Executive Director, Project HIP-HOP

Mariama White-Hammond was born and raised in Boston, MA. Having been involved with Project HIP-HOP (Highways Into the Past - History, Organizing, and Power) throughout high school and college, Mariama became its Executive Director in September 2001. Mariama has received a certificate in youth work through the B.E.S.T. Initiative Youth Worker Training and a certificate in trauma response from the Children's Trauma Recovery Foundation. For her work at Project HIP-HOP, she received the 2004 Roxbury Founder's Day Award and along with youth at PHH received the 2005 Boston Celtics "Heroes Among Us" Award. Mariama is also involved with a number of other organizations in Boston including the South End / Lower Roxbury Youthworkers Alliance.

When Project HIP-HOP began in 1993, activists Nancy Murray, Pam Ellis, and Bill Batson were tired of going to rallies and other social justice events and seeing children of the1960s but almost no people under the age of 30. All of them had been doing anti-racism work in some capacity and felt that the heavy emphasis on diversity and interpersonal racism often failed to raise issues of institutional racism. Recognizing that many American young people born in the 1980s and 1990s were not taught about institutional racism and had very little context for social justice movements, Project HIP-HOP's founders decided to connect Greater Boston-area young people with the living history of the Civil Rights Movement in order to inspire them to fight racism by building their own movements. In September 2001 Project HIP-HOP became an independent youth-led organization that focuses on leadership development through youth organizing.

Mariama majored in International Relations at Stanford University and is fluent in Spanish. Ms. White-Hammond is an active member of the Boston nonprofit community, serving as the Chair of the Critical Breakdown Steering Committee and as a board member of the South End/ Lower Roxbury Youth Workers Alliance, the Union of Minority Neighborhoods and Urban Edge. She has been chosen numerous times to be a young leader on Boston's City-to-City Exchange. She has also received awards from the Boston City Council, Channel 56 Unsung Heroes, The Roxbury History and Cultural Collaborative, and The Boston Celtics.