As we announced on Monday, we’ve completed several of the key tasks involved in establishing the foundational infrastructure required to support the RRA’s mission, enabling us to turn toward the more exciting work of delivering on that mission.

Unfortunately, shortly after Monday’s announcement, Daniel expressed his desire to step back from his role as an RRA founder. Happily, Daniel has not wavered in his enthusiasm for Roosevelt and Riis, his commitment to citizenship, or his pursuit of growth, efficiency, and order in New York. But the growth of Daniel’s company, Maximum New York, will limit his ability to contribute to the RRA in the future.

We’re excited that the growth of Maximum New York has enabled so many New Yorkers to learn about our city. In meaningful ways, its continued expansion will help deliver on the mission of the RRA. And as the scope of its offering expands, it will encompass much of what we’d envisioned the RRA doing.

Given Daniel’s central role in conceiving the RRA, this development has prompted us to pause and consider how the RRA can most effectively pursue its mission. Theodore Roosevelt and Jacob Riis are superb exemplars of the style of friendship and citizenship that New York needs. We’re delighted that their story has resonated with many of you like it does for us. We are committed to honoring their example by working to support New Yorkers in practicing active citizenship effectively and joyfully.

We’d like to have been able to make this announcement with more clarity around the RRA’s future. But given the significant ask we’ve made of our founding members, we didn’t want to wait. We turned off the links to donate shortly after posting Monday’s update. We will be refunding the donations that had already been made. (Some of you were fast, thank you for that!)

Thank you for your interest, enthusiasm, and support. We will share more information on the path ahead in due course. If you would like to be part of the discussion of what comes next, we’d be delighted – please reach out.

We are grateful to a group of volunteers who have been working alongside us in building out the RRA’s programming. We need all the help we can get, so if you’re interested in joining this working group, please let us know by messaging us here or at volunteer@rrny.org.

As we exit the “soft launch” phase of the organization, we wanted to share a few updates with you. What can you expect? How can you participate? What can we look forward to in 2026?

What comes next: membership and prizes!

We are tremendously grateful to all the people who have indicated their interest in joining the Founding Membership of the RRA. And we’re grateful for your patience as we’ve worked to enable you to deliver on those commitments.

We’re thrilled to say that you can now officially join the RRA! If you like what you see and want to join others of like mind and similar attitude, here’s what to do:

1. Click here to make a tax-deductible donation to support the RRA (all donations go to our fiscal sponsor, E2AC, in support of the RRA). Various membership levels are available for a minimum donation of $1,000.

2. After your donation has been received, you will receive a link to a short member onboarding survey. The survey will help us understand the interests and experience of our members. You should expect to receive the survey within 2-3 days following your donation.

Join the Founding Membership

For questions about joining the Founding Membership, you can reply to this post or email membership@rrny.org. Members who join in 2025 will be remembered for eternity as Founding Members. We are launching with two membership tiers, at $1,000 and $10,000 annually. We recognize that joining the founding membership represents a significant financial commitment. Those able to make that commitment are contributing directly to the creation of the RRA.

But joining the RRA as a Founding Member is not the only way to participate in the activities of the RRA. The duty of citizenship is one we all bear, happily! Access to the RRA will not be limited only to those who can contribute financially at this level. To receive updates on other ways to get involved, subscribe to this newsletter for updates, including updates on our 2026 events calendar.

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One way to participate in the RRA is through the RRA Prize Program, which we’re excited to announce will be launching within the next week, with our initial slate of six contests. We hope you will share them widely with anyone you think might deliver a strong submission. And we want to know what kinds of prizes you think are important. For this reason, one prize is the “prize prize” — where we will award a prize to whoever suggests the best prize to add to our slate!

Upcoming Events & Where to Find RRA Members

We will have our first membership meeting in January 2026, and will be sending out invitations after we finalize details. New members, look out!

In the meantime, you can find us around the city (and very likely at Maximum New York events, especially Daniel). We’ll organize some office hours sessions in the coming weeks for folks who wish to learn more about the RRA. Feel free to reach out with any questions or ideas you have for the RRA.

Subscribe to the RRA calendar to stay up-to-date with events as we add them. And subscribe to this Substack for further updates as we continue our efforts to grow the RRA and strengthen the citizenry of our city.

Under our form of government voting is not merely a right but a duty, and, moreover, a fundamental and necessary duty if a man is to be a good citizen.
— Theodore Roosevelt’s Seventh Annual Message, December 1907

Today we go to the polls in New York. Many had already done so, in fact. Over 735,000 votes were cast during early voting, far outpacing all nonpresidential elections since early voting began in New York.

Theodore Roosevelt sincerely believed in the duty of voting. He treasured the ritual of carrying out that duty. As president, he would take an overnight sleeper train to New York City the night before an election. In the morning he would cross the East River, transfer to the LIRR, and continue the journey to his polling place in Oyster Bay.1

Jacob Riis of course felt similarly. In A Ten Years’ War, he bemoaned the return of Tammany Hall, which retook control with the 1897 election of Robert Van Wyck. Riis assigned responsibility for this regrettable outcome not to the “bosses” of Tammany Hall (who were simply playing the role they always had) but rather to those who knew better, but nevertheless chose not to exercise their right to vote:

The real Tammany is not the conscienceless rascal that plunders our treasury and fattens on our substance. That one is a mere counterfeit. It is the voter who waits for a carriage to take him to the polls; the man who “doesn’t see what’s the use;” the businessman who says “business is business,” and has no time to waste on voting; the citizen who “will wait to see how the cat jumps, because he doesn’t want to throw his vote away;” the cowardly American who “doesn’t want to antagonize” anybody; the fool who “washes his hands of politics.” These are the real Tammany, the men after the boss’s own heart. For every one whose vote he buys, there are two of these who give him theirs for nothing.2

But, crucially, Roosevelt and Riis believed that voting is the beginning, not the end, of our duties as citizens in a democracy. We must vote, but we must not only vote. Roosevelt wrote in The Duties of American Citizenship:

A great many of our men in business, or of our young men who are bent on enjoying life (as they have a perfect right to do if only they do not sacrifice other things to enjoyment), rather plume themselves upon being good citizens if they even vote; yet voting is the very least of their duties, Nothing worth gaining is ever gained without effort. You can no more have freedom without striving and suffering for it than you can win success as a banker or a lawyer without labor and effort, without self-denial in youth and the display of a ready and alert intelligence in middle age. The people who say that they have not time to attend to politics are simply saying that they are unfit to live in a free community. Their place is under a despotism; or if they are content to do nothing but vote, you can take despotism tempered by an occasional plebiscite, like that of the second Napoleon.

One might view these duties as an unwelcome burden to bear. We view them instead as a path to freeing ourselves from the angst and frustration that accompany dissatisfying elections or dissatisfying electoral outcomes. We keep having “the most important election of our lives,” over and over again. It doesn’t seem to get any more fun. If we view the election as the end, after which we wait two or four more years to do it again, then the stakes seem immensely high. If instead, voting is just one of the many actions we take to deliver effective self-government, then an electoral disappointment becomes easier to take in stride.

A great deal of attention, time, and money has been devoted to this year’s mayoral election. The high turnout highlights the strong feelings people have about the candidates from whom we’re choosing. Many people feel strong enthusiasm about one or another candidate. Others feel just as strong in their opposition to one or more of the candidates. Some people feel disappointed with the options presented, and have found themselves in the unfamiliar position of being “undecided” late into the process.

It is a testament to the strength of democracy in New York that so many people have spent so much time considering who should be our city’s next leader. When we wake up tomorrow morning (or whenever we learn the results), a plurality of New Yorkers will joyfully learn that their preference carried the day. Meanwhile, many (or even most) New Yorkers will feel sincere disappointment, or concern, or fear about the future of our city and their future in it.

No matter which of those feelings each of us has, what matters most is that we need not – in fact we must not – simply stand by and wait until our next opportunity to vote. We all must do our part to ensure that the policies implemented under the next mayor are the best achievable policies under the circumstances. There are plenty of things we can do to grow and improve our city and our neighborhoods, regardless of who dwells in Gracie Mansion. We must do those things.

If you wake up tomorrow feeling joyful, translate your elation to action. If you wake up tomorrow feeling concerned, translate that angst into action. If you’re not sure how to take action, then oh boy do we have just the organization for you.

Nothing is more erroneous than to suppose that a corrupt government in this city is a necessity. Neglect and indifference alone have brought us where we are, and energy and determination can alone carry us where we desire to be. Neither passive endurance on the one hand, nor revolution, riot and bloodshed on the other, will do it, but regular, lawful, PERSISTENT efforts will accomplish it… The power, intelligence and capital are here to do it. Remember, with good government we have nothing to fear, and without it, nothing to hope.

— Report of the Citizens’ Association of New York, 1868

The Roosevelt-Riis Association is for “Happy Warriors”

The Roosevelt-Riis Association (“RRA”) is a startup civic nonprofit inspired by the friendship between Theodore Roosevelt and Jacob Riis. Many New Yorkers have the desire and capacity to help shape our city’s future, but struggle to find fulfilling ways to do so. We volunteer and find ourselves carrying out tasks that don’t utilize our skills and don’t seem to affect the things we care about. We get fundraising texts, haranguing social media posts, and calls to vote for people we don’t know. It’s tiresome, demoralizing, and just not that effective. The RRA offers a different path. We focus on the fundamentals of civic life that get washed away by electoral obsession. Want to deepen your friendships, and form new ones, while having a good time enhancing our city? Want to actually use the skills you’ve developed through your career and your hobbies for the betterment of New York? Want to meet other people who prize results over tribalism? Want to work to deliver the greatest good for the most New Yorkers? Read on.

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We value democracy and self-government. We believe that everyone who values these cornerstones of Americanism has a duty to ensure their perpetuation by contributing to their successful administration. In the words of one of our founders, “sometimes the ‘self’ in ‘self-government’ is yourself.”

This concept was aptly summarized by one of our namesakes, Theodore Roosevelt, in his 1893 address “The Duties of American Citizenship.” He stated:

If freedom is worth having, if the right of self-government is a valuable right, then the one and the other must be retained exactly as our forefathers acquired them, by labor, and especially by labor in organization, that is, in combination with our fellows who have the same interests and the same principles.

We agree! The RRA seeks to be a platform through which those who share our interests and principles can work together to achieve our objectives of growth, efficiency, and order in New York City.

The RRA’s Values

Any effective civic effort must start from a shared set of clearly defined values. Over time we intend to explore and clarify our values, in this newsletter and elsewhere. For now we present them here, as a set of affirmative values and a set of contra-values. We welcome questions and feedback on these lists, and any other suggestions you might have.

We Believe In: Active citizenship, realizable ideals, social graphs, knowledge, technological progress, family, disagreement and uncertainty, partnership, and having a good time.

We Oppose: Cynicism, anti-politics, demonization and demagoguery, identity politics, zero-sum thinking, degrowth, corruption, purity tests, and being mean.

The RRA’s “Realizable Ideal” for NYC

Bigger and better, and more like New York

We all have an idealized notion of New York. It’s why we live here. The details differ for everyone but the spirit is the same. It’s captured in books and movies and paintings and poems. One of our favorite distillations of this idealized New York appears in E.B. White’s essay, “Here is New York:”

The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. The island of Manhattan is without any doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain illusive… It is to the nation what the white church spire is to the village – the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying that the way is up.

There are many ways in which today’s NYC lives up to our collective ideal. That’s why we love it. And it’s why we want to work to address the obvious ways in which we currently fall short of the ideal.

These shortcomings curtail New Yorkers’ lives in many unfortunate ways. They make it too hard for too many people to live the lives they wish for. Most troubling of all is the obstacles they present to those who wish to perform the most essential task for any enduring society – to start and raise a family.

Many New Yorkers want to be parents but can’t afford (or find!) an apartment that fits their desired family. They worry about the cost of childcare, or the quality of the schools, or the safety of their future children on the streets. So they delay, in some cases indefinitely. Or they leave, and build their family somewhere else.

A city that makes it so difficult to start and raise a family is unlikely to deliver the dynamism that has defined New York for so long.1 And these same constraints inhibit all manner of other dreams, including the pursuit of endeavors core to our city’s identity.

Thankfully there is good news: the ways in which we’re falling short are solvable. New Yorkers have faced far greater challenges in the past. Everything we love about New York is a result of successful efforts to overcome the challenges of the past. It’s just the same now.

Our idealized New York is a “realizable ideal,” and thus it’s incumbent on all of us to realize it.

The RRA’s Three Pillars

So how do we do it? We think there are three core objectives, which we consider the RRA’s “three pillars” – growth, efficiency, and order.

Growth – At the root of so many of our challenges is the simple fact that we don’t have enough of the most important necessities. To a significant extent, these shortages are driven by self-imposed constraints. We must fix this. Growth will solve many of our problems directly while making others more tractable. We can’t shrink our way out of the challenges we face, and we shouldn’t want to. We must grow.2

Efficiency – We are lucky! People want to live here. People are willing to pay a lot to live here, and they do so in many ways, including by bearing the highest tax burden of any populace in the country. We collectively spend enormous sums. Over a third of the city’s budget goes toward education, and our per-pupil spending is exceptional relative to every other American city – but the student outcomes our school system delivers are not exceptional. Education is what we spend most on, but this same dynamic prevails across other vital functions, including public safety, housing, transportation, and sanitation. If the quality of our public services isn’t worthy of New York’s status as America’s greatest city, it’s certainly not due to insufficient funding. More often it results from the inefficient deployment of the considerable resources we’ve committed. This is not sustainable or desirable. We need to fix it. We need to do more with more. We should demand an efficient and effective government, and we should work to deliver it.

Order – Jane Jacobs was bang on when she wrote that the “bedrock attribute of a successful city district is that a person must feel personally safe and secure on the street.” On the street, on the subway, on the bus, in our parks, and in our buildings. Our public spaces must be safe, functional, and orderly. If we can’t achieve this, nothing else matters. We’ve got to be willing to prioritize the broad interests of all New Yorkers over the narrow interests of the antisocial few.

Those are the three pillars of the RRA – growth, efficiency, and order. The foundation on which they rest is active citizenship. So that is what we will work to foster.

How We’ll Pursue the Three Pillars

Our objectives for New York are ambitious but achievable. Together they represent a realizable ideal. We intend to realize that ideal through a set of interrelated activities, all of which seek to promote active citizenship and the pursuit of growth, efficiency, and order in New York City.

In future posts we will elaborate on each of these activities, but for now we present a summary of the activities we plan to pursue:

• We will provide information and resources highlighting opportunities for civic participation. Our online hub will enable New Yorkers seeking to increase their civic engagement to find opportunities aligned with their interests, skills, expertise, and availability. For instance, some people may be interested to join or attend meetings of their Precinct Community Council, to contribute to public safety in their neighborhood. Others may be interested to work for more street trees in their neighborhood or create an “Open Streets” day on their block. Still others might like to get their expertise on the record by providing testimony. There are many such opportunities, which we will help to surface through a directory and by publishing guides, making it easier for New Yorkers to contribute effectively and joyfully to the betterment of our city.

• We will organize events for New Yorkers, which we intend to be informative and educational while fostering relationships that will generate excitement and mutual encouragement toward civic engagement. We aim to deepen the connections among civically interested New Yorkers, creating more organic opportunities for collaboration and partnership toward shared objectives. At RRA events, we will provide updates on important issues facing the city, share relevant stories from New York’s history, highlight current opportunities for meaningful civic engagement, and celebrate inspiring examples of successful civic contributions.

• We will organize a membership program for highly motivated New Yorkers to significantly commit to civic engagement in New York. RRA members will provide financial support to enable the RRA’s activities. They’ll volunteer their time and knowledge to enable the citizenship programming described above and will propose and judge the competitions described below. RRA members are people with the wherewithal to substantially contribute to the betterment of NYC (access, influence, knowledge, wealth, expertise, etc.) whom we’ll support in delivering on their civic potential, making them “more like Roosevelt.”

• We will organize a program of prizes to incentivize the creation of works (writing, arts, software, data analysis, etc.) aligned with the mission of the RRA. Jacob Riis deployed his skills as a journalist and photographer toward illuminating the reality of tenement life in New York and identifying solutions to those problems. Among New York’s 8.5 million residents are people with essentially every imaginable skill. Through the RRA prize program, we will encourage talented New Yorkers to be “more like Riis,” by applying their various talents toward improving NYC for all New Yorkers. The works produced through the RRA’s prize program will deepen our collective understanding, helping to ensure that our citizenship efforts are rooted in shared knowledge. (Stay tuned for more information on the prize program, and the first slate of competitions.)

• We will resurface public domain texts with relevance to the RRA’s mission and make them accessible to a contemporary audience. There are so many gems buried in libraries. We enjoy reading these and have benefited immensely from doing so. But not everyone is able or willing to read a scan of a nineteenth century publication in order to further their citizenship efforts. We’re going to address this by making foundational texts accessible to a broader audience. First in print material, and then in other media.

• We will celebrate civic heroism. Examples of the style of citizenship we need abound, in history and in our current day. Saying that we need greater civic engagement doesn’t mean that such efforts don’t exist currently or didn’t in the past. We will celebrate these efforts, including through: 1) a campaign for new statues and monuments to the civic heroes of New York’s history, and 2) a series of awards and honors recognizing contemporary contributions, which will be named for the civic heroes of our past.

Join Us!

We’ve laid out an ambitious set of goals and activities. We will need all the help we can get! If you’re interested in joining our effort, we would welcome your participation. Please shoot us a note (you can reply to this email, drop a comment below, or contact us here).

• Let us know how you might like to participate, if you have an idea of that.

• Let us know of any feedback you have based on the outline we’ve shared here.

• Let us know of any questions you have or topics you’d like us to explain further.

Contact form

If you’re interested in joining the RRA as a member, please fill out this form and we’ll follow up with more details. Our next gathering will be in the evening on Wednesday 11/19, and we welcome prospective members to join us there.

In future posts, we’ll share more details on everything we’ve described above. Subscribe here for those updates, and please pass along to anyone you think might be interested.

We’ll close with some stirring words from our namesake Jacob Riis, from his book A Ten Years’ War:

New York is the youngest of the world’s great cities, barely yet out of its knickerbockers. It may be that the dawning century will see it as the greatest of them all. The task that is set it, the problem it has to solve and which it may not shirk, is the problem of civilization, of human progress, of a people’s fitness for self-government.

Theodore Roosevelt, The Duties of American Citizenship:

If freedom is worth having, if the right of self-government is a valuable right, then the one and the other must be retained exactly as our forefathers acquired them, by labor, and especially by labor in organization, that is in combination with our fellows who have the same interests and the same principles.

Source: Maximum New York

The Report of the Citizens’ Association of New York, 1868:

Nothing is more erroneous than to suppose that a corrupt government in this city is a necessity. Neglect and indifference only have brought us where we are, and energy and determination can alone carry us where we desire to be. Neither passive endurance on the one hand, nor revolution, riot and bloodshed on the other, will do it, but regular, lawful, PERSISTENT efforts will accomplish it… The power, intelligence and capital are here to do it. Remember, with good government we have nothing to fear, and without it, nothing to hope.

Source: Hathitrust.

Elihu Root, The Citizen’s Part in Government:

It is not rightly a matter of choice whether a man shall trouble himself about affairs of government in his community, or confine himself to his business, his profession, or his pleasures, and leave others to govern; it is a matter of peremptory obligation which cannot be avoided by any intelligent man who has any understanding of the conditions under which he lives. A French nobleman could attend the Court of Louis XIV, or retire to his castle, as he chose, without discredit; for under that system of government the question was whether certain men or certain other men conducted the government. The essential feature of the present condition is that the burden and duty of government rest upon all men, and no man can retire to his business or his pleasures and ignore his right to share in government without shirking a duty. The experiment of popular government cannot be successful unless the citizens of a country generally take part in the government. There is no man free from the responsibility; that responsibility is exactly proportioned to each man's capacity—to his education, to his experience in life, to his disinterestedness, to his capacity for leadership—in brief, to his equipment for effective action in the great struggle that is continually going on to determine the preponderance of good and bad forces in government, and upon the issue of which depend results so momentous to himself, his family, his children, his country, and mankind.

Source: Archive.org

E.B. White, Here is New York:

A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. The island of Manhattan is without any doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain illusive…

New York is nothing like Paris; it is nothing like London; and it is not Spokane multiplied by sixty, or Detroit multiplied by four. It is by all odds the loftiest of cities… Manhattan has been compelled to expand skyward because of the absence of any other direction in which to grow. This, more than any other thing, is responsible for its physical majesty. It is to the nation what the white church spire is to the village – the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying that the way is up.

It is a miracle that New York works at all. The whole thing is implausible… Every facility is inadequate — the hospitals and schools and playgrounds are overcrowded, the express highways are feverish, the unimproved highways and bridges are bottlenecks; there is not enough air and not enough light, and there is usually either too much heat or too little. But the city makes up for its hazards and its deficiencies by supplying its citizens with massive doses of a supplementary vitamin — the sense of belonging to something unique, cosmopolitan, mighty and unparalleled.

Source: Archive.org.

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities:

Great cities are not like towns, only larger. They are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers. To any one person, strangers are far more common in big cities than acquaintances. More common not just in places of public assembly, but more common at a man’s own doorstep…

The bedrock attribute of a successful city district is that a person must feel personally safe and secure on the street among all these strangers. He must not feel automatically menaced by them. A city district that fails in this respect also does badly in other ways and lays up for itself, and for its city at large, mountain on mountain of trouble…

Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance—not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.

Source: NYPL and Penguin Random House.

Mission Statement:

Inspired by the friendly partnership between Theodore Roosevelt and Jacob Riis, the Roosevelt-Riis Association works to cultivate active citizenship in New York City. The Association activates and organizes New Yorkers who love our city and wish to contribute to making it bigger and better. We enable talented New Yorkers to carry out the duties of citizenship effectively and joyfully, in pursuit of growth, efficiency, and order for New York City.

Subscribe here for updates as we work toward our official launch in October 2025.

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