A Movement Born of Survival. A Vision Rooted in Liberation.

From Trauma to Purpose: The Conditions That Gave Rise to CEP

The Caribbean Equality Project (CEP) was founded in 2015 in the wake of a brutal anti-LGBTQ+ hate crime in Richmond Hill, Queens, home to one of the largest Indo and Afro-Caribbean populations in the United States. That act of violence revealed not just a community tragedy, but a systemic void: no existing infrastructure to support LGBTQ+ immigrants of Caribbean descent, who face a compounded reality of cultural erasure, state abandonment, and violence at the intersections of race, gender identity, sexuality, language, and immigration status.

At the center of this response was Mohamed Q. Amin, a queer Indo-Caribbean immigrant and survivor of the attack, whose personal trauma catalyzed a public call to action. From his vision emerged the Caribbean Equality Project, an immigrant- and survivor-led movement that began as a grassroots act of healing and has since evolved into one of the most vital LGBTQ+ immigrant justice organizations in the United States. CEP is now the only nonprofit in New York City and State solely dedicated to serving and empowering Afro- and Indo-Caribbean LGBTQ+ immigrants. Its founding was not born from institutional planning, but from a community’s refusal to be forgotten.

A Decade of Impact, Resistance, and Belonging

Over the last ten years, CEP has created an ecosystem of services, programs, and organizing efforts that are culturally grounded, trauma-informed, and people-powered. Its work centers joy, dignity, and visibility, while meeting critical needs through direct services and shifting public narratives through cultural and civic leadership. CEP operates on the belief that who you serve matters just as much as how you serve. Every service, strategy, and structure is designed through the lens of lived experience—built not for generic inclusion, but for deep, cultural belonging. The organization’s programs are designed for and by the very communities too often excluded from traditional systems of care and representation.

CEP doesn’t merely serve, it restores, reclaims, and rebuilds. Every offering is a political act: a rejection of invisibility and an affirmation of Caribbean LGBTQ+ existence as worthy, sacred, and powerful.