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RightRides
Filed under: 11101, 11206, 11211, 11222, 11237, Astoria, Bed-Stuy, Bronx, Brooklyn, Bushwick, Clinton Hill, DUMBO, East Williamsburg, East Williamsburg Brooklyn, Ft. Greene, Greenpoint, Greenpoint Brooklyn, Greenpoint Magic, Long Island City, Manhattan, Navy Yard, New York City, Park Slope, Queens, Sunnyside, Williamsburg, Williamsburg Brooklyn
Yesterday upon learning the horrible news about the rape which came to pass at Nassau Avenue and Diamond Street earlier this week I posted it here on New York Shitty to make you, dear readers, aware. Later in the day I was reminded (by buddy d of pointgreen) of a service unescorted women (and many more— as I learned) out late at night can and should use. It is called RightRides and I am going to dedicate this post to giving you the 411 about this organization.
To get the ball rolling, here’s an excerpt from their “About” page to give you a general idea of their mission:
The mission of RightRides For Women’s Safety, Inc. is to build safer communities by ending gender-based harassment and sexual assault. We work towards this by community organizing and offering direct service, safety education and advocacy programs.
In our RightRides program, we offer women, LGBTQ and gender nonconforming individuals a free, late-night ride home to ensure their safe commute to or through high-risk areas.
In our Safe Walk program, we offer walking escorts for any one who doesn’t want to walk alone.
We are also a founding member of New Yorkers for Safe Transit, which will pursue coalition building and policy change work to increase safety in mass transit…
HOW DOES IT WORK?
Very simple: if you are out and about Friday and/or Saturday night (11:59 p.m. – 3:00 a.m.) and am in need of a safe ride (or escort) home you call either of these two telephone numbers
- (718) 964-7781
- (888) 215-7233 (SAFE)
and they will dispatch a driver to pick you up. CAVEAT/POSSIBLE CATCH: your person and destination must be within their “service area”. Follow are their service maps for Friday and Saturday.
SATURDAY
As you can see I have not included the key for this map. This is because it is too extensive for me to screencap and publish here. You can view this map (along with the key) by clicking on the above image or clicking here.
HOW CAN I HELP?
RightRides welcomes donations, fund raising events and volunteers. You can learn more about how you can help this wonderful organization by clicking here. On that note, the peeps at RightRides will be hosting a series of fund raisers at the Parkside Lounge starting this evening at 8:00 p.m.
Professor Von Awesome’s Traveling Caravan of Cautionary Warnings
October 23, 24, 30, and 31, 2009 starting at 8:00 p.m.
Cost of admission: $15.00 (a portion of the proceeds go to Rightrides)
Parkside Lounge
317 East Houston Street
New York, New York 10002
In closing (and for those who are interested) you can receive a quarterly e-newsletter from RightRides by clicking here.
Stay safe!
Miss Heather
Comments
3 Comments on RightRides
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jake_tuff on
Fri, 23rd Oct 2009 11:29 am
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al oof on
Fri, 23rd Oct 2009 2:55 pm
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d on
Sun, 25th Oct 2009 11:42 am
“I’m sorry we do not travel to neighborhoods infested with dangerous minorities on Fridays”
there is a legitimate complaint that rightrides doesn’t service some neighborhoods that need them most, but there are also logistical reasons for this. the cars, for one thing, live in manhattan (they are donated by zipcar). so the service has kind of grown out from that center. also, the original impetus for the program was increased rates of assault in north brooklyn specifically and that is where it was originally focused. when i volunteered years ago, we didn’t service queens or the bronx at all.
But the reason saturday and friday are different is probably because they don’t have enough volunteers. We had 3 cars when i was volunteering to do all the pickups and drop offs. It just wasn’t feasible to go out to mott haven and then come back down to cobble hill. so jake, if you wanted to volunteer on fridays with a few friends, maybe they could get further out into those neighborhoods.
Thanks for posting! And thanks Al for the inside view. Being that it took me about an hour by car to get from Greenpoint through Manhattan to the Holland Tunnel Friday night (I had to get to 78W to go to PA), I think that lack of funding and resources may be a main reason that many more neighborhoods are not serviced, not that there isn’t a desire to try and service more areas.
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