Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, grassroots community groups across the city have been following similarly jam-packed schedules as they scramble to maintain their missions while taking on new programs in response to their neighborhoods’ changing needs.
City Limits Magazine
However, most foundations, Barrett adds, have voiced an unwavering commitment to the grassroots causes they have funded for years. The North Star Fund, for one, has established a 9.11 Activist Fund to give community organizing groups small grants for emergency needs and sustained support for mid- to long-range planning efforts. As of late October, the Fund had doled out $2,500 in emergency grants ($500 to Women for Afghan Women and $2,000 to Downtown Community Television for its upcoming series “America at War, Then and Now”). The foundation hoped to raise another $50,000 at a November 8 fundraiser.
Meanwhile, community groups work to keep up with the times.
- For more than a year, NICE has focused most of its resources on coordinating the Government Access and Accountability Campaign, an effort to get candidates for city office to commit to holding regular town hall meetings, conducting surveys of their districts’ needs and publicizing reports on how tax dollars are spent. Once Islamic fundamentalists were named as perpetrators of the Trade Tower attacks, however, the all-volunteer organizing group began reaching out to young immigrants to help them deal with and combat the bias incidents that were cropping up around the city.
“We decided that since we’re an organization that’s about bringing communities together across racial, ethnic, religious, and cultural lines, there was a void to be filled,” says Pu-Folkes.
From there, a new partnership was forged with the Council for Unity, a nonprofit that teaches community and personal development in over 50 city schools. A quick application for funds to the Citizens Committee of New York produced $500 for a unity rally for teens in Flushing Park. Students from Newcomer High School, the Academy for New Americans and other immigrant-heavy schools read aloud poems and letters, and painted a handful of six-by-nine-foot murals to hang in the state capital and in fire and police departments around the city.
More events, including a youth summit, are also in the works, but Pu-Folkes stresses that none of this can happen without more resources. Already short-handed, the group is now in search of funds to hire a muralist and a coordinator for future rallies. Some good news: In late October, the NICE board brought on two new members and approved the group’s first office, a closet-sized space in Corona.
- Imani House, a small Park Slope-based group, offers support--from English and adult literacy classes to a food pantry--to local Latino families. After September 11, the group’s staff worked with the Commission for Human Rights to develop and post flyers outlining how to legally combat harassment. They reached out to local Arab Americans and asked them to hang the posters in their shops and distribute them at their mosques. “I’ve seen what ethnocentricity can do to tear a country apart,” says Imani Executive Director Bisi Iderabdullah, who lived through the evacuation of Liberia, West Africa, in 1996. She has also shifted the focus of a collaborative program with the New York Civil Liberties Union from juvenile justice to race and policing after the terrorist attacks.
