Following reporting by THE CITY on city agencies breaking language access laws, the Mayor’s adopted budget restored $3.8 million to a community based-program that will provide in-person interpretation services to city agencies. 

The program, coined the Language Justice Collaborative, will be a coalition of multilingual New Yorkers able to translate for non-English speakers. 

The legislation to start the program first ed in December of 2022 and was granted $3.8 million in 2023 to begin development. Yet the program was left out of the mayor’s fiscal year 2024 budget. Queens Council Julie Won and Sandra Ung advocated alongside community organizations to get the funds back into the 2025 budget, announced on Saturday. 

“We referenced THE CITY’s reporting on secret shoppers extensively in the last stages of our advocacy,” said Amaha Kassa of African Communities Together, a key organizing body for the co-op program.