East Lake Meadows: A Public Housing Story
Online Screening & Panel Discussion
Thanks to those that joined us for this event on Monday, April 27 @ 7:00pm! You can view the panel discussion below and learn more about the film at pbs.org/eastlake.
Hosted by WSKG Public Media’s President & CEO, Greg Catlin, and in partnership with The Greater Binghamton Tiny Homes Community, this event featured filmmaker David McMahon and was followed by a panel discussion about housing issues and opportunities with Binghamton community leaders.
Meet our panelists:
David McMahon - East Lake Meadows Filmmaker
David McMahon has been making award-winning documentary films for more than a decade. In 2010, along with Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, he wrote and produced The Tenth Inning, a two-part, four-hour update to their Emmy Award-winning series, Baseball. With Ken Burns and Sarah Burns, he wrote, produced and directed The Central Park Five, a two-hour film about the five teenagers who were wrongly convicted in the Central Park Jogger case of 1989, which won a Peabody Award and Best Non-Fiction Film of 2012 from The New York Film Critics Circle. In 2016 he teamed with Ken Burns and Sarah Burns again to produce and direct Jackie Robinson, a two-part, four-hour biography of the baseball and civil rights icon, for which he and Sarah Burns received an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Writing for a Nonfiction Program and won a WGA Award for Documentary Script. He recently completed East Lake Meadows: A Public Housing Story, a two-hour film about a housing project in Atlanta, and is currently at work on a series on the life of Muhammad Ali.
Kristina Lambright, PhD - Senior Associate Dean, College of Community and Public Affairs, Binghamton University
Kristina Lambright has worked for a variety of organizations including a public housing authority, county government and a nonprofit organization. Lambright's research interests include contracting, monitoring social service delivery systems, organizational performance, and civic and citizen engagement. She has articles published or accepted for publication in a variety of prominent public administration, public policy and higher education teaching journals including Public Administration Review, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Nonprofit Management and Leadership, The American Review of Public Administration, Administration & Society, Public Performance & Management Review, Journal of Public Affairs Education, Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement and others. She currently serves as Associate Editor for Public Administration Review, on the editorial boards for the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory and The American Review of Public Administration, as well as a reviewer for numerous other journals. Lambright was also the Assistant Grants Administrator for the Syracuse Housing Authority prior to getting her PhD and one of her classes recently worked on a survey project for the Binghamton Housing Authority.
Scott Fiedler - Board Secretary, The Greater Binghamton Tiny Homes Community
Scott Fiedler has been contributing to the Greater Binghamton Tiny Homes Community project as a volunteer since December of 2018. He currently serves on the board of directors. Scott is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ professional and has worked in the Wealth Management Division of NBT Bank for almost 16 years. He believes that the issues of housing inequality, and economic mobility are best addressed with pragmatic solutions based on academic studies, economic theory, and “boots on the ground” research, understanding, and work.
Amy Winans - Executive Director, Broome County Habitat for Humanity
For over 20 years, Amy Winans has been working and serving in non-profit settings in our community. She began with the local Children's museum, The Discovery Center of the Southern Tier, and her affinity for non-profit, mission focused work was sparked. She has led programs with the YMCA, and the Binghamton Boys and Girls Club, and worked for The First Congregational Church in downtown Binghamton as the Director of Christian Education for 10 years. In her ministry role, she gained meaningful experience leading projects that benefited transient and homeless populations, refugees working hard to get settled in our community, and struggling families in Broome County seeking to strengthen their lives. These life shaping experiences made valuable connections, and proved how critical partnerships, relationship building and acts of kindness are to success of a community. Working with the people has always been Amy’s passion, especially in charitable driven work. She has been with Habitat for 14 years and is excited about continuing to lead the organization into their second generation, as they recently celebrated their 25th anniversary. A world where everyone has a decent place to live, where love is put into action, is more than a part of a mission statement. It is her heart's passion, as her daily charge is to bring people together to build homes, community and hope. Amy has served on the Board of Directors for the Broome County Council of Churches, and has been a National representative on boards for the United Church of Christ. She is a Trustee for Union Endicott's Education Foundation, and teaches Junior Achievement for the Greater Binghamton Chamber in local elementary schools. She is a proud graduate of Binghamton University, and of the Broome Leadership Institute (BLI), and is a past President of the Alumni Association. Amy grew up in Windsor and now lives in West Endicott with her husband and daughter. She enjoys exploring nature trails, cooking, sewing costumes for community and school theater productions and playing in her garden. Most recently, she and her family are 3D printing face shields and sewing masks to help with the COVID-19 pandemic demands.
About East Lake Meadows:
In October of 1970, the Atlanta Housing Authority opened a public housing community on the edge of Atlanta called East Lake Meadows. Over the next 25 years, many thousands of low-income Atlantans, mostly African American, would call it home.
Residents moved in for hundreds of different reasons and created strong bonds despite the many challenges they faced. But as public housing in America became stigmatized and abandoned, and a crack wave swept through the neighborhood, East Lake Meadows became nearly uninhabitable. In the mid-1990s, Atlanta bulldozed the housing project to make way for new mixed-income housing, as government and philanthropic funds poured into the area in an effort to create a thriving community.
Through the stories of former residents, EAST LAKE MEADOWS: A Public Housing Story gives voice to some of the most marginalized people in our society and raises critical questions about how we, as a nation, have created concentrated poverty and limited housing opportunities for African Americans, and what can be done to address it.
EAST LAKE MEADOWS: A Public Housing Story is a production of Florentine Films and WETA Washington, D. C. Executive Producer is Ken Burns. Producers and directors are Sarah Burns and David McMahon. Project Executives for WETA are Dalton Delan, John F. Wilson and Anne Harrington.
This new documentary premiered on Tuesday, March 24 at 8:00PM on WSKG-TV.
You can now stream the full film at this link.