CM Krishnan questions first panel on language community challenges

And this is a question for all three of you about your work with different language communities.

What are the challenges that you may have been encountering in working across different language communities?

I think just going back to CBO outreach, of course, we have over 100 partners spread out across the five boroughs.

A lot of that includes in areas in Queens that might not be our specific, let's say, demographic.

For example, La Voz de Unidas, that was referenced before, they not only employ and identify safe spaces for LGBTQIA folks,

other groups such as New Immigrant Community Empowerment focuses on training undocumented day laborers based on workplace bias, discrimination, as

packed into already existing know your rights training.

And that cuts across different languages, different ethnicities.

So something that we rely heavily on the coalition of partners that we have that cut across different sectors of identities and better represent the mosaic.

Of this city.

From the work that I do as well, given that we work with the Sikh community, our community really needs bilingual materials and resources to effectively communicate their needs and to help understand what's going on within our community.

And so we heavily work with, you know, Gurdwara Saibjis, which are Sikh houses of worship, who predominantly also speak in Punjabi as well.

So we do our best to provide Know Your Rights resources as well, you know, provide presentations and make sure that they have all the information that they need to know how to

access resources, legal referrals, mental health support, and various other components as well.

So we really take pride in the fact that we do our best to make sure that our community's needs are being heard while, you know, using our own capacity to translate their needs effectively as well.

I would just add, in terms of our community, the Jewish community, the language that is a little bit more difficult to manage is Yiddish.

There is a significant Yiddish-speaking population here in New York.

Many of them speak English, but not all, or not so well.

And reaching them in that language is important.

And I can actually relate to the other question that you asked of my colleague here, that the issue of underreporting, a major way to combat underreporting, is...

to build those relationships.

So what we've done is we actually hired two people who are members of the Orthodox community.

That was relatively new for us a few years ago, and it has been very, very important, very important both for reaching them because they are Yiddish speakers,

but also for making sure that there's a trust that's developed.

And when there's a trust that's developed, people report.

So we were receiving very few reports from the Orthodox community just a few years ago, and that has changed tremendously, and it's changed tremendously because of that trust.

And the language barrier is broken, you know, very, very, very important to have that.

And I will just add that Orthodox Jews in the city are disproportionately affected by such incidents because they are what we call visibly identifiable Jews.

So very, very important.

And that's why the organization made the commitment to hire people that could build that kind of trust and have those language skills.

Thank you.

Thank you for your testimony.

I appreciate it.