Series 4: Community activists, 2007-2013, inclusive

Pam Harris has lived in the Coney Island neighborhood of Brooklyn all her life. She attended John Jay College of Criminal Justice, St. Joseph's College, and Capella University, where she received a master's degree in Human Development and Family Studies. A retired corrections officer in 2013, she devoted her time to local community efforts including the founding of the non-profit organization for youth; Coney Island Generation Gap. An advocate for restoring services following Superstorm Sandy, Harris was elected to the New York State Assembly in 2015.

Joe Holtz is a founding member, served on the Board of Directors, and remains a General Coordinator of the Park Slope Food Coop, a food cooperative market in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn. Holtz became an adult in the late 1960s, when multiple social causes were trending mainstream. Awareness of food science also grew in the early 1970s, and that period overlapped with Holtz's arrival in New York City. He settled in Park Slope as a renter and later as a homeowner. With other founders in place, the Coop opened in February of 1973 and management began tinkering with how to make the cooperative system of customers/owners/workers a viable, sustainable operation. The Coop was originally in a space that was sublet by a community center. In 1978, with over a thousand members, the Coop made a down payment to buy 782 Union Street. Two neighboring buildings were purchased in the two decades that followed. In 2016, membership was between 16,000 and 17,000.

Esther Cooper Jackson was born in in Arlington, Virginia in 1917. The younger of two children, her father was an officer in the Army and her mother was a bureaucrat who worked for the Forest Service, as well as an activist. Jackson graduated from Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C. She went to Oberlin College and then onto Fisk University, where she received a master's degree in sociology. Jackson moved to Birmingham, Alabama in 1940 to work on a voter registration project; spending seven years working there as a community organizer. She met her husband during that era, and they later decided to move to New York City in the early 1950s. Settling in Brooklyn, Jackson began working as an activist and board member with the Committee to Defend Negro Leadership. In 1961, she became a founding member and managing editor of the magazine Freedomways. She continued at the magazine for a quarter century. Jackson followed that with work as an activist and speaker, all while living in the same apartment in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn since 1963. As recently as 2015, she had donated many personal papers to the New York University library.

Maxine Wolfe was born in 1941 and raised in a working-class, Jewish family in Brooklyn. Attending public school, she graduated from New Utrecht High School at age sixteen. Wolfe went on to Brooklyn College, receiving an undergraduate degree in psychology. She attained her doctoral degree in social psychology from the City University of New York (CUNY). Later, Wolfe was a professor in that school's Environmental Psychology Program. Having had an interest in activism since her teens, Wolfe joined and supported several organizations, being a notable mentor in ACT UP beginning in 1987. In 1984, while living in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, Wolfe began attending weekly volunteer meetings of the Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA). With the collections growing, LHA fundraised and coordinated the purchase of a house in Park Slope in 1990. The Archives were moved there from the Upper West Side apartment of founder Joan Nestle in 1993. As of 2017, Wolfe remains a coordinator at LHA and a professor emeritus at CUNY's Graduate Center.