NYCT AR2009_final.pdf - The New York Community Trust

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Trust’s board approved $7 million in
safety net grants in early 2009 to eight
seasoned agencies that we were confident
would effectively distribute services and
cash to the maximum number of people.
And in April, we made grants to nonprofit
management consulting groups to help
agencies that had lost public and private
funding, and were struggling themselves.
consequences of the recession have been
drastic in New York’s poorer communities,
where the same people facing lost jobs and
Preserving
community:
Nellie Lopez and Terise
Haines sit under dinosaur
mobiles made by Ms.
Haines and her class of
4-year-olds at the Hudson
Guild, a member of United
Neighborhood Houses.
In the next few pages, you’ll read about
some of their work—and what they
accomplished.
Stocking the Pantries
How to feed more hungry people
Groups that feed hungry New Yorkers
started 2009 with a double whammy:
steep declines in contributions and a rapid
rise in the number of families needing
help.
City Harvest is the country’s first and New
York’s only food rescue organization. It
collects tons of donated fresh fruits and
vegetables and distributes it through a
network of feeding programs; it also runs
mobile food markets and nutrition classes
in poor neighborhoods. “The
wages are often those most likely to suffer
from diet-related diseases like obesity and
diabetes,” says Jilly Stephens, the executive
director of City Harvest. Last year, many
of its feeding programs had to turn away
hungry people; others were feeding an
additional 4,000 each month. City
Harvest was getting the produce; it just
didn’t have the resources to get it out to
the programs. Our $200,000 grant got a
lot of bang for the buck.
Stephens continues: “With The Trust
grant, we were able to identify pockets of
extremely high demand for emergency
food and send four million additional
pounds of produce to agencies with the
capacity to move more fresh food. As a
result, these programs were able to keep