Grantees
and Partners

RSVP (Please Respond)

Overview:

Terra Firma is a nationally recognized mental health, medical, and legal organization that works to facilitate access to crucial services for immigrant and migrant youth. Terra Firma and an array of partners created RSVP (Please Respond) to introduce the arts to recently arrived unaccompanied immigrant children seeking humanitarian protection as an acculturative “path-marking” experience in New York City.

Collaborating partners include DYKWTCA (Do You Know Where the Children Are?) with artists Mary Ellen Conner/MEC, studios and Lucas Michael; Reddymade Architecture, and Dr. Jessica Marshall, with assistance from Storefront Center for Art and Architecture.

• DYKWTCA (Do you know here the children are?) is an ongoing initiative by artists Mary Ellen Carroll/MEC, studios and Lucas Michael that addresses asylum and immigration policy for/with refugees through the lens of culture.
• Reddymade Architecture, founded by Suchi Reddy, is a leading global design firm informed by neuroaesthetics, the study of how the brain responds to the design of our surroundings.
• Jessica Marshall, PhD is an adjunct professor in English and Women & Gender Studies at Pace University. She works with the National Education Alliance for Borderline Personality Disorder.

Grant:

Purpose: To support the development of RSVP (Please Respond).

For RSVP’s pilot program in 2022-23, participants experience the arts through a combination of weekly field visits throughout the city that are complimented by hands-on workshops where the participants engage in exercises to map (using a variety of materials and mediums that include: videos/photos/drawings/ writing/music) and reflect on what they did, what they want to do, and who they want to be in their new home — New York City.

Areas of the arts include: Art, Architecture, Music, Film, Writing, and Performance/Theater. Examples of the partnering organizations for the field visits include: Diller, Scofidio + Renfro (Architecture), National Sawdust (Music), and Times Square Arts (Performance and Theater), among others. A key component of the field visits is that the children engage in related activities of ‘making and doing’ while at these sites of cultural production. Mapping exercises incorporate the places and activities that the youth identify as making New York City a home for them, as well as becoming a guide to ‘their NYC’.