Over 50 girls and young women from Project Reach’s Womyn’s Space challenge male-dominated graffiti art by developing and producing a 20’x 40’ mural on a factory warehouse wall in Long Island City. Marrying art and activism, this mural reflects their understanding of sexism and misogyny and exposes the harsh realities of how rigid gender roles contribute to the personal, institutional, systemic, and global violence faced by women everywhere.

After repeated harassment by students in a midtown high school around which bathroom to use, a 15-year old female who presents as male organizes an institutional intervention that results in a mandatory 2-hour teacher/administrator training and an invitation by the principal for Project Reach youth and adult staff to conduct school-wide workshops in every classroom. Over 320 students completed 4-6 hours of training on discrimination in general, and homophobia and transphobia in particular.

Young people living with AIDS from Positive Youth, a program at Project Reach employing HIV+/young people living with AIDS, partner with older Asian immigrants living with AIDS to form one of the country’s only intergenerational support groups to fight against HIV/AIDS discrimination and to establish an intergenerational people with AIDS-run drop-in and organizing center. The recent loss of one young person and 3 adults in their community has strengthened their commitment to challenging the discrimination impacting their health care and silencing their communities.

When inter-group tensions arise between young women in this already established, cross-community Brooklyn collaboration, Project Reach is called upon to “mediate” the situation. An emergency 3-hour, turned day-long workshop engaged Arab, Muslim, and Russian-speaking Jewish youth in examining the forms of discrimination that threatened to divide their communities. These collaborating organizations have since joined our Social Justice Boot Camp community.

A facilitator team of 6 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth of color from Project Reach conduct a 9-hour, all-day, national, Youth Organizing Institute attended by over 60 predominantly White college-aged students at a skills building conference in Miami, Florida. Over the past 4 years, Project Reach has taken the lead in designing and institutionalizing conference-wide discussions on race and racism at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s annual Creating Change conferences in Portland, Miami, St. Louis, and Oakland – over 2,000 activists attend each year.

Our annual, week-long, out-of-the-city, cross-community, anti-militaristic “boot camp” training at The Farm in upstate New York and city-wide monthly workshops bring together over 150 young people and staff from around the city, upstate New York, and San Antonio, Texas.  At the Boot Camp young people meet, work, and live with one another, growing their awareness of each other and building alliances through a "basic training" on racism, sexism, homophobia/heterosexism, adultism, classism, and militarism.