Greg Floyd has looked to strengthen the ranks of the Teamsters as the New York local's president.

Gregory Floyd, president of the Teamsters Union Local 237, has a new plan for getting elected officials to listen to the concerns of his members.

In April, Floyd helped launch what he calls a groundbreaking new initiative to educate members and their families in the basics of civic involvement. The idea, he said, is to empower union members with the right tools to better understand the city agencies that affect the fundamental quality of their lives and to help union members and their families better hold lawmakers more accountable for their decisions.

In collaboration with the National Union of American Families (NUAF), a non-profit grassroots organization, Local 237 plans to establish resource centers in each of New York's state legislative districts where anyone—union-affiliated or not—can learn more about the political, educational, economic and law enforcement issues that affect their lives.

The initiative would also serve to make communities safer by erasing a lot of the divisions that exist between neighbors, Floyd said.

“Can you imagine if you knew who your neighbor was?” he said. “There would be no fear, crime would go down, quality of life would go up.”

NUAF is in talks with International Brotherhood of Teamsters President James Hoffa Jr. and other national unions to negotiate a plan to take the project to other cities across the country, said the group's founder Jesse Epps, a veteran of the civil rights movement who played a prominent role in the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers strike and who was with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the final moments of his life.

Epps said that these days, city, state and county legislators are more beholden to special interest groups than communities and working families. By working with labor leaders like Floyd, Epps said he hoped to change that.

“Those that are elected to power become the equivalent of special interests because it's the special interest people that provide for the support system that they need in order to stay in office,” Epps said. “And so we the people become the servants rather than the masters.”

The NUAF initiative could be one of several projects that help Floyd as he eyes advancement within the Teamsters.

He said he would like to have a role in the national Teamsters organization. If he is able to make the move, he would continue in what has been a steep but steady rise over the last 15 years, when, as an officer in the Queens Hospital Center police force, he became the youngest police captain in the history of the Health and Hospitals Corporation.

That helped get him the attention of the union leadership. In 1994, Floyd was appointed deputy director for peace officers for Local 237, then director of the union's Citywide Division. In 2002, he was elected the union's secretary-treasurer. He went on to win the presidency.

Under his leadership, the 24,000-member union—which includes employees of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), the Board of Education, the City University of New York and several other city and Long Island agencies—has become more progressive and politically active. With members from all over the city, Long Island, New Jersey and Connecticut, Local 237 has a broad political base.

“Wherever there are races,” he said, “whether local or national or state races, we can cover four states.”

In addition to politics, Floyd has broadened the union's agenda to include raising over $100,000 for the United Negro College Fund and assisting in the management of the Bridge Fund of New York, a homelessness prevention program.

But with about 9,000 of Local 237's members employed by NYCHA, Floyd said the critical lack of funding for public housing may be the most important issue for the union today.

On May 1, Local 237 held a spirited rally in front of City Hall to call attention to the budget crisis facing NYCHA, which this year is under-funded by almost $200 million. The budget deficit has fueled concerns of service reductions among the city's 400,000 public housing residents, as well as staff cutbacks among the Teamsters.

The rally drew thousands of union members and public housing residents, as well as a handful of elected officials and a four-piece rhythm and blues band called GQ, which supplied each speaker with a funky, bass-slapping introduction.

“We are the largest public housing system in the country,” Floyd shouted at the rally. “We are larger than most cities! We count!”

And Floyd has also extended his activist approach to help the Teamster members who are school safety officers, helping raise money for a gang intervention organization called the Council for Unity. Floyd reasons that by making the schools safer, he is protecting his members, many of which are affected by gang violence in schools.

“They won't get injured,” he said of school safety officers, “they're not subject to disciplinary charges, accused of being excessive with force. It's more community-oriented.”

Amid managing his union's many responsibilities and an evolving philosophy of union politics itself, Floyd has nurtured his own political connections, both inside the union in the national Teamsters, and, he joked, potentially beyond as well. He recalled meeting Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama in May—a meeting that went so well that it prompted his wife to ask whether he would be in the running for Secretary of Labor.

“I looked at her and said, ‘No, I'm not going to be Secretary of Labor,’” he said. “But I would move to Washington if the right job came along.”