On Tuesday morning, Mayor Mamdani's Office of Mass Engagement will announce its first big initiative: Organize NYC, a multi-issue project aimed at getting New Yorkers more involved in their city government. Vague? A little bit—but in more concrete terms, Organize NYC will launch with a series of canvasses aimed at drumming up participation at public hearings during this year's Rent Guidelines Board rent adjustment process.
Starting in May, volunteers will knock doors in Concourse, Bronx; Jackson Heights, Queens; Northern Washington Heights and the East Village in Manhattan; and Flatbush, Brooklyn, in order to convince people to speak up at the four RGB meetings set to include public testimony in June. "This is a really great example of a process that exists, and we would love to see more New Yorkers, renters and landlords, participate in this process, and there's a really clear path for volunteers to get involved," OME Commissioner Tascha Van Auken told Hell Gate.
OME volunteers will be going door to door in the five neighborhoods, selected for their high concentration of rent-stabilized housing, and urge people to join in on the convoluted RGB process by testifying at hearings, something the mayor himself has already been doing online.
Of course, volunteers won't be telling potential participants what to say—although it's not hard to predict what might come from the mouth of someone showing up to a hearing at the behest of the "freeze the rent" mayor. Assuming the OME canvasses are successful at turning out Mamdani-aligned New Yorkers to testify, members of the Rent Guidelines Board—who vote to increase, decrease, or keep rents for rent-stabilized tenants the same at the end of each RGB cycle—will have more public pressure to carry out the mayor's mandate and put rent on ice for the upcoming year.
As Hell Gate wrote back in January, Mamdani brought the OME into existence on his second day as the city's chief executive, in order to create a City-sanctioned home base for the organizing work that super-powered his mayoral campaign. At a press conference after the new office was announced, Mamdani told reporters that he wanted to give Van Auken "more than five minutes before she gets into the position to have to answer some of the specifics around budget and personnel."
Now that she's had time—just under five months—to get the operation up and running, Van Auken says the RGB canvasses will be the first of many forays into grassroots organizing spearheaded by the OME, although she said the office doesn't have any specific campaigns lined up for the future. "Because this is the first one, we really want to make sure that we are building the infrastructure and that the infrastructure works really well," she said. "We expect that every project we do, we are going to learn a lot that will help inform the next project." But the central thrust of the initiative is already solid: Fulfilling the mayor's promises around making New York City more affordable.
The need to take this kind of initiative in-house feels especially important, given the reported internal turmoil at Our Time for NYC, the nonprofit founded in November 2025 acting as an independent torchbearer of the mayor's DSA-led, inside-outside strategy on affordability. (Our Time's biggest accomplishment to date is its work alongside NYC-DSA on the Tax the Rich campaign, which culminated in a march on the state capitol back in February that the mayor did not attend.)
When asked about whether changes at Our Time impacted Organize NYC's mandate, Van Auken told Hell Gate that she can "only speak to the inside, and what our office is working on," adding, "we are laser-focused on looking at ways to connect New Yorkers to issues around the affordability crisis."