Liz Berger fights for her community as the president of the Downtown Alliance

By Susan Armitage

On the morning of 9/11, Liz Berger had just dropped off her oldest child for kindergarten at P.S. 234 and was on her way to work. Though she had already been active in civic life, she said, that devastating day reaffirmed her dedication to the community she loves.

“My first thought was about all we had done in the past 20 years and how it had been destroyed in 18 minutes,” said Berger, a native New Yorker who has lived south of Fulton Street for three decades and now heads the nonprofit Alliance for Downtown New York.

Berger served on the local Community Board at the time, but says 9/11 motivated her to deepen her involvement and take on new formal roles. She was honored to be asked to represent residents at the Senate Field Hearing.

“I think what you realize in those kind of crises is that your troubles and problems are really everybody’s,” Berger said. “And what that does is make them more urgent, rather than less urgent.”
In 2007, she became president of the Downtown Alliance, which manages the Business Improvement District for Lower Manhattan, after decades of work in government, community affairs and strategic planning.

Berger says the organization plays a key role in convening constituents to understand their needs. Through research, service, information and advocacy, the Downtown Alliance aims to make Lower Manhattan a better place to live, work and visit.

“Liz’s leadership is tremendous,” said Peter Poulakakos, a restaurateur and member of the Downtown Alliance board. “She inspires the board, she inspires the community. She’s got a great energy.”

Berger, whose commute to the office is a handy two blocks, loves living in what she calls a “complete community.”

“It’s a little village with probably the best-known business address in the world,” she said. “It’s that combination of knowing your neighbors and having unbelievable choices.”

She loves the parts of Lower Manhattan that evoke history, like Front Street, Stone Street and the city’s oldest park, Bowling Green. But the neighborhood, Berger said, “is about the past and the future, all together.”

Under her leadership, the Downtown Alliance is charting a forward-looking course. The organization has expanded its social media outreach to better connect with constituents, and the Downtown NYC free mobile app provides tips on places to visit and things to do in Lower Manhattan. The organization also anticipates new initiatives related to Lower Manhattan’s growing tech industry.

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, the Downtown Alliance also recently announced a new grant program to help affected small businesses in the Zone A areas of Lower Manhattan. While some suffered physical damage, Berger said, the bigger issue is a decline in foot traffic while some commercial and residential buildings undergo repairs.

“This is about Lower Manhattan big business supporting Lower Manhattan small business,” she said.

“It’s about business-to-business self-help. That’s really what our organization is about, and it’s a very important element of building this community.”

In addition to her role at the Downtown Alliance, Berger holds a myriad of other community positions. She is president of the Downtown-Lower Manhattan Association and serves on the boards of the Municipal Art Society, Film Forum, Second Stage Theatre, American Museum of Natural History Planetarium Authority, the New York Building Congress and the Trust for Governors Island.
Berger simply says she likes to be busy. “That’s why you live in a city; because you want to participate in public life and do what you can to support the institutions that make urban life worth living,” she said.

Irene Zola wants the world to know about people like Dolores Saborido.

In her nineties, Saborido had outlived nearly all of her relatives. Her hired caregiver did not speak enough English, Zola says, and Saborido was socially isolated. Eventually, Saborido phoned Zola’s organization, Lifeforce in Later Years (LiLY), which matched her with several volunteers who visited daily to keep her company.

Zola still keeps a thank-you voicemail from Saborido, who passed away last year, on her cellphone. It’s a testament to the impact of the human connections she strives to foster. A college writing instructor and longtime Morningside Heights resident, Zola, 66, founded LiLY in 2009 to do something “life-affirming” after her mother passed away.

“My eyes were open to the dire challenges old people face,” she said. Dissatisfied with the care her mother had received in a nursing home, Zola says she decided to make other people happy.

More than 85 volunteers have since joined LiLy’s Morningside Village program, which supports seniors aging in their own homes. The program organizes home visits to more than 70 seniors in the area bounded by West 106th and 118th streets, Riverside Drive and Morningside Drive/Columbus Avenue. Volunteers help connect elders with health care and social services, assist with everyday tasks like shopping and provide one-on-one social attention. Most of the seniors are in their eighties and nineties. All services are free.
These Upper West Side seniors are not the only ones who benefit. Some Morningside Village volunteers are new to the neighborhood and looking to make friends. Others hope to find a grandparent figure for their own children. Whatever motivates them to get involved, volunteers build close relationships with one other and the seniors they visit.
“I would spend two hours with her, and it was like being with a girlfriend,” LiLY’s director of recruitment Erin Broad said of Saborido.

As if leading an entirely volunteer-run organization and teaching part-time at John Jay College weren’t enough to keep her busy, this year Zola took on a new project to raise awareness of seniors. Her group approached Mayor Bloomberg’s office, resulting in his proclamation of New York’s first Love an Elder Day on Oct. 1. Assembly Member Daniel O’Donnell also presented LiLY with a New York State Assembly proclamation recognizing the event, which fell on the same day as the UN’s International Day of Older Persons. The Love an Elder Day celebrations included an advertising campaign in Morningside Heights with posters, street art and greeting cards to combat what Zola calls the “invisibility of seniors” in the media and in the family.

Ten million seniors are living alone in the U.S., she said, and may go through a personal crisis when their voices are weakest. “Sometimes they can hardly be heard, literally,” Zola said. She hopes to expand LiLY’s awareness campaign across New York City and eventually, the nation. Zola says she believes greater visibility of seniors will inspire others to act, translating into more compassion and care for older Americans.

Assembly Member O’Donnell, who nominated Zola for the Westy Community Builder award, praised her initiative in addressing elder isolation. “She saw that need, decided to step into the void, and produced a result, which is extraordinary,” he said.