STREET TALK: Occupy Wall Street goes strong yesterday near Zuccotti Park, where leaders — who insist they’re not — are emerging. (G.N. MIller/NY Post)
A handful of hard-core Occupy Wall Street protesters — ranging from a Free Tibet activist to a Sundance Channel producer to an unemployed English grad — have emerged as makeshift leaders of the movement.
Naturally, they decry the term “leader” in favor of “facilitator” when asked about their roles.
“We just coordinate everything. It’s a necessary part of the process,” said Nicole Carty, 23, who helped lead the group’s emergency general assembly on Thursday as members mulled how to respond to Mayor Bloomberg’s request to vacate their Zuccotti Park encampment for cleaning.
“It’s so important for it to be leaderless,’’ Carty, a 2010 Brown University graduate, said of the movement.
“As soon as you allow someone to speak for you, you’re giving up your freedom and your individual voice.”
The group also is being guided by a veteran organizer of Students for a Free Tibet and Amazon Watch, a 39-year-old who uses the alias Han Shan.
Shan has acted as the main contact between local elected officials and Community Board 1 to discuss quality-of-life issues for the group as it continues to make Zuccotti Park its home.
“I’m certainly empowered to talk to people, to provide a face and conduit,’’ he said. “But I’m not empowered to negotiate anything.’’
This lack of a clear hierarchy has created problems for elected officials who, while sympathetic to the OWS movement, have privately griped that it’s hard for them to know whom they are dealing with.
But the group is grinding on.
Working up daily press releases is Patrick Bruner, 23, an out-of-work college grad and ex-English major who lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
He’s aided by Kobi Skolnick, an Israeli who is the director of leadership development at the Center for World Religions, Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University.
In terms of dough, the group has relied on the Washington, DC-based Alliance for Global Justice to help it accept donations as a nonprofit.
OWS has an estimated $230,000 in its coffers — leaders won’t tell where it’s being stashed — and spends $1,500 a day on food, said one man who identified himself as an organizer.
He added that the group is planning to spend the rest on “fund raising,” shelling out some of its bucks on such things as billboards, in the hopes of eventually raising $1 million — to set up a permanent, worldwide headquarters in Chelsea.
“Our first goal we hope to achieve is to acquire at least $1 million in order to procure a building, a headquarters for OWS,’’ the man said.
Additional reporting by Rebecca Rosenberg and Frank Rosario