Humans of New York helps raise $1.2 million for debate programs for underprivileged high schoolers

An online campaign led by the photography account Humans of New York has raised over $1 million for a high school debate team coach who had drained his savings to keep his debate league afloat.

Humans of New York, or HONY, began as street photography project by Brandon Stanton, featuring portraits of New Yorkers with interviews about their lives. Since it launched in 2010, Stanton has pivoted to using the platform to raise money for his subjects, from a retired burlesque dancer to a woman behind on her rent while undergoing cancer treatment.

When Jonathan Conyers, 27, had the chance to tell his life story on HONY, he decided to honor his high school debate coach, K.M. DiColandrea (nicknamed DiCo).

DiColandrea recently spent $6,000 of his savings to fund the Brooklyn Debate League, which provides free speech and debate programs for teenagers who can’t afford the exorbitant fees typical for prep camps and tournaments.

Soon after Stanton posted the interview series with Conyers and DiColandrea, donations poured in. As of Monday, the GoFundMe campaign Stanton set up has raised nearly $1.3 million for the league.

DiColandrea, Conyers and Stanton did not immediately respond to requests for interviews.

In the HONY post, Conyers opened up about first meeting DiColandrea when he was 14.

Conyers, who grew up with parents who had drug addictions, said he had just broken into a home but wasn’t charged. He was admitted to the Frederick Douglass Academy in Harlem, where the principal pushed him to join an extracurricular activity. A discussion in the debate room about drug addiction piqued his interest, and he thrived on DiColandrea's debate team.

"Ms. DiCo would give me these articles on drug addiction, and she'd be like, 'Your parents do love you. They aren't bad people. Let's read this together,'" Conyers said in a HONY post. "If she ever saw that my clothes were wrinkled, she'd offer to wash them. And when I didn't have any money, she'd cover my tournament fees. Ms. DiCo knew that home was hell for a lot of us, so some nights she would stay until 8:30."

DiColandrea later came out as trans, and students began referring to him by his nickname, "DiCo."

"Every day I thank God that DiCo was the first person who I met who was transgender," Conyers continued in the HONY feature. "This was the only person who really loved me and understood me. DiCo could have told me he was a dinosaur, and I'd be like: 'That's cool. Just stay DiCo.' And the rest of the team felt the same way."

Conyers graduated with a scholarship to the State University of New York at Stony Brook to major in respiratory therapy. He's now a respiratory therapist at NYU Langone Medical Center's newborn intensive care unit.

DiColandrea, now a history teacher at Stuyvestant High School, has continued coaching underprivileged teenagers in speech and debate and is godfather to Conyers' 9-year-old daughter.

DiColandrea founded the Brooklyn Debate League in 2017 to counter to the high-cost "gatekeeping" common in the community. Speech and debate can be a powerful skill, but the community is "dominated" by "rich kids," the league's GoFundMe page says.

"These kids are going to broken-down, [expletive] schools and internalizing 'nobody is listening to me anyway,'" DiColandrea said in a HONY post. "And that's the beauty of debate. It teaches kids to listen. You can't win a round if you're not listening to your opponent. Speech and Debate is one of the only activities that I know that really has the power to integrate communities."

The Brooklyn Debate League accepts donations from families but says online that "no child will ever be turned away because of inability to pay." DiColandrea recently drained his own savings to keep the league going. Conyers, now a board member of the Brooklyn Debate League, wanted to help.

"The people of New York and around the world have stepped up," DiColandrea told NBC New York. "Sky's the limit! Let's go! Let's do all the things we've wanted to do."