during the application period<\/a>. Out of the 367 appointees across all 14 boards, 115 of them are new members who represent an increase in diversity of gender identity, age, race and housing status.<\/p>\nAmong new members, appointees who identified as female rose to 60% \u2014 an increase from 43% in December 2020 \u2014 and those who identified as Hispanic and Latinx rose to 39.1% \u2014 up from 29.4% of new members in 2025.<\/p>\n
Residents under the age of 40 made up 51% of new members, those under 30 made up 20% of the group, and the youngest new appointee is 17 years old. Prior to Richards taking office in 2020, less than 25% of community board members were younger than 45 years old.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Residents who either rent their homes or live in a NYCHA development, which is another historically underrepresented group on the city\u2019s community boards, made up more than half of new members at 52.2%.<\/p>\n
Additionally, residents who identify as African American made up 28.7% of new appointees \u2014 an increase of 6% from last year \u2014 and those who identify as East Asian, Southeast Asian, Pacific Islander or South Asian made up 16.5% of the group.<\/p>\n
The report, which is required by the New York City Charter, demonstrated progress in addressing demographic inequities in community board membership by implementing reforms to the application process and prioritizing appointees from underrepresented communities.<\/p>\n
Richards explained that for generations, community boards did not reflect the neighborhoods they represented. For the past six years, he continued, his office has worked to remedy historic disparities on community boards and uplift entire demographics that have been marginalized.<\/p>\n
Richards led an initiative to modernize and digitize the community board application in 2021, making it a fillable online form that no longer required notarization. His office also conducted sustained outreach to underrepresented communities that helped generate a more diverse pool of candidates for appointment to Queens\u2019 14 community boards.<\/p>\n
Since he took office, Richards has received over 5,400 applications \u2014 the vast majority of which came from individuals who had not previously served on a board.<\/p>\n
His office said it believes heightened interest in Queens community boards also stems from the borough president\u2019s 2021 announcement of a series of reforms aimed at establishing a centralized code of conduct for all 14 community boards, as well as a call for a holistic review of each board\u2019s bylaws, with the intention of making boards more welcoming places for new members.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs this annual report lays out in great detail, we have made tremendous headway this year toward achieving that critical objective,\u201d Richards said. \u201cThere is more work ahead, however, and I look forward to appointing yet another diverse class of community board members next spring.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The 2026 Queens Community Board Demographic Report shows a historic increase in participation from underrepresented communities, including women,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":294659,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[9,24,63,122,124,123],"class_list":["post-294658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294658\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/294659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}