Temple NY community harm statement
7/23/2025
To the Temple NY community and the rope scene at large,
As many of you are aware by now, there are major concerns about the behaviors and actions of someone in our local community, as well as how we as Temple NY have handled this situation, that needs to be addressed publicly as well as privately. We have been working as individuals to come forth publicly to address these issues and are here to address it as a collective. Anyone who wants to inquire further about the details we can share, please email us through our contact page on Templenewyork.org
We are in open communication with those who have been directly affected by this person and stand in full support of them, their wishes in terms of accountability measures, and how they want their stories to be handled. Their voices are central to this process of accountability and action.
We acknowledge that in our role as the central rope space in NYC, we hold a higher level of responsibility to work to keep our community safer to exist in. We have not been entirely effective in that role and have to acknowledge that for many reasons, we have a lot of work to do repairing and rebuilding trust in ourselves and trust from our local community. We are committed to learning and to doing better.
It has become plainly obvious to us that certain steps need to be taken immediately:
The person perpetrating harm has been banned from our space.
We are integrating with a third party of professional psychologists, social workers and community activists to take over receiving and reviewing our incident reporting. This will hopefully allow people to feel safer reporting in general and especially where concerns of personal bias within our organization might impact response. It will also be structured to keep us accountable for the outcomes that are required from these reports.
Any accountability processes that are initiated will be handled by people trained in the work of restorative justice whether it be centered on one of our team members or community members.
Our team will be entering into an accountability process as organizers to review their roles and further educate them on biases and handling of sensitive information.
Temple will be opening up a new channel through our website through which people can let us know "how we can do better" in how we operate and show up for our community.
We hope that with time, a lot of communication, and mutual support, this community can heal and grow from this experience and work more closely to keep this place safer. We appreciate the support from our community as well as all the people asking the hard questions, both are deeply needed.
This is our initial response and certainly won't be our last; we wanted to put forward what will be done in the short term due to the urgency of the situation and the call for a response from the community. We will continue to update everyone as best we can about our process and progress and are committed to moving slowly, thoroughly, and intentionally with our next steps.