The NYC Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes (OPHC) and the Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) recently awarded 12 winners a grant of up to $10,000 to combat discrimination and bias from a grassroots level. Successful proposals often centered on the arts and stemmed from not only nonprofit providers, but from individual New Yorkers as young as 15.
“Community-led work is critical to preventing hate and addressing the conditions that allow bias to take hold,” said CCHR chair and commissioner Christine Clarke in a statement. “These grants support New Yorkers who are doing the hard, meaningful work of bringing people together, strengthening relationships, and helping build a city where everyone belongs.”
To be clear, preventing hate crimes goes beyond lowering arrest numbers. In fact, they remain underreported on a local level. Last year, just 46 of the 580 total incidents recorded by the NYPD were anti-Black, even as the New York area boasts the nation’s largest Black population. Meanwhile, anti-Black hate crimes outpace any other bias nationally over the past five years, according to FBI data.
Additionally, not every offense can be charged as a hate crime under the current statute. Through this grant, the city hopes the recipients can fill in those gaps and curb the root causes of racism and other discrimination before they fester into violence.
“Our office receives the data from the NYPD Hate Crimes Task Force, and that raw data shows the hate crimes as reported to [the] NYPD,” said OPHC executive director Vijah Ramjattan. “Those are people who actually went to the precinct and said [that they wanted] to file a report. We know that different communities have different cultural perspectives when it comes to NYPD or law enforcement. We know there are language barriers, access barriers, [and] people’s age where they don’t go to the police to report.
“Through these programs, we are trying to empower the local communities to say, you are the trusted member in the community…creating these little clinics, [to bridge] the local community to New York City to report these hate crimes.”
Recipient Michael “Coach Mike” Peterson points to growing up in the wake of a white mob murdering Black teen Yusef Hawkins in Bensonhurst nearly forty years ago. His grant project, “ONE NYC: The Imagination Lab for Belonging,” will include a workshop per borough.
“At one point, every single borough had their own flag,” said Peterson. “I’m an abstract artist [that’s] multihyphenate and what I begin to think about is, how can we reimagine this concept and idea of the flag from an abstract [but] unified perspective…we’re working through fabrics and paint and a whole bunch of materials that should not go together — but are going together — which [speaks] to what I want to say with ONE NYC.”
Artists Yohanna Báez and Jasmin Benward also received an OPHC grant. Their project “The Map Belonging Project” will also bring people together across the city for workshops featuring poetry and storytelling. Two will be online while the recipients develop a diverse cohort to participate in the live programming, like a one-day pop-up exhibition.
“It’s going to be a silent disco, but in the headphones,” said Benward, “audience members will be able to hear the recitations of the work in a curated walking tour. But if they’re not able to attend that, our project is a call to action. We want folks to be able to use QR codes to put it up in their community boards [and] in their neighborhoods, so that you can put your phone up and listen to other folks’ stories, their memories.”
“It means that the city recognizes that culture and storytelling are forms of prevention,” added Báez. “I also believe that you can’t really legislate belonging into existence. You have to cultivate it. So when institutions support community-driven art, they’re acknowledging openly that social connection [and] cohesion.”
The grant is now running in its fourth year. OPHC dates back to 2019 and operates under the NYC Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, which leads many criminal justice reform programs in the city. CCHR, meanwhile, oversees the NYC Human Rights Law, which prohibits employment and housing discrimination. Grant applications reopen for next year’s cohort in October.
Author’s Note: A previous draft was published containing an error saying the grant’s recipients ranged “from individual New Yorkers as old as 15 was published” rather than “as young” from the final draft. The story is updated to reflect the current print version of the article.
Great read! Thank you so much!