CARIBBEAN EQUALITY PROJECT
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Mission Statement
Caribbean Equality Project (CEP) is an immigrant rights organization that empowers, advocates for, and represents Afro and Indo-Caribbean LGBTQ+ people in New York City. For a decade, the organization has focused on advocacy for LGBTQ+ and immigrant rights, gender equity, racial justice, immigration, and mental health services through public education, community organizing, civic engagement, storytelling, and cultural and social programming to end hate violence in the Caribbean diaspora.
About This Cause
The Caribbean Equality Project was launched in 2015 in response to anti-LGBTQ hate violence in Richmond Hill, Queens. For 10 years, the organization has been hosting bi-monthly healing community spaces through its Unchained support groups in Queens and Brooklyn, facilitates immigration legal services for LGBTQ+ asylum seekers, curates oral history and storytelling interdisciplinary art exhibitions, combats food insecurity, organizes culture-shifting programming and builds political power through civic engagement, Census outreach, redistricting, voter registration, and legislative advocacy to advance LGBTQ+ and voting rights in New York State. Since its founding on June 26, 2015—the same day the U.S. Supreme Court legalized marriage equality—CEP has grown into a survivor-led organization providing vital resources to marginalized Caribbean LGBTQ+ individuals. Notable achievements include organizing the first international "Breaking Silences" conference in Toronto in 2018 and expanding its programs during the COVID-19 pandemic to address emerging community needs. New York City is home to the largest Afro- and Indo-Caribbean foreign-born population in the United States, many of whom live in immigrant communities like Richmond Hill and South Ozone Park in Queens, Flatbush and Crown Heights in Brooklyn, and Castle Hill and Wakefield in the Bronx- all Caribbean centric neighborhoods Caribbean Equality Project has served for a decade. The organization's one-on-one immigration case management support provides our members with culturally and linguistically competent services, including application support for newly arrived asylum seekers, obtaining gender-affirming identification documentation, legal name change, economic stability, housing, clothing, food, financial literacy, and sexual health and Trans healthcare. Caribbean Equality Project's cross-racial solidarity work, confronts gendered and racialized violence within Black, Asian, and Caribbean immigrant diasporic communities by fostering deeper connections across generations, nationalities, ethnicities, and gender and sexual practices and identities, as well as across the academic, artistic, and activist communities that center LGBTQ+ Caribbean people's experiences in their respective work. The organization is a leading voice in the fight in New York to pass legislation to ensure Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander history is taught in our public schools with the REACH Coalition. CEP transnational work centers on cross-border relationship development with Caribbean regional partners whose organizing focuses on decriminalizing same-sex intimacy and postcolonial laws. In the face of anti-immigrant sentiment, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, gender, and racial discrimination, lack of access to health services, and hate violence at the hands of their families, friends, employers, medical professionals, and law enforcement officers (even in New York City), Caribbean Equality Project is creating sustainable and progressive Caribbean diaspora communities, free of violence and all forms of discrimination.