Remembering Fran Justa, a champion for our neighborhood & every neighborhood

Fran was one of the founders of the Fifth Avenue Committee, helping organize her neighbors to fight abandonment and displacement, and to create one of NYC’s great community development groups. She documented that history in her PhD dissertation, to help make sure we learned the lessons and remembered the people who made it happen.

We were thinking of Fran just a couple of weeks ago, when 400 of her neighbors (and a much more diverse group that you might think) gathered in a campaign to save the Key Food supermarket as part of a mixed-income development on Park Slope’s Fifth Avenue – a legacy of FAC’s founding, upheld in the organizing and values that were on display that night.

After FAC, Fran went on to lead Neighborhood Housing Services of NYC, where she helped build a network of grassroots community groups that enabled thousands of low- and moderate-income New Yorkers to become homeowners and anchors of their communities. She fought redlining, saw the dangers of predatory lending long before most, and built community everywhere she went.

The love she shared with her husband Moe and her daughter Sarah was infectious, and it spread up & down Carroll Street, one of the most civic & neighborly blocks in all of Brooklyn. My most enduring memory of Fran will be from her daughter Sarah’s wedding, on their stoop, with the spirit of love and community flowing out across Carroll Street and all through our community.

Her husband, Moe Kornbluth, published a book about Fran. You can read an interview with him about her here in (where else?) the Park Slope Food Coop newsletter, the Linewaiters’ Gazette.

Here’s a little of what Moe wrote about her: “There are remarkable people who can literally change the world and the lives of those they interact with. They are altruistic, have unbounded energy, great enthusiasm, optimistic vision, tremendous work ethic, and a belief in justice and fairness. They can instill hope, provide support, enable happiness and satisfaction in others. Fran Justa is one of these people.”

It’s hard to lose Fran Justa and Jay Small – two of the people who taught me personally about community development, and built the organizations that have helped us do the work – in the same week, and just a few weeks after we lost Bette Stoltz. Let’s make their memory into blessings – with fond memories, love and support for their families, and a deep commitment to strengthening the institutions, the communities, and the movement they helped to build.