2025 Community Leader of The Year: Faith Welch
In a community with few young people in leadership roles, Faith Welch stands out. The Greenport High School senior has become a powerful advocate on issues from racial justice to preservation funding — and people listen when she speaks.
As a fourth-generation resident, she has established herself as a community leader — advocating for Community Preservation Funds to be used in Greenport, shedding light on racial profiling and championing Black rights.
Faith won the 2025 Princeton Prize in Race Relations for the New York City metro region for her research into enslavement on the North Fork and advocacy for the Black community. She is active as the youth ambassador for the racial healing group Coming to the Table and was a youth leader for the local Juneteenth celebration.
Her leadership doesn’t stop there. Faith founded and is president of the African American Studies Club at Greenport High School and is a junior scholar at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.
“I understand how it is to be a minority in the school,” she said about starting the club. “A lot of people are embarrassed about their history and their culture, and it’s shunned and not talked about. So, I wanted to make a space where it could be talked about.”
At a joint Greenport Village and Southold Town Board meeting last June 26, Faith shared her personal experience dealing with racial profiling as a young Black teen in Greenport. Her recollection moved some to tears.
“We weren’t walking around, we weren’t bothering anyone,” Faith said at the meeting. “We were standing on the curb doing what anyone who scheduled an Uber would be doing: waiting.”
The police officer who pulled their Uber over — following a call that reported Faith and another Black teen were acting suspiciously in the King Kullen parking lot — took the pair’s IDs, ran some scans and returned with another officer. The two were kind and apologetic, Faith said, “unlike how we were primarily approached.” The officers apologized and acknowledged “how bad this looked.”
“The officer who made the initial stop realized relatively quickly that this was some sort of misunderstanding,” Chief Steven Grattan said in a July 1 phone interview with The Suffolk Times about the ordeal.
The incident is emblematic of a broader issue of perception, Faith said, “where young people of color are automatically seen as a threat even when doing the most normal things.” She urged the Town Board, who serve as police commissioners for Southold Police, and all community members to take racial profiling seriously and ensure that false or biased 911 calls are not treated as unquestioned facts.
“It’s about making sure that the next young person who stands outside of a grocery story doesn’t get criminalized for simply existing,” Faith said.
Councilman Brian Mealy, Town Board liaison to the Anti-Bias Task Force, responded to Faith’s story as a fellow person of color who has been pulled over by local police. He related to her experience and fear in that moment, recalling through tears what his father told him to survive the situation.
“I’m just glad that you survived, and I’m sorry that happened to you,” he said, his voice choked up by emotion.
The experience made her want to research deeper, she told The Times.
Faith has also interned with the Stirling Historical Society of Greenport and Oysterponds Historical Society where she explored the origins of a dollhouse with historical connections to local enslaved people and the family who enslaved them.
For her advocacy and unwavering spirit, Faith Welch is The Suffolk Times’ 2025 Community Leader of The Year.
Previous Winners
*The award was previously called Civic Person of the Year
2024: Paul Drum Life Experience Project
2023: Lori Panarello
2022: Rena Wilhelm
2021: Rev. Natalie Wimberly
2020: Kenny Black
2019: Cathy Demeroto
2018: Rev. Dr. Ann Van Cleef
2017: Mindy Ryan
2016: Valerie Shelby and Sonia Spar
2015: Don Fisher
2014: Designer show house organizers
2013: Ron and Doris McGreevy
2012: Group for the East End
2011: American Legion Post restoration volunteers
2010: Peggy Murphy
2009: North Fork Community Theater
2008: Lori Luscher
2007: Committee for Phil McKnight
2006: Relay for Life organizers
2005: Merle Levine
2004: Christine Roache
2003: Barbara Taylor
2002: Kim Tetrault
2001: Elinor May
2000: Mark Miller
1999: George Hubbard Sr.
1998: Ed Siegmann
1997: Freddie Wachsberger
1996: Shelley Scoggin
1995: Craig Richter
1994: Stewardship Task Force
1993: Walt Krupski
1992: The Eklunds
1991: Bill Grigonis
1990: Merlon Wiggin
1989: Jeanne Marriner
1988: Ray Nine
1987: Bessie Swann
