Despite moving to the Bronx roughly two years ago, Afua Atta-Mensah still feels very much at home in Harlem, where she recently spoke with the AmNews. After all, her mom was born in Harlem hospital, although Atta-Mensah won’t share what year — for her own personal safety, she joked.
Beyond her Harlem heritage, Atta-Mensah also remains true to her organizer roots. Last month, Mayor Zohran Mamdani appointed her as the city’s chief equity officer and commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Equity & Racial Justice (MOERJ) after she served as his campaign’s senior political director.
However, Atta-Mensah spent most of her career holding power accountable rather than simply holding power, particularly through her previous work with Community Voices Heard and the Urban Justice Center. She came into such organizing work after starting as a “disaffected” legal service attorney, which led to her championing housing rights for years.
Atta-Mensah played a key hand in five mayoral candidates, including spending a night at a dilapidated East Harlem public housing development at Rev. Al Sharpton’s behest back in 2013. Atta-Mensah recalled mold and a lack of running water plaguing the apartments. The eventual election winner, then-Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, participated and soon vowed to address issues NYCHA residents faced. Atta-Mensah believes the Mamdani administration can build on such efforts.
“That was not just informative for me, but impactful and powerful for residents to have folks walk a mile in their shoes and then shape policy that is based [on] that firsthand knowledge,” said Atta-Mensah. “I hope there [are] aspects of this that can be similar. We hope to shape our policy and action based [on] the lived experiences of what people have said have impacted them by having agencies lift up what has not met the needs of the communities they serve and give recommendations for how to change that.”
Her new role largely focuses on the city’s much-delayed racial equity plan and stems from a ballot measure New York City voters overwhelmingly supported back in 2022. MOERJ formed in October 2023 under inaugural Commissioner and Chief Equity Officer Sideya Sherman. The office engages with every city agency on shaping racial equity, as well as bolstering existing diversity programs among the municipal workforce, such as NYC Men Teach, which supports male teachers.
“[The MOERJ commissioner] is someone whose vision will imbue every agency across city government with a focus on equity and racial justice,” Mamdani told the AmNews last month. “I am so excited in our choice — Afua Atta-Mensah — to be that person, because what she has shown me time and again is not just that focus but that ability to deliver those kinds of results.”
Mamdani vowed to release the inaugural preliminary racial equity plan within his first 100 days after the previous Adams administration missed multiple deadlines and the report was then indefinitely postponed pending legal review. Last August, the independent NYC Commission on Racial Equity (CORE), which provides an oversight and accountability check for MOERJ, sued Adams over the delays.
The preliminary plan will allow public input after each city agency formulates aspects of their individual equity plans. A final plan comes out after review and comment, with original intentions to align with the city’s budgeting process. “Then the role of this office is to ensure that we are moving forward on the implementation of the recommendations coming out of the finalized plan,” said Atta-Mensah.
A tall task awaits her, particularly with the vast number of city agencies. Atta-Mensah also knows the public is “rightly” critical of the government’s unfulfilled promises. She believes publishing the plan on time will provide a small step forward in restoring trust.
Despite her optimism, Atta-Mensah remains keenly aware of nationwide efforts concentrated against racial equity work, including by the federal administration. Working under Mamdani, the frequent target of conservative attacks comes with additional scrutiny. Atta-Mensah herself faced outsized backlash after her appointment from right-wing media and racist trolls, arguably a redundant distinction at this point — such opposition just reinforces the importance of the city’s racial equity efforts to her.
“It’s important for people to know that equity does not mean harming others,” Atta-Mensah said. “It means we are understanding that different people — for historical and current reasons — have racial, gendered, and other hurdles that have prevented folks from accessing government services in a way that is fair, and we seek to start the work of rectifying that, and [to] hold the city accountable for doing such.”
Atta-Mensah acknowledged that “It ain’t gonna be easy, but I hope New Yorkers will continue to have the same energy they had in 2022, when they voted for this, [in] 2026 to support [and] lift up the work of the office, and to hold us accountable.”