The Audre Lorde Project is a Brooklyn, New York-based organization for LGBT people of color. The organization concentrates on community organizing and radical nonviolent activism around progressive issues within New York City, especially relating to LGBT communities, AIDS and HIV activism, pro-immigrant activism, prison reform and organizing among youth of color. It is named for the lesbian-feminist poet and activist Audre Lorde and was founded in 1994. History The purpose of the Project emerged from "the expressed need for innovative and unified community strategies to address the multiple issues impacting LGBT People of Color communities." In 1996, the organization moved into its permanent home in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn, parish house of Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church. The Project was begun to "serve as a home base" for LGBT peoples of African/Black/Caribbean, Arab, Asian and Pacific Islander, Latina/o and Native/Indigenous descent can work to further a collective history of struggle against discrimination and other forms of oppression. At the time of its founding, it was the only organization in New York dedicated to people with an intersection of those identities. Radical politics and nonviolence The Project's decision-making structure seeks to be "representative of our communities" and acts to promote existing LGBT people of color organizations, cultural workers and activists. The organization also acts in an explicitly feminist, anti-sexist practice because it believes women's leadership "continues to be de-valued and discouraged in broader LGBTST organizations/communities." In the public arena, it often engages in nonviolent civil disobedience. Campaigns and Working Groups Safe OUTside the System: the SOS Collective The Collective is an anti-violence organization focusing on hate and police violence targeting "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Two Spirit, Trans, and Gender Non Conforming people of color", in particular in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. The Collective uses community-based strategies, declaring that "strategies that increase the police presence and the criminalization of our communities do not create safety." Originally called the Working Group on Police and State Violence, it began in 1997 in response to a rise in street violence and police harassment the organization believed was connected to the "quality of life" policies of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. The group helped to found the Coalition Against Police Brutality and People's Justice 2000 soon after the killings by police officers of unarmed men of color Amadou Diallo and Abner Louima, as well as annual Racial Justice Days, focusing on the appeals of families of color