On June 10th, 2026 Bettina Calloway-White, a founding member and leader of our Parent Power for Cultural Equity (PP4CE) program got to submit testimony to New York’s committee on finance ahead of state budget adoption. Calloway-White spoke on the importance of creative access in Bed-Stuy, parent leadership and why THIS is a pivotal time for the state to enhance its support on art and cultural equity.
We couldn’t be more proud to have been represented by such candor and passion. Thank you Mama White! Read the full speech below:
Good afternoon, and thank you to Speaker Julie Menin, Finance Chair Linda Lee, and members of the committee and the entire city council. My name is Bettina Calloway-White. I am a 67-year-old lifelong resident of New York City, and I have seen many changes over the years. It has been a journey.
I have mainly lived in the Bed-Stuy area, a mecca of culture, diversity, and artistic expression. It has been enlightening to experience the opportunities afforded to my community. Over the years, I have seen creative expression diminish.
When I was in school, all schools had arts in the curriculum. We all took ceramics, woodworking, cooking, sewing, etc. Today, those skills are still needed, but they are not extended to all. How would I know if I like painting if I have never been introduced to it?
As a parent, I wanted my children to have artistic experiences. I work for an early childhood program, Bedford Stuyvesant Early Childhood Development Center, which gave us the Cool Culture card. Cool Culture provides 50,000 families in 450 Early Childhood Centers and Title 1 Department of Education schools with a Cool Culture Family Pass that offers families a year of unlimited, free admission for up to five people to our 90 New York City cultural institution partners. Having that card made visiting affordable and let us experience and venture out to the vast neighborhoods of the city.
For the last two years, I have had the pleasure of belonging to a group called Parent Power for Cultural Equity (PP4CE), a program of Cool Culture in partnership with the Bedford Stuyvesant Early Childhood Development Center.
We are mothers, daughters, granddaughters, and sisters. We’re caregivers, organizers, researchers, and members of a community where art has always been part of everyday life. Many of us are also artists in our own ways — raising children who love art, passing down creative traditions, and living in a neighborhood with a deep cultural history.
We came together because we believe that art is not something extra. It’s a way communities connect, express identity, and protect culture across generations.
Through this project, we partnered with the Public Science Project at the CUNY Graduate Center to design and lead a community research project grounded in the knowledge of people who live here. This group of moms wondered about the lack of artistic opportunity in the community now. With sponsorship from Cool Culture, we began our quest.
Using surveys, interviews, and even community mapping efforts, we created a critical participatory action research project in Bed-Stuy focused on the lack of the arts here. With presentations across the city and workshops with our stakeholders, we worked to spread the word about our work. The outcome of our research manifested into our report called Creative Pathways in Bedstuy: A Participatory Study on Art Access, Intergenerational Creativity, and Cultural Equity. We are Parent Power for Cultural Equity.
My job is to work with families, to foster relationships, set goals, and to help them advocate for their needs. My passion is doing all that and then celebrating their every success.
Being a part of our CPAR project solidified that the voices of the people must always be heard, acknowledged, and fed. It’s time to stop dreaming of what people’s reality is and to now start asking them how to make it become reality.
We found that when motivated with a common cause that is respectful, motivational, non-judgmental, and attainable, the masses will come. It is believed that we live in a time where people are just not interested, but we learned that they are.
We heard that:
- People want to meet for common goals.
- They will gather with a call of action.
- They want to talk together, generation to generation, in a safe and secure space.
- People want to preserve their past and culture.
- People want to stay close to home.
- Because of the economy, they want to do things at little or no cost.
This aligns strongly with our four key research findings:
- Key Finding 1: Art is everywhere. Access is not
- Key Finding 2: Art is an intergenerational connection and families want those pathways restored
- Key Finding 3: Gentrification is reshaping art and cultural belonging
- Key Finding 4: Bedford Stuyvesant families hold bold freedom dreams for their creative future.
It is imperative to me that elected officials like you hear the people and make realities become true.
Although we have gotten an increased investment in the arts from you, speaking up and speaking out is acceptable through the arts. I believe it’s a pivotal time for creativity to be enhanced.
Many in our city and our nation feel that so many of life’s opportunities are dwindling away, and their voices are not being heard. But through spoken word, you can hear me and my intentions. Through painting and drawing, my fantasies and realities become seen. You can see my struggle through my hair and dress. You can see us soar as we dream skyscrapers, buildings, and housing dreams through architecture.
New Yorkers dream big. New Yorkers work hard. New Yorkers create uniquely.
The funding of this one project helped women begin to come into themselves. They broke boundaries. They experienced new things. They were heard when they thought no one cared about what they wanted to say. They learned how to organize.
These gifts not only helped the project but also helped them in their daily lives. They gained time management skills, budgeting, presentation tools, and how to sell themselves. The most important skill for me was that they gained confidence.
A confident parent raises children who can rule the world. When families feel that they can have it all, they soar. Our communities are better, their lives are better, the world is better.
I encourage you to increase the base amount for culture and arts in the city budget by $30M. I understand this is not an increase over the amount the Department of Cultural Affairs received last year, but setting it as a baseline will go a long way toward stabilizing arts and culture organizations and keeping them going.
If I had a dream today, it would be that you continue to fund programs like Parent Power for Cultural Equity, knowing that every dollar invested today is worth life-changing assets for the future that are immeasurable and bankable.
Thank you,
Bettina Calloway-White
Founding Member, Parent Power for Cultural Equity
Family Services Coordinator, Bedford Stuyvesant Early Childhood Development Center