Posted on October 7, 2009

New York Community Trust Announces Results of Safety Net Grants

The New York Community Trust has announced the results of grants made earlier this year to organizations working to assist people hardest hit by the recession.

In February, the trust announced more than $8.7 million in grants to organizations working to provide food, emergency loans, financial counseling, and medical and legal services to those in need. By July, according to the trust, the nonprofits involved had achieved significant results. For example, a $1.5 million grant to the Food Bank for New York City increased the amount of food distributed by the organization to 181 pantries from 52 million pounds to 60 million pounds, an increase of 15 percent. Similarly, a grant of $275,000 to City Harvest enabled that organization to deliver an additional 1.6 million pounds of food to 69 emergency feeding programs in four boroughs, an increase of 17 percent. And a $1.2 million grant to the Legal Aid Society allowed that organization to open a total of six thousand new cases involving poor people with problems related to unemployment, housing, public benefits, tax and consumer debt, and bankruptcy.

"We knew that people were suffering and that we needed to adapt our grantmaking," said NYCT president Lorie A. Slutsky. "Our aim was to get a substantial amount of money out early in the year to nonprofits that we knew would make effective use of it. The numbers speak for themselves."