studies and Spanish, and studied modern dance. She was an early member of the Greenfield Street Collective, helping to run Buffalo’s first vegetarian restaurant. Like her husband, she tried the West Coast for a year, and then returned to Massachusetts for nursing school. Buffalo felt like home by then, so she came back and went to work at Buffalo General Hospital. She helped organize the nursing staff, eventually joining the original executive board of Nurses United/CWA Local 1168
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“We had to go out on strike to get our first contract,” she says, recalling the events of 1983. “We had a lot of community support...People like nurses, and when they see nurses not being treated well, they don’t like that.” Under the leadership of Debbie Hayes as president and DeVinney as vice president, the local expanded to include technical and clerical workers. They eventually organized the DeGraff and St. Joseph’s hospitals nurses, never without a fight. By 2000, with Hayes leaving to join the CWA staff, DeVinney had become president of the the local, a post she holds today. She is quietly determined about what she sees as her life’s mission.
“No one can fool me—I know what modern health care is about,” she says. “What we have today is the corporate model of health care: profits, making money—it all comes at the expense of everyone’s health care.” She traces the deterioration in health care in part to Medicare cuts, which have led to hospital mergers because hospitals can’t survive on their own. “It just gets tougher and tougher.
“We are primarily a female work force, and the employers don’t want to listen to what’s happening in health care. For example, when you have mandatory overtime for people who are often responsible for children and perhaps aging parents, you can’t simply demand that they work late...Ultimately, health care is funded by public dollars, and those monies should be used effectively, efficiently, and most of all, humanely.” It’s all part of larger web, which makes for a much more difficult fight. The pharmaceutical industry must be regulated, she says, and campaign finance reform must be enacted so legislative inertia can’t be bought by special interests.
All this might daunt some other dreamer, but DeVinney is nothing if not grounded in reality. She and Goldstein seem to thrive on challenge, drawing support from a caring network of family and friends.
For years they have been involved in the Fargo Estates Block Club (named for the great mansion that once dominated the area), joining with neighbors to tackle problems ranging from crime to noise and absentee landlords, forging a good working relationship with the police, and helping to run the annual Halloween parties at D’Youville College. They are most proud of their community garden at Jersey and West, multi-year winner of the Buffalo in Bloom best community garden award. It was designed and implemented by master gardener Gail Graham and his wife Pat Watson, and is now tended by many residents, young and old, and even some outside volunteers.
“The site held an abandoned apartment building—it took us three or four years to get it torn down,” says Goldstein. “Now the kids play softball there— it’s a safe place.” It’s also a diverse place, this neighborhood, one of the most integrated in the whole city. Whites, blacks, Vietnamese, Puerto Rican, Haitian, Italian—all can be found here, many speaking their native tongues. That appeals to the Goldstein-DeVinney sensibility: a global perspective in a solid Buffalo working-class life. Though they would disdain the title, this fact that they are living out their values has clearly made them among the best activists in Western New York.
Maria Scrivani is a free-lance writer and former staff reporter for the Buffalo News.
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