February 2012 Grants Newsletter

Making your giving matter more... since 1924 February 2012 NEWSLETTER

GRANTS

You know that good feeling you get when you help make things better?

This newsletter looks at grants that were made possible in large part by generous New Yorkers who wanted to make a difference—and set up endowed funds with us. To find out how you can leave your own legacy, contact our general counsel, Jane Wilton at (212) 686–2563 or janewilton@nyct-cfi.org.

Helping the City Help Its Veterans

“W TABLE OF CONTENTS 3 Toward a New Horizon in Social Work 5 Queens Spotlight 6 Other Grants

hile in Iraq as a member of the “Fighting 69th” Infantry Regiment, Efrain Diaz watched his friends get blown up yards away. When he returned to New York, he did his best to find work and got two part-time jobs. But then his mother fell ill and needed 24-hour care,” starts Coco Culhane, director of the Veteran Advocacy Project at the Urban Justice Center. “He moved back into the public housing unit he grew up in to take care of her and applied to be re-added to the household, but was told he could only have temporary status. Time and again he tried to get approved permanently, but with no success. After his mother’s death nearly two years later, he finally sought

Efrain Diaz, a veteran who fought in Iraq, is now fighting to keep his home with help from attorney Coco Culhane, director of the Veteran Advocacy Project at the Urban Justice Center, which is supported by a $50,000 grant.

“If the NYC Veterans Fund is able to organize this committed community and focus our efforts efficiently, I have no doubt we’ll be able to make our City a better place to live for veterans and their families.”— Len McNally, program director at The Trust

support for what he would learn was post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Then the New York City Housing Authority began eviction proceedings, claiming he had not lived in the apartment the requisite 12 months as an authorized tenant and thus had no succession right.”

Last year, the Urban Justice Center began providing legal help to veterans. A grant of $50,000 is helping vets with PTSD, depression, and other problems. But this program—and our grants—can’t reach all those who need services.

Adjusting to life back in New York City can be extremely hard for veterans. Services are difficult to get and don’t take into account the complex and changing needs of vets. For instance, many are National Guard members who had never been deployed overseas, but have now served several tours and can’t find work. Some are women who have been sexually traumatized while serving. And while a fast-track to citizenship may have been an incentive used at the recruiting office, it’s up to immigrant soldiers to deal with the red tape and paperwork. A single veteran may need mental health care for PTSD, physical therapy for injuries, family counseling, and career training. He may also need help with problems that plague many other low-income New Yorkers, such as finding housing or dealing with debt— problems that may have been exacerbated by the time away.

To get help, returning vets must juggle working with the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), two state agencies, the City Department of Veterans Affairs, VA hospitals, community Vet Centers, and nonprofit agencies. Some nonprofits have begun to offer services with government and foundation support, but there is no central coordinator for all of these services.

That is why, with the encouragement of City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, we started the New York City Veterans Fund with a grant of $150,000. While still taking form, the Fund’s advisory committee will eventually comprise foundation representatives, public

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officials, veterans’ advocates, and nonprofits to ensure that money goes to fill the most important gaps in services.

“Through our inquiries, we have found that many foundations, agencies, and individuals care deeply about the future of our veterans and are eager to work together,” says Len McNally, program director at The Trust. “If the NYC Veterans Fund is able to organize this committed community and focus our efforts efficiently, I have no doubt we’ll be able to make our City a better place to live for veterans and their families.”

Legal Advocates for Veterans In addition to the grants above, The Trust is supporting the Veterans Assistance Project of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York Fund for the fourth consecutive year with a $35,000 grant. The program trains lawyers to provide pro bono help to vets dealing with the VA’s onerous disability claims process. “A veteran who is now suffering due to exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam may need help connecting his health problems now to his service 35 years ago,” says Rob Gingher, a patent attorney with Dickstein Shapiro, who both instructs other lawyers and works with vets at the Bar’s clinic. Gingher, who served for six years as a Naval officer, can relate to the vets he helps. “I know exactly what’s on a Form DD214, because I’ve got one, too.” He enjoys the work because “there is nothing greater than being able to help someone who really deserves to be helped.”

With poverty at the heart of many vets’ challenges, a $100,000 grant will help Legal Services NYC start a new Veterans Justice Project. It will work with veterans groups in all five boroughs to provide help getting health, disability, and other government benefits. The group’s lawyers will also help with housing, employment, family law, and other legal issues veterans face. In addition, the Project will train staff at several immigrant-serving groups throughout the five boroughs, such as the MinKwon Center for Community Action and El Centro Del Inmigrante, to identify immigrants eligible for military service benefits, including expedited citizenship.

Toward a New Horizon in Social Work Fed by a dissolving middle class, the disappearance of good jobs, and systems stacked against the have-nots, poverty and its web of troubles are thriving in the U.S. Those who want to end the suffering often become social workers.

Supervised graduate students from NYU’s Silver School of Social Work provide guidance to families and conduct research. A $78,000 grant will enable the school to develop better ways to help survivors of domestic abuse gain independence.

But our world is changing faster than the field, and services are not keeping up. Drug addiction, lack of affordable housing, family violence, and diminishing job opportunities continue, but their faces, situations, and solutions have changed. According to the 2010 Census and other studies, the poor and the elderly compose an ever greater share of social work clients. Foreclosed homeowners are fighting homelessness. More immigrants need help, and in a language they understand. Recidivism remains high, as men and women are released from prison to communities ill-equipped to help them get back on their feet.

Social work gets the lion’s share of its funding from government, much of it for clinical work that emphasizes low-cost, safe, but sometimes outdated, approaches.

With funding concentrated in direct service provision, the “macro” practice of social work—improving systems that affect society or communities—gets short shrift.

Developing leaders and managers of institutions that help the poor needs to become a priority, as does the use of field research in policy development and school curricula.

The New Social Work Strategy With four charitable funds that support social work, The Trust now has $1.2 million a year for grants, an amount that impelled us to determine a plan for its use.

We decided to focus on improving social work research, education, and practice in those neglected areas. (Read more about the funds on pg. 4.)

“The Trust’s new strategy will help lead the way for the next generation of social workers,” says Jacqueline Mondros, dean of the Lois and Samuel Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College. “It will help us push the envelope on what we should be studying and researching, and help translate what we learn into action.

It will allow social work to take the necessary steps to be strategic as we move into the next 50 years. There have been enormous changes and the profession alone doesn’t have the resources to keep up with them.”

Four December grants reflect the new strategy.

Building Evidence “Women who enter domestic violence shelters bring with them the trauma of violence and long-term poverty.

They are often stuck where they are because they don’t have the money, support, or confidence to leave and start over,” says Pat White, program director at The Trust. A $78,000 grant to New York University’s Silver School of Social Work will fund a new approach to helping these women. The school will work with the Jewish Board for Family and Children Services to test a jobreadiness model for women in four domestic violence residences.

“Unlike most other job-readiness programs, this program addresses the psychological dimensions of women making the transition to work and managing money, particularly the continuing effect of traumatic abuse. We know that financial independence is a key factor in helping women leave abusive relationships,” says Lynn Videka, dean of the Silver School of Social

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Four Funds United by a Cause

Work. Women in the 20-week program will work on developing their network of family, friends, and other supporters who can help them improve their lives.

Videka continues, “The solid research approach is also important because it will gather evidence about the program’s impact as well as women’s experiences moving into work.”

Innovating in the Classroom More women are being sent to prison and being incarcerated repeatedly, but there is no empirical curriculum in social work schools that teaches students to help women stay out of prison. A two-year $134,000 grant to Hunter College’s Silberman School of Social Work will help figure out what works and what doesn’t.

The school will work with Greenhope, a temporary residence and treatment program for women released from prison, to assess when and why many women end up back in jail. The research findings will be published and used to improve practice at the agency and develop course work at the school.

This grant will also fund a study to build a curriculum for helping the City’s racially diverse elderly, who are living longer—but with chronic illnesses—and who can be cared for at home. Faculty at the school will interview experts in geriatrics and talk with clients about their needs. The study will also determine how social workers can work with professionals in other disciplines to better serve an aging New York.

Creating a “Macro” Workforce Catholic University of America, National Catholic School of Social Service, $27,000 to catalogue and assess licensing requirements for macro social work practitioners—those who seek to improve systems and communities based on caseworkers’ understanding of their clients’ needs.

Yeshiva University, Wurzweiler School of Social Work, $57,000 to understand and deal with families’ resistance to getting follow-up testing for newborns with possible hearing impairments.

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Harriett M. Bartlett Fund, established 1987 Harriett Bartlett dedicated her scholarly career to turning the art of social work into a science. She wrote, among other books, The Common Base of Social Work Practice. In her will, she established a fund in The Trust to “strengthen the contribution which social workers and the social work profession can make to people and to society.” The Trust has used this fund to help improve the City’s child welfare system and hospital discharge planning. Most recently, to help families face problems brought on by the recession, grants totaling $287,000 from the fund are helping eight of the City’s schools of social work add financial literacy to their course work.

Fahs-Beck Fund, established 1986 This fund was set up to support graduate research and scholarships with the guidance of an advisory committee of experienced social work professionals. More than $1.3 million in grants have been made to schools around the country for studies on therapeutic intervention, language development in children, and other topics.

Robert & Ellen Popper Scholarship Fund, established 2010 Robert Popper was a civil rights activist, chairman of the New York State Office for the Aging, and a Bloomingdales heir.

Ellen Popper was a founder of the Animal Welfare League of Westchester. In her will, she created a fund to provide graduate and undergraduate scholarships to social work students with a particular interest in health care.

Lois & Samuel Silberman Grant Fund, established 1992 Believing that social workers are uniquely equipped to help poor people better manage their lives, the Silbermans have been one of the field’s biggest champions. To help low-income students get an affordable education and ultimately go to work in their neighborhoods, they donated a building to CUNY for a public school of social work in the ’70s. When it no longer met the needs of its students and faculty, Lois Silberman worked with The Trust to build a new home for the Silberman School of Social Work in East Harlem. A second Silberman fund in The Trust supports research and policy work of social work faculty nationally.

Queens Spotlight Reproductive Health Stays Local, Even if Funding Goes

Where Can Teens Find a Safe Space in Jamaica?

Birth control can mean the difference between becoming a mom at 16 or having a career. Preventing sexually transmitted disease and getting prenatal care can mean the difference between a healthy family and one riddled with preventable disease. Reproductive care clinics provide all this and more, but their financial solvency is in serious jeopardy.

Clinics across the country that serve poor and increasingly uninsured women are hemorrhaging money as their primary source of funding, the federal Title X program, was cut 5 percent last year, with deeper cuts expected this year.

When home is filled with anger, stress, and violence, young people look for an out. In Jamaica, where the number of single-parent households, unemployed youth, child abuse, and teens having kids top the charts, young people need all the help they can get. In order to help them overcome social, academic, and mental health obstacles, Safe Space runs a drop-in center at its headquarters in downtown Jamaica as well as neighborhood sites and a residential center for youth.

Public Health Solutions (PHS), the City’s largest provider of publicly funded reproductive health services for young women, operates six clinics serving 18,000 women in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. Title X cuts have already forced it to freeze wages and consolidate two of its centers, but it has become clear that more needs to be done.

“Public Health Solutions made the courageous decision to transfer operation of three of its six clinics to the Community Healthcare Network, a federally qualified health center, which means more stable funding sources due to the range of medical services it provides,” says Joyce Bove, senior vice president for grants and special projects at The Trust.

A grant of $100,000 to PHS will help it transfer the operations of the three clinics, integrating both providers’ electronic medical records systems to assure that clients get continuous care. Most of the multi-lingual staff will make the move and all three centers’ services will add adult and pediatric primary care. The grant will also help PHS to plan for its three remaining women’s health clinics in Brooklyn.

“This is a win-win solution,” says Ellen Rautenberg, executive director of PHS. “The health clinics will be solvent again, and women will actually have more medical services available to them.” With Title X funding under constant attack in Congress, Rautenberg notes that these transfers are being looked to as a possible model for other women’s health clinics in jeopardy across the country.

A $120,000 grant will help the group hire a youth specialist to run two new, six-week leadership courses.

A college-prep workshop will use college students to mentor younger teens through the college and financialaid application process. A second financial literacy workshop will cover avoiding credit card debt, managing money, and starting savings accounts. The grant will also help hire a social worker to teach distressed teens how to date safely, deal with problems at home, improve selfconfidence, and control anger. Teens with serious mental health problems will be referred to the agency’s on-site mental health clinic.

Other Grants Helping Queens Families Ocean Bay Community Development Corporation, $40,000 to help public housing residents in Far Rockaway find jobs and apply for tax credits and refunds.

Northwestern Queens Financial Education Network, $70,000 to coordinate financial education and counseling services for immigrants in Astoria, Long Island City, and Jackson Heights.

Center for Family Representation, $100,000 to keep immigrant families together by providing legal and social services to those involved in child protective proceedings in Queens.

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Other Grants

Housing Conservation Coordinators, $40,000 to provide financial and legal assistance to limited equity cooperatives in Clinton.

A Voice for Struggling New Yorkers

Make the Road New York, $40,000 to involve poor residents in advocacy to improve living conditions and enforce rent regulations and housing codes in Bushwick, Brooklyn; Jackson Heights, Queens; and Richmond, Staten Island.

Community Service Society of New York, $75,000 to produce and distribute the tenth edition of The Unheard Third, a report that chronicles the concerns and views of poor New Yorkers.

Neighborhood Coalition for Shelter, $150,000 to provide overnight shelter, food, and counseling at two churches for individuals sleeping on church steps on the Upper East Side.

New Yorkers for Children, $89,000 to help teen mothers served by the discontinued Teenage Services Act Program throughout the City get educational, health, and child abuse prevention services from other agencies in their neighborhoods.

Neighborhood Initiatives Development Corporation, $40,000 to improve living conditions, prevent evictions, and conduct financial literacy courses in Soundview, Bronx.

Richmond Senior Services, $40,000 to help elderly residents on Staten Island get housing subsidies and benefits.

Staten Island Economic Development Corporation, $40,000 for a community service internship and employment program.

Staten Island Mental Health Society, $80,000 for life-coaching, crisis, and in-home counseling for addicted youth, and for rehabilitated youth to counsel groups of 10- to 14-year olds on avoiding addiction.

Transforming the Urban Environment

Financial Counseling for Families in Homeless Shelters

New Partners for Community Revitalization, $50,000 for a coordinator to work with 17 groups to accelerate the redevelopment of brownfields.

Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, $92,000 to hire a financial counselor to help homeless families in seven shelters in Bed-Stuy, Brownsville, and Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

Phipps Community Development Corporation, $95,000 to hire a bilingual financial counselor to advise homeless families in seven shelters in the south and central Bronx.

Bolstering Children’s Development

Columbia University, Mailman School of Public Health, $149,000 to work with the NYC Early Childhood Professional Development Institute to develop an improved training and career development program for teachers in publicly funded day care programs.

Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, $75,000 to expand a program in the Bronx County family court that improves the parenting skills of those whose infants and toddlers may enter or are already in foster care, and help the court handle these cases effectively.

Improving Employment Opportunities and Housing in NYC Neighborhoods

Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, $40,000 for job training, internships, employment, and benefits assistance.

Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation, $40,000 for career counseling, GED-prep classes, job training, and employment services for young adults.

East Side House Settlement, $40,000 for legal counseling and services for local entrepreneurs and small businesses in the Bronx.

Erasmus Neighborhood Federation, $40,000 to strengthen small businesses in Brooklyn through promotional events, management services and workshops, and individual assistance.

Flatbush Development Corporation, $40,000 to provide housing services and benefits counseling for people who rely on food pantries and soup kitchens.

Good Old Lower East Side, $40,000 for benefits counseling and employment services.

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Freshkills Park Alliance, $25,000 to develop recommendations for recreational, cultural, educational, and fundraising objectives for this new park conservancy.

New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, $30,000 to protect the City’s waterfront from storm-caused contamination.

Urban Garden Connections of New York City, $25,000 to create governance and fundraising operations for the 32 gardens in the Bronx and Manhattan Land Trusts.

Good Jobs for New Yorkers

Upwardly Global, $65,000 to help skilled immigrants fill health care jobs that are in demand, including licensed practical nurses and radiology technologists.

Women’s Initiative for Self Employment, $90,000 for a training program that prepares disadvantaged young women to open new businesses.

Workforce Development Corporation, $150,000 to coordinate the New York Alliance for Careers in Healthcare, a Trust initiative to expand health careers for disadvantaged workers.

Arts and Culture

Apollo Theater Foundation, $50,000 for a joint promotional campaign for Harlem Jazz Shrines 2012, dance and music performances at Harlem Stage, the Apollo, and Jazzmobile’s summer concerts at Grant’s Tomb.

Career Transition for Dancers, $35,000 to help retiring dancers plan for second careers.

Hive Digital Media Learning Fund, $200,000 for a joint grantmaking program to promote hands-on learning and critical thinking for teens through digital media.

New York Live Arts, $60,000 to strengthen this new dance group, a result of the merger of Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and Dance Theater Workshop.

New York Naturally Occurring Cultural District Working Group, $50,000 to conduct and coordinate research and advocacy for neighborhoods where artists live and work together, and promote their collective creativity.

Education

Arts Horizons, $25,000 to expand a program for disabled and chronically ill students that will bring visiting artists to five hospital schools.

Kids Orbit, $175,000 to work with GirlSmart to provide daily literacy instruction to girls in pre-school, kindergarten, and first grade in Farragut and Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.

Learning Through an Expanded Arts Program, $30,000 to improve the literacy skills of 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders in eight elementary schools through auditory, tactile, visual, and other interactive methods.

Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility, $50,000 to help 10 principals in Brooklyn and the Bronx improve their schools through workshops on building social and emotional skills.

New York Hall of Science, $50,000 for a distance-learning program that enables chronically ill, hospitalized, and homebound students to share their experiments and compare notes through video chat.

Shinnecock Indian Nation Fund, $45,000 to help teenage and pre-teen boys living on the Shinnecock Reservation avoid selfdestructive behavior, graduate from high school, and go on to college or a skilled trade.

Standing Up for Human Justice

Lesbian and Gay Law Association Foundation of Greater New York, $40,000 for legal help at sites in Brooklyn and Manhattan, including advice about marriage.

New York Legal Assistance Group, $75,000 to represent immigrants who have been victims of fraud in their attempts to gain U.S. residency and citizenship.

Better Health Care for Those in Need

Enrichment Audio Resource Services, $45,000 to advertise and update free downloadable CDs for elders with significant vision loss on simple ways to manage daily tasks.

Institute for Family Health, $95,000 to determine if electronic medical records improve the care of people with heart disease who also have mental health and substance-abuse problems.

League Treatment Center, $37,000 to help autistic children with speech defects and behavioral problems.

Maimonides Medical Center, $85,000 to use electronic medical records to improve the care of patients with mental illness.

Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, $160,000 to help poor and uninsured immigrants with cancer get treatment, transportation to medical visits, and manage other health problems.

Mount Sinai Medical Center, $75,000 to hire an additional doctor to work full-time in the hospital’s clinic for poor and uninsured adolescents.

United Hospital Fund of New York, $75,000 to expand a program that reduces medical errors that lead to bacterial infections acquired in hospitals.

Visiting Nurse Service of New York, $120,000 to train home health aides to provide better post-hospital physical rehabilitation to chronically ill elders.

Khaleel, a student from P256 in Far Rockaway, Queens, demonstrates his winning project to staff and judges at Emoti-Con 2011, the City’s technology and digital media festival for youth. This year, a $200,000 grant from the HIVE Digital Media Learning Fund will support several programs of groups working at the intersection of technology and learning, including MOUSE’s Emoti-Con 2012.

Blood Disease Research

The Francis Florio Fund in The Trust supports research into blood diseases. An advisory board of hematologists reviews proposals annually and has recommended the following grants to support studies of blood cancers and anemia.

• Columbia University, College of Physicians and Surgeons, $100,000 • Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, $100,000 • New Jersey Medical School, $100,000 • New York University School of Medicine, $100,000 • Rockefeller University, $100,000 Medical Research

Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, $124,000 to research bone cancer in children.

Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research, $125,000 to investigate the effect of various medications on lysosomes and organelles on the breakdown of Alzheimer’s-related plaques.

Joan and Sanford I. Weill Medical College of Cornell University, $125,000 for a study to determine if a special type of immune cell has the ability to prevent or destroy Alzheimer’srelated plaques.

Joan and Sanford I. Weill Medical College of Cornell University, $100,000 to study a new treatment for brain cancer in children.

Other Grants

Food Bank for New York City, $63,000 to expand a program to distribute pet food to needy animal owners who might otherwise abandon them to the streets.

Medgar Evers College of CUNY, $50,000 to coordinate advocacy on the redistricting process.

New York Landmarks Conservancy, $100,000 for emergency repairs of historic buildings owned by nonprofit organizations.

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February 2012 NEWSLETTER

Inside: Helping the City Help Its Veterans, A New Horizon in Social Work, Queens Spotlight, and More...

GRANTS

Nonprofit Org. U.S. Postage PAID Permit No. 5013 New York, NY

The grants described in this issue were approved by The New York Community Trust’s governing body at its December 2011 meeting.

For grantee contact information, or for more information about the grants, please call The Trust’s receptionist at 212.686.0010, ext. 0.

This issue and past newsletters can be found at www.nycommunitytrust.org.

If you’d prefer to receive our newsletter by e-mail, write to newsletter@nyct-cfi.org.

A 2,200-acre former landfill, Freshkills Park is being transformed into a Staten Island destination that will offer horseback riding, kayaking, running trails, and picnic areas. A $25,000 grant is helping the park’s new conservancy plan for the future.

Most of the grants in our newsletter are made possible through the generosity of past donors who established permanent, charitable funds with us during their lifetimes or through their wills. To learn more about setting up a fund, please contact our general counsel, Jane Wilton, at 212.686.2563.