Alliance Blog

Thanks to the Safer blog and Sarah for this amazingly written and overall great article about the recent City Council budget cuts:

That was the title of the shocking and extremely distressing email I received this morning from the NYC Alliance Against Sexual Assault. Yesterday the NY City Council passed the FY2011 city budget, which completely cuts the Sexual Assault Services Initiative funding that the Council has been allocating since 2005. To put this in perspective, NYC has a $63.1 billion budget. For the past two years, $332,500 of that has gone toward sexual assault services, with another $100,000 in discretionary funding going to the Alliance for “preventing sexual violence and ensuring access to best care for all survivors.” As the Alliance email points out, that’s .001% of the total budget.

What does that mean for NYC? Besides the $275,000 loss for the NYC Alliance—which makes up one-third of their entire budget—funding was also cut for three rape crisis programs. In FY2010 the Kingsbridge Heights Community Center in the Bronx, Mt. Sinai Sexual Assault and Violence Intervention Program in Queens, and St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Intervention program in Manhattan each received $52,500 for providing sexual assault services. In FY2011 they will receive nothing.

This is an incredible loss for New York City. Yesterday an editorial in the NY Times praised the city for running the budget process quickly and quietly, despite the fact that the city faced $5 billion budget gap (which was dealt with by “cutting most services.”) The author mentions that some public services (all important ones as well, I might add) were saved, prompting Mayor Bloomberg to declare of the cuts: “pain, yes, serious damage, no.”

I’d have to disagree with the mayor. In a city where in one year the police department received 890 reports of 1st degree rape; 944 arrests were made for 1st-3rd degree rape; and 1,933 arrests were made for other sexual offenses; and where one in six public high school students say they’ve experienced sexual violence, I’d say that cutting funding for sexual assault prevention and crisis services does indeed do some serious damage.

Right now, the Alliance (who has been receiving city council funding for nine years) is asking for donations to their emergency fund and preparing a conference call with NYC rape crisis centers and other folks in the SV field to brainstorm around a collaborative community response to this incredibly sad and disappointing decision.  Because this is a community issue—we all have someone in our lives who has been impacted by sexual violence, and should be committed to providing our loved ones and neighbors with support and resources. And in order to decrease the amount of sexual violence in our communities, we need prevention and education programming. Please consider making a donation to the Alliance here, or sending one to:

Emergency Fund
New York City Alliance Against Sexual Assault
27 Christopher Street, 3rd Floor
New York, NY  10014

The Alliance has a lot of great programming which I encourage you to check out. But as they wrote this morning:

“Without this funding for the Alliance, efforts to ensure sensitive, culturally competent treatment of victims, community-based programming for prevention, and research that identifies the determinants of sexual violence as well as opportunities for prevention will be severely curtailed.

You can also contact your council member to let them know how you feel about this tremendous loss. I’ll keep you posted in the coming days if any further action is planned.

Please find below a letter from Alliance Executive Director, Harriet Lessel.

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Dear Friends,

I am sending an urgent appeal to all Alliance friends and supporters. We are in a crisis and need your support!

Yesterday, we learned that the New York City Council has eliminated all funding for sexual violence programming and prevention. As a result, the Alliance now faces a budgetary shortfall of $275,000 – that represents one-third of our Fiscal Year 2010-11 budget!

I want to emphasize that the Alliance has received NYC Council funding for the last 9 years, so this was totally unexpected. The total amount of money earmarked for sexual assault programs, which included funding for 3 Rape Crisis Programs and the Alliance, represented only .001% of the total NYC Council appropriations budget.

In response to this crisis situation, we have created an emergency fund and are hoping that 500 Alliance supporters will contribute $100. If you can help us in this way, please go to the Alliance website at: https://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/5469/t/6039/shop/custom.jsp?donate_page_KEY=1482 to make an online donation.

You also can send a donation to:

Emergency Fund

New York City Alliance Against Sexual Assault

27 Christopher Street, 3^rd Floor

New York, NY  10014

Any donation, no matter what amount, will be deeply appreciated.

Please take the time to read “Calculating the Damage” (below) to understand the full ramifications of the funding cuts.

Thank you so much for your support at this critical juncture!

Sincerely,

Harriet Lessel

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Calculating the Damage

What does this denial of funding mean to New York City and the anti-sexual violence community?

By completely eliminating the Council’s Sexual Assault Initiative that funds the NYC Alliance Against Sexual Assault (Alliance) and three local rape crisis programs, the New York City Council has effectively turned its back on the issue of sexual violence.  Without this funding for the Alliance, efforts to ensure sensitive, culturally competent treatment of victims, community-based programming for prevention, and research that identifies the determinants of sexual violence as well as opportunities for prevention will be severely curtailed.

On immigrant communities in New York City:

The City Council has denied funding for technical assistance to coordinate the ARISE Coalition, which works to improve prevention and response to sexual and intimate partner violence experienced by immigrant women and families. The Coalition is comprised of the Alliance, Voces Latinas, Sauti Yetu Center for African Women, Sakhi for South Asian Women, Garden of Hope, the Arab-American Family Support Center and the Immigrant Outreach project of Planned Parenthood of New York City. The community-based organizations serve diverse ethnic groups throughout the five boroughs, and provide an opportunity for research to be conducted by traditionally marginalized communities of immigrant women. These organizations depend on the Alliance to build their capacity to coordinate advocacy efforts with policymakers, city agencies, law enforcement, health care and the justice system to provide culturally competent services.

On youth:

The loss of funding to the Alliance’s youth programming means that we are unable to implement a training program for community-based, youth-serving organizations on ways to handle disclosures of sexual and dating violence.  This is a program that promotes the health and well-being of New York City youth, who experience a disproportionate prevalence of sexual and dating violence, which is twice the national average.

On prevention:

With funding eliminated, the Alliance will be unable to support community coalitions engaged in primary prevention activities in the South Bronx, the Lower East Side and Williamsburg, Brooklyn. We will be unable to develop the leadership of individuals to mobilize their communities to change the conditions that promote sexual violence in New York City.  The elimination of funds has implications for the safety and well-being of hundreds of thousands of residents in these three communities.