There’s something really exciting in the works in Far Rockaway, Queens. On Thursday, May 30, 200 community volunteers from The New York Mets Foundation, the Workforce Housing Group, and The Child Center of NY will join forces with KaBOOM! — a national non-profit dedicated to building playgrounds for all kids, particularly those growing up in poverty in America — to transform an empty site at the Dix Avenue Apartments into a kid-designed, state-of-the-art playground in just SI

On a seemingly ordinary school day in Brooklyn, a classroom at Aspirations Diploma Plus High School was transformed into a courtroom where the case being debated was the controversial practice of “stop-and-frisk.”

I was born and raised in Queens, with just my brother and my mother. My mother is from...