More About Our Founder

We the People Warwick is a grassroots movement started in March of 2021 by Beverly Braxton, longtime Warwick, New York resident, with the goal of building connection and community and finding commonality across differences among Warwick residents.

The mission of We the People Warwick is to foster dialogue, greater understanding, and common ground among all people of Warwick, ensuring that every person feels welcomed, heard, and supported in the town we all love.

Background

Beverly has always had a passion for working to bring people together and her actions are woven into the living fabric of the community, where she has lived and worked for almost 50 years. Over the years, Beverly has consistently promoted dialogue and peace initiatives with people of different beliefs and backgrounds here in Warwick.

In the early eighties, prior to teaching, Beverly was part of the first group of trained mediators in Orange County and mediated conflicts between neighbors in the village courts of Warwick, Florida, and Greenwood Lake. When she became a teacher, Beverly taught those skills to her students and their parents who used them to mediate conflicts in their families. After 9/11, her third and fourth graders expressed their sadness and confusion about what had happened by designing a monument to peace. The Warwick community rallied behind their efforts and supported their creation of the Sanfordville Peace Wall Memorial, a 60-foot diameter stone wall on the grounds of the school.

Upon her retirement from teaching in 2010, Beverly created Family Central, a grassroots parenting support network to raise awareness about the critical issues facing today’s families with the goal of creating a parenting community to help reduce isolation, build connection, and a way for families to share information and resources. Family Central, with the help of citizens in the Warwick community, provides a Newborn Welcome Bag to every baby born at St. Anthony’s Hospital in Warwick. These bags provide resources to help bond families and encourage a baby’s social, emotional, and intellectual growth right from the start.

After the “Blueline” controversy that surfaced on Railroad Avenue, Beverly started a Community Conversations forum at the Albert Wisner Library. The back-and-forth divisive letters to the editor and the very heated Village Board Meeting revealed the need to find a more productive way to solve community differences. Residents who joined the Community Conversations went through a series of dialogues to identify opportunities and challenges facing the community.

In response to a father’s cry in the paper about the death of his daughter from an overdose, Beverly created a town-wide conversation about the opioid crisis to help the Warwick community understand the extent of the problem and what was at stake for families, EMS workers, police officers, and healthcare professionals.

In March of 2018, understanding that democracy requires that we listen, have discussions, ask questions, seek credible information, and do the hard work of compromise, Beverly designed a series of conversations at the library to teach the skills of active listening and dialogue with a group of residents seeking to address political divisions felt here and around the country.

When the Capitol insurrection that followed the last election boiled over in our town, it was clear to Beverly that we have a lot more work to do. She set out to explore how she could best continue the work of bringing our community together. Out of that visioning process came We the People Warwick. This initiative is truly a grassroots effort, made possible by over a hundred local volunteers who offer their talents, skills and/or financial support.

We the People Warwick goals:

To advocate for the safety, acceptance, and support of all families
To work to bring together neighbors to share points of view
To work to build trust and seek common ground through dialogue
To identify opportunities and challenges before us
To embrace the richness of our diverse views and opinions in finding solutions to community problems

Above all, we strive to exercise compassion toward one another by acknowledging that what we share is more powerful than what divides us.

Won’t you consider joining us?