New York is soliciting grant applications for a $15 million program designed to help residents of the state cope with “collective trauma,” including the purported pain brought on by the “structural inequalities and disparities” experienced by people of color and immigrants, state documents show.
The program, titled “Promoting Wellness and Healing in Communities,” tasks applicants with proposing ways to “reduce the impact of trauma on members of a community” by “implementing or expanding innovative community/grass-roots strategies that support promotion of community well-being, resilience, and healing.” New York’s state Office of Mental Health asserted that migrants, people of color, and refugees can experience collective trauma because “trauma histories can be built into cultural norms, values, and beliefs, and furthermore, it can be passed from generation to generation.”
Prospective grantees are encouraged to use public funds for the provision of non-traditional approaches, including culturally sensitive “ritual[s],” to treat collective trauma in the grant procurement document published by OMH.
While the document says that there are many approaches to handling community trauma, it goes out of its way to highlight “emerging practices that draw on ‘culturally based knowledge, ritual and practice.’”
OMH directs possible applicants toward a 2016 paper titled “Adverse Community Experiences and Resilience,” published by Kaiser Permanente, for further information on such practices. The page of the paper cited by the grant procurement document argues that the move away from traditional evidence-based practices toward “indigenous based healing and restorative justice” is the result of “increasing appreciation and understanding of the importance of healing strategies that have been developed within communities that have been affected and subjected to structural violence and institutional racism and inequality.”
Members of minority groups don’t even need to have been victimized themselves to be eligible to benefit from the program, according to the grant documents.
“The term collective trauma refers to the psychological reactions to a traumatic event that affect an entire society; it does not merely reflect an historical fact, the recollection of a terrible event that happened to a group of people,” the grant’s definition of collective trauma reads. “Collective memory of trauma is different from individual memory because collective memory persists beyond the lives of the direct survivors of the events and is remembered by group members that may be far removed from the traumatic events in time and space. These subsequent generations of trauma survivors, that never witnessed the actual events, may remember the events differently than the direct survivors.”
While New York’s standards for community care eligibility are permissive in some areas, they are less so in others. In a separate document that contained questions submitted by possible grantees and answers from the state, one prospective applicant asked whether funds for the program could be used to help “with the acquiring and training of a Community Police Therapy Dog.”
“No,” a state official responded. “This grant is focused on activities that are community based to support wellness in the community.”
In addition to racial minorities and migrants, the grant solicitation also notes that victims of natural disasters, pandemics, and mass violence, as well as people in rural areas, are considered eligible communities under the program.
While New York sets aside millions of dollars to provide culturally sensitive collective trauma services, the state faces a multibillion-dollar budget deficit. New York Comptroller Tom DiNapoli announced in August that the state faces a $34.3 billion budget gap, an increase of $7 billion since the last estimate was released in January.
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“The Financial Plan paints a challenging picture for the state that will only grow more problematic with the incoming federal cuts from [President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act],” DiNapoli said in a statement. “This is likely just the beginning; the relationship between the federal government and the states is being restructured, and state governments will be facing drastic reductions in federal aid that could force difficult decisions about state revenue and spending priorities. There is an urgent need to formulate a fiscal response to the federal reconciliation bill and support New York’s safety net.”
The New York governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
