June 2014 Grants Newsletter by The New York Community Trust

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grants JUNE 2014 NEWSLETTER

Web Education

Volunteer Pros Teach Coding in City Schools | page 3

Questions about setting up a fund in The Trust? Contact Bob Edgar, VP for donor relations, at (212) 686-2564.

new program officer

Arturo Garcia-Costas recently joined The Trust’s grantmaking staff, bringing 20 years’ experience in environmental and sustainability issues. He’s a graduate of the City University of New York as well as Stanford Law School. He has worked for local nonprofits, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Congress, and the United Nations. What drew you to work on environmental issues? My grandfather. He was head of wildlife and natural resources for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Puerto Rico office. During my visits, he’d take me climbing, caving, and snorkeling. In each adventure, he talked about the plants and animals around us. This sparked a lifelong fascination with science and nature. Your first task here was to revise The Trust’s national and New York City environmental grantmaking strategies. What was that like? Like learning to swim by diving into the deep end of the pool: intense and rewarding. The range of issues we’ve addressed through the Henry Phillip Kraft Family Memorial Fund is amazing (see below). From reducing toxic chemicals in consumer products to helping develop offshore wind farms to building successful wildlife

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For 90 years, The Trust has been making donors’ charitable dreams come true by funding the nonprofits that make the City and its suburbs great places to live, work, and play.

corridors, our grants are changing things for the better. Still, developing the strategies crystallized for me the urgency of the environmental challenges we face. The Trust is just one foundation. How can it most effectively address huge environmental challenges? We look for opportunities where a grant to the right organization at the right time can make a difference. For example, we were an early supporter of an effort that got California to ban the use of toxic flame retardants in furniture, forcing manufacturers across the country to redesign their products. And we approach challenges from different angles. Our grants to get toxic chemicals out of consumer products use “market” approaches in addition to policy advocacy, such as work to convince retailers to stop selling products made from unsafe chemicals.

An Inventor’s Imagination, a Daughter’s Dedication In 1922, Henry Phillip Kraft—a businessman and inventor— patented an invention that changed the world. It was a valve that allowed inner tubes to be filled with air. When Kraft’s daughter, Dorothy, died in 1995, she honored him in her will by establishing the Henry Phillip Kraft Family Memorial Fund in The Trust. She had a clear purpose: to protect the national and global environment, but she left The Trust’s program officers to choose which nonprofits would carry out her wishes. Started with gifts totaling about $69

million, the fund has given out $54 million over nearly two decades. It’s now worth more than $89 million. In April, we gave $75,000 to Ecology Center to work with large retailers to phase out toxic chemicals in products, from shampoo to furniture. Another $75,000 went to the University of

California, San Francisco, to educate doctors about the connections between poisonous chemicals and reproductive and children’s health. And $100,000 went to Resources for the Future to create a community flood insurance approach to rescue the bankrupt federal program. “The Kraft Fund shows how we honor a donor’s intent as we work to solve today’s problems,” said Patricia Jenny, vice president of grants. PRESERVING WILDERNESS: A Trust grant funded corridors for migrating wildlife in the Rocky Mountains. Photo by Im me / Creative Commons; (Inset) Henry Kraft’s valve.

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More Grants for STEM Education $40,000 to Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health expands Health Science Academy, a three-year program for minority high school students in Brooklyn. They take college-level courses at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, attend seminars on health careers, and compete for paid research internships at Downstate and community sites.

COVER STORY

Web Pros Teach Teens to Code

$75,000 to New York Academy of Sciences, which recruits scientists to volunteer to teach nanotechnology, robotics, programming, and life sciences in more than 100 classrooms and after-school programs. The academy also will host family science fairs and a robotics competition. CODING: (cover) A volunteer freelance programmer teaches high school students to write a computer program in a course led by our grantee ScriptEd. Photo by Ari Mintz / The Trust HACK IT: (left) ScriptEd students, paired with a mentor from the industry, compete with teens from other schools in a hackathon. Photo by Vaughn Wallace DELIVERED: (below) Students at the Arthur Ashe Health Science Academy take a hands-on approach to learning obstetrics at SUNY Downstate Medical Center.

oftware developers from Google, About.com, and other tech firms in the City are volunteering in 15 high schools in poor neighborhoods to teach HTML, CSS, and Javascript to students. This experiment began in 2012, and early results are, as developers put it, <strong>positive</strong>. The teens say they like the program, and ScriptEd, the nonprofit that runs it, is getting requests to expand to other high schools. Why the demand? Three reasons: A lack of teachers who specialize in computer science (pay is far higher in the private sector than in schools); professionals in this fast-changing field can teach up-todate content; and mentors give teens a direct connection to jobs in the industry. “Our students are thrilled to be taught exactly what they need to know to get a job,” says Maurya Couvares, executive director and co-founder of ScriptEd. This gives students a way to channel their obsession with technology into producing it instead of just using it, she says. The teens take in-school and after-school classes twice a week. They learn programming languages and web applications, go on field trips to technology companies, and shadow software developers at work. They finish by testing their skills in a hackathon and doing paid summer internships. Our $40,000 grant is helping bring ScriptEd to nine more schools.

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June 2014

Do you care about juvenile justice? The

A Better Future for Teen Offenders

ew York is one of only two states where courts still prosecute 16- and 17-year-olds as adults. Studies show that putting young offenders into an adult justice system increases their chances of suffering physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. They also are more likely to commit violent crimes or die by suicide after release. And while many charges against teens are for minor crimes, such as shoplifting or trespassing, criminal records make it more difficult to get jobs and more likely they’ll land back in jail. Trust grants help young people ensnared in the court system (see “Rebuilding My Future”); we’re funding efforts to fix the system, and this work is paying off. Last year, a $200,000 grant to Public Interest Projects helped persuade Governor Andrew Cuomo to create a Commission on Youth, Public Safety, and Justice. Managed by the Vera Institute of Justice, the commission proposes raising the State’s age of criminal responsibility to 18 while making New York’s juvenile and criminal justice systems better serve teen offenders and protect public safety. This year’s grant of $100,000 to the Vera Institute will help these experts make recommendations in time to influence the 2015 State budget.

Recent Grants to Help 16- and 17-Year-Olds in the System Grants totaling $300,000 to the Center for Court Innovation at the Fund for the City of New York provided judges with a new option to put young offenders on a probation and rehabilitation plan, rather than incarceration. $140,000 to Friends of Island Academy helped young people released from Rikers Island make a successful transition to school. $55,000 to Brooklyn Defender Services helped hire a social worker to assist young offenders in getting their lives back on track. ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE LAW: Charles, former teen offender and current Skadden Arps Honors Fellow at CUNY, in front of the criminal division of the New York County Supreme Court. Photo by Ari Mintz / The Trust

ce? The arts? Education? Other issues? Set up a fund. Call Jane Wilton at (212) 686-2563.

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June 2014

New Grants The full list of grants approved at the April board meeting can be found in the Latest News section of our website, nycommunitytrust.org.

OPERA America is using $50,000 to promote its National Opera Center, which offers singers and opera companies Manhattan rehearsal, recording, and performance spaces.

To provide a safety net to cancer patients, our $100,000 grant to New York Legal Assistance Group is opening legal clinics in hospitals; Cancer Care is using $750,000 to help patients get treatment; and $100,000 to God’s Love We Deliver provides meals to cancer patients. (Right, a patient in a Legal Assistance Group video.)

The Trust’s grant to Citizens Committee for New York City last year helped 50 neighborhood groups clean up vacant lots, repair street lights, and improve their blocks in other ways. This year, another $125,000 will benefit New Yorkers who are taking community clean-ups into their own hands.

Members of Queens Center for Gay Seniors demonstrate their connection to one another. The Trust’s $35,000 grant to Queens Community House funds recreational, social, and health programs.

Halting Mercury Contamination

uick quiz: How much mercury ends up in New York’s landfills and waste incinerators every year? Answer: More than a ton. How does it get there? Mostly from discarded household thermostats. The poisonous metal makes its way into air, water, and the fish we eat, putting pregnant women and babies at particular risk. Mercury can cause birth defects, learning disabilities, and other serious health problems in children who are exposed in utero or as infants. For years, manufacturers put mercury in products such as thermostats, thermometers, switches, and measuring devices, and avoided responsibility for their disposal. Thanks to the Multi-State Mercury Products Campaign, this is changing. Using $220,000 from The Trust, the group helped pass laws banning the sale of products containing mercury, leading to a major market shift to safer alternatives.

ort t II,” a rep p The Hea U ute, it g in st In rn u ip ted from “T Product Stewardsh rp e c x e E: Data Council, US WAST s Defense HAZARDO Resource l roject. ra P tu y a N lic by ercury Po M prepared d n a , d ter Fun Clean Wa

Last year, New York joined six other states in passing laws requiring makers of thermostats containing mercury to collect and safely dispose of them. With a $100,000 Trust grant, the campaign will push to enforce these laws and pass mercury-reduction legislation across the Northeast.

What it Really Costs to Live in NYC If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. Of course. But how much does that take? More than you thought: $63,166. That’s what a working parent with a toddler and middle schooler in Brooklyn needs to make ends meet without food stamps, welfare, or help from nonprofits. In Manhattan south of Harlem, the yearly tab rises to $91,552. These figures were calculated with 2010 data using the SelfSufficiency Standard, a method of determining the real cost of living by factoring in housing, child care, food, health care, transportation, and taxes. The standard’s online calculator is used by more than 1,500 caseworkers

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and job counselors in the City so clients can apply for tax credits and other benefits as they try to move out

of poverty. It has been used to make the case for raising the minimum wage. It also is used to target private and public funding for workforce development, educational programs, and other efforts to help millions of New Yorkers. In 2000, The Trust helped bring the standard to the City, and with our new $50,000 grant, the Women’s Center for Education and Career Advancement is updating the data. Merble Reagon, executive director of the Women’s Center, says bolstering the incomes of workingclass families bolsters those around them: “When we put more money in their hands, they spend locally, and it boosts our economy.”

June 2014

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Make your philanthropic dreams come true. This newsletter highlights some of the 58 grants totaling $5.3 million that our board approved in April 2014.

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If you want to start a fund to do the kind of work featured in these pages, contact Jane Wilton, general counsel, at (212) 686-2563; or Bob Edgar, vice president for donor relations, at (212) 686-2564.

Inside: The Real Cost of Living Stopping Mercury Contamination A Better Future for Teen Offenders After moving from place to place, Brooklyn theater St. Annâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Warehouse is building a home nested inside the roofless shell of the Tobacco Warehouse, a centerpiece in the Fulton Ferry Historic District. Our $100,000 grant supports preservation of this Civil War-era structure. Rendering by Rogers Marvel Architects