Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. WNYC isn't the only organization celebrating its 100th birthday in New York City this year. One of our fellow centenarians is the New York Community Trust, a non-profit that's been supporting doing good since 1924. To find out more about their work and what it shows about the city's history and what comes next, and they have something that you can vote on, which is one of the reasons that we're doing this, that might determine where some of their grant money goes next.

I'm joined by Amy Freitag, the president of the trust. Welcome to WNYC. Congratulations on your organization's longevity.

Amy Freitag: Oh, thank you, Brian. What a treat to be with you this morning. Thank you so much.

Brian Lehrer: I will say by way of full disclosure that the New York Community Trust has at times supported WNYC. Let's start with just an explanation of how the New York Community Trust works. Is it a way for people to leave an endowment to a cause they support, so individuals leave money through the trust to things that they would like to see it go to?

Amy Freitag: Absolutely. Look, it's one of the greatest institutions of New York. I say that with all deference to the wonderful friends we have at WNYC, but the New York Community Trust is this extraordinary gathering of generations of generous New Yorkers. We have both hundreds of bequests that have been left to the betterment of New York and then hundreds and hundreds of living donors, and together they come together at the New York Community Trust where we help connect them with our highest impact non-profits.

I like to say that the New York Community Trust is like this crazy quilt of generosity that has been building over 100 years, and each one of our patches is a generous act of an individual donor. We sew those together to create some really extraordinary support for our non-profit community, and that's what we're celebrating for our centennial.

Brian Lehrer: How specific can people get in what they want to support?

Amy Freitag: Oh, Brian, we have some people that have been very specific. We literally have a permanent fund for aging injured ballerinas so they can have physical therapy.

Brian Lehrer: Whoa. A dedicated fund for aging and injured ballerinas.

Amy Freitag: Exactly. We also have some various generous funds that are for the betterment of New York, and that really allows our grantmakers to hit the ground and really find out through their various deep connections with the subject areas that we fund to find the really most pressing needs at any given moment. We give out about $200 million in grants every year. About 50 of those, 50 million go out from those permanent and endowed funds, and then about 150 million that goes out from living donor advisors. It's a pretty remarkable combination of history and present that make us such an impactful partner for our non-profits.

Brian Lehrer: You have another geeky, obscure, but wonderful one like the one for injured and needy ballerinas?

Amy Freitag: I tell you, we do. What I love about this is that it's a place-- The community foundation is this beautiful creation of American philanthropy that goes back-- I mean, we are all modeled, believe it or not, on the Cleveland Foundation that was created about 110 years ago. The idea was that all of the banks of the city were holding these charitable bequests, and the bank's really good at investing the money, but they didn't really know how to make the grants. That was the original origin story of the New York Community Trust.

Over the years, we've created a more traditional endowment where individuals can come to us with all kinds of passions and interests that they want to fund either in their lifetimes or long after. We have funds, for example, one of my favorite, Brian, is from Harry Rogers, who was a cab driver for 40 years in New York and left us a fund to plant trees in all five boroughs, which I just think is the most poetic thing after maybe putting a little bit of carbon in the air over those four decades, he's now absorbing carbon and will forever. The Harry Rogers Fund is one of my favorites at the trust.

Brian Lehrer: That's very sweet. As you celebrate the organization's centennial, I see you're asking the public to weigh in on your future in two ways. We're going to name some nominees for something that I think our listeners will find interesting, but tell us about your two requests.

Amy Freitag: The first request is people go to our website at www.theneworktrust.org/ourvotes, or anywhere on our centennial site, you'll see where you can click on voting. When I said that we have $50 million of grants that we put out from our permanent endowed funds each year, about three quarters of those have been fairly well defined by our donors. They might say it's for cancer research, and we get to determine what at that moment is the right cancer research, but really only about a quarter of the grants we get to make every year are completely unrestricted.

You can imagine that there are so many demands for those unrestricted funds. What we're asking New Yorkers to do is to vote on how you want us to spend $3 million of those unrestricted funds in the year 2025. You can vote on a number of different issue areas, affordable housing, non-profit resilience, workforce development, job creation, mental and behavioral health. We're eager for every New Yorker to go onto that website and click on the areas that they want us to focus on in 2025.

I think this is really our vision for the next century of service, is to be really listening to the community and really hearing from them on how they want us to really focus our resources and to find partnership with those donors.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we're going to let you do a little bit of that here for the sake of meaningful conversation and maybe to actually inform the New York Community Trust on where to spend some of their grant money. Maybe, listeners, before you fill out your form at thenytrust.org with your nominations, call up right now and tell us what monetary support would make our communities better places to live, work, and play. That's how they put it. What kinds of causes that they should support would "Make our communities better places to live, work and play"?

There's only one rule, you can't mention WNYC. Too self-interested. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. What comes to mind? Call or text if anything does. I'm looking at your webpage here, and I'm not sure I understand exactly if I'm looking at the categories right, but I'm going to go through some of these. You tell me if these are the major categories that you have as nominees. One is called Breaking Cycles of Harm and Incarceration for Young New Yorkers. Yes?

Amy Freitag: Definitely. Yes.

Brian Lehrer: Another one is towards resilience, climate change and coastal communities. That's a category?

Amy Freitag: Well, yes. There's a number of things that especially Brian, as you know, over this past 24 months as we've been welcoming this next generation of our newest New Yorkers, when you have that kind of demand on those unrestricted dollars, we really think that hearing from-- that has to compete against decarceration or trying to break those cycles of harm against our-- especially our youngest New Yorkers. Democracy, mental and behavioral health, non-profit resilience, which is just helping our non-profits weather particularly this post-Covid moment, affordable housing, workforce.

These are those demands that really hit us on those unrestricted funds every year. That's where we'd love guidance from our listeners and from all New Yorkers, honestly, to click in and make-- There's an opportunity to vote on which of those categories you'd like us to focus most on in 2025, and then after you vote, there's an opportunity for you to just share your vision for New York. What would you like to see change in the years and decades ahead? That gives us the longer view of how we should be thinking about our grant-making.

The voting is specifically about our 2025 grant-making, and your vision can be expansive. It can go beyond 2025, the things that you'd really love, and if they're not listed in that group of things that you voted for, tell us what your passion is.

Brian Lehrer: I mean, at the same time that it's a privilege to have this money to distribute to causes that you designate, it must make your head explode. How do we pit affordable housing-- Now I have the concise list. It's affordable housing, non-profit resilience, workforce development, mental and behavioral health, decarceration, democracy, and immigration. Does it make your head explode when you say, well, we have to either give more money to democracy or to affordable housing or to workforce development? How do you go about it?

Amy Freitag: [laughs] Well, luckily, I am surrounded by the most extraordinary team at the New York Community Trust, and we have really, I would like to say, some of the most skilled grant-makers in the city. It is challenging. I like to say there isn't an issue area across the eight counties we serve, because, Brian, we are Westchester to the east end of Long Island, eight counties, home to just 12.4 million New Yorkers, so there is a myriad issues. I'm going to tell you, and no one's yet proven me wrong on this, across this hundred years, there's not an issue area we haven't touched in some way, shape, or form.

I like to say we do from cats to cancer, from climate to culture, we do it all. Yes, those are always competing demands, but when you work with this very talented group of grant-makers, I think they're particularly smart at ways that the trust can really take the long view and go after some really tough systemic issues. The most recent example that I absolutely love is a decade worth of grant-making we did around children's reading in New York City public schools.

We were blessed by the attorney general to have $50 million of Brooke Astor's estate to put towards that cause. We really thought hard about it, and the attorney general wanted us to give a lot of direct grants to people that were tutoring, but we said, "Why don't we take some of that money and study the problem? Let's do some research, let's do some advocacy, let's do some policy work, and over a decade, we're very proud to see many of our grantees were so impactful when the DOE switched the reading curriculum over two years ago.

Then, ultimately, Kathy Hochul signed a new reading curriculum into New York State. We're talking about millions of children that were impacted over a long and hard fought campaign to really understand what it means to get kids reading on grade level in New York.

It's those kinds of long duration projects that the trust really specializes in and does incredible work, as we do, quite frankly, in moments of emergency, whether it was after 9/11 when we worked with the United Way to put a half a billion dollars to work for recovery for the city or most recently in Covid when we worked with generous foundations and individuals to put $80 million of grant-making to work just in weeks after the city and state's closures.

In moments of crisis, but in those long and steady ways, the New York Community Trust has been a real quiet and important force in New York City and the eight counties we serve.

Brian Lehrer: My guest is Amy Freitag, president of the New York Community Trust, which like WNYC is celebrating its centennial this year. For those of you who just joined us and didn't hear the premise at the beginning, they are actually taking nominations from the public on what kinds of causes their grant money would best "Make our communities better places to live, work, and play".

You can put that into, let me get it, their website at nytrust.org, but we're also taking a few on the phones right now, so let's do that. Here's Sharon in Queens. You're on WNYC. Hi, Sharon.

Amy Freitag: Hey, Sharon.

Sharon: Hi. Hi. I think we should have affordable programs that provide care for older adults so they don't have to go into nursing homes and they can live safely in their community. They're called PACE programs, all-inclusive care for elderly so we can forestall them going. I see so many seniors, my friends, when they lose the income of their husband or significant other, they're thrown into a poverty and they can't afford housing, and they also need services.

I think that would be good, affordable housing or PACE programs for the elderly to help them transition into the [inaudible 00:14:03] of their life.

Brian Lehrer: Sharon, thank you very much. By the way, I think I slightly misstated the Community Trust's website. It's thenytrust.org, thenytrust.org. Do you have anything like what Sharon lays out already?

Amy Freitag: Well, it's something we're passionate about, Brian. One of the things I'm most proud of working at the New York Community Trust is that we're one of the largest donors in the region focusing on folks with disability, which is not what Sharon's asking about. When we think about the community that needs additional supports in New York, we recognize that we have a graying New York.

We have a fabulous program officer named Rachel Pardoe who did a fabulous presentation on her work last week as we had our Queens-focused centennial celebration, and tomorrow night is our Westchester-focused celebration, but in Queens last week, we talked a lot about the needs of older New Yorkers and how we're all, Brian, you and I, we're going there, and I think we have to recognize that this is a high-need population. We do a lot of grant-making focused on engaging our older New Yorkers to make sure they don't--

Loneliness is such a terrible, terrible problem for these folks. Yes, affordable housing and services. We put a lot of thought into our oldest New Yorkers. Boy, Sharon, we can always use more support in that area, and we're trying to engage more and more donors to recognize that we could be even a more welcoming and kind city and region if we had more focused donors around elder support. I'm with you, and I hope you'll fill out our survey and give us that beautiful vision for New York as being a place that's kinder to our older New Yorkers.

Brian Lehrer: I think our next caller, Marsha in Brooklyn, is going to go to the other end of the age spectrum. Marsha, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Marsha: Hi, Brian. Hi-- I'm sorry, I don't remember your name.

Brian Lehrer: It's Amy Freitag.

Amy Freitag: [laughs] It's Amy.

Brian Lehrer: Amy.

Marsha: Amy, but I did get the website and I will definitely go after I finish.

Amy Freitag: Thank you.

Marsha: My suggestion is for those teenagers aging out of foster care. My heart bleeds for them. I am a parent. I've raised two sons here in New York. I can only imagine about the kids who are basically told at 18, "Sayonara, go figure out the rest of your life yourself." Especially in New York City. I think that is just tragic. I just hope there's some kind of fund, grant specifically for the foster kids who age out.

Amy Freitag: This is a population we think a lot about and we have done a lot of grant-making over the many decades of the New York Community Trust focusing on this population. We do a lot of support of really great programs that help these kids that are graduating out of this foster care environment and into really successful jobs. When Brian mentioned workforce was one of the areas, you really can think about how important that first job, that first opportunity is for some of those kids to really get a leg up, and so we think about that transition of youth into the workforce a lot. We think a lot about programming.

Again, I think it's interesting to me that of these 100 years of grant making and 100 years of donor gifts to the New York Community Trust, that targeting this group of really important job seekers and people trying to graduate into this next phase of their life, that we don't have more dedicated funds in our endowment for that purpose, but could there be a more important use, right? I completely agree with you.

Yes, it's a population we think a lot about, but boy, we would love to find some donors who want to make those kinds of permanent gifts and living donors who want to put efforts and energy into specifically helping that group of New Yorkers. Thanks so much for that.

Brian Lehrer: As we have a few minutes left with Amy Freitag, president of the New York Community Trust, which is open for nominations for what kinds of causes they should make grants on. How about that? 212-433-WNYC, call or text. We have some interesting ones coming in on text messages before we run out of time.

One says, "After watching the recent New York City Council hearing on animal welfare, it's clear that there is an animal crisis in this city. I would like to see funds," the listener writes, "that go towards shelter improvements and funds that help household with pets that are in financial need to care for those adopted pets." Do you do anything in the area of animals or pets?

Amy Freitag: We do a lot. Brian, we do have many of those permanent funds that were set aside for our furry four-legged friends. It's something that, again, my colleague Rachel Pardoe at the trust thinks a lot about. She holds our animal welfare portfolio. There have been great instances on how we've done this work. Boy, after moments of crisis, like after 9/11 and others, there were such moments of particular stress. Yes, there is an animal crisis in our city, in our region, and we work with, I think, some of the most outstanding non-profits to try to address that challenge.

It's an area where we have some directed donor support, but boy, if we could get a few more of those folks that love that issue and want to support us, we'd welcome it. We also sometimes work at the intersection of animal welfare and other communities. We have a great non-profit that works at the intersection of creating for the visually impaired to provide guiding eyes, a wonderful non-profit that does that work.

Trying to find all kinds of interesting ways that we can support multiple sectors of our community, all doing great work, all wanting to advance their causes. Appreciate very much that text message.

Brian Lehrer: Another listener writes, "I worked two summers for the summer youth employment program in South Jamaica, Queens. Investment in youth employment pays off for a lifetime." Another listener, I guess, is asking you to defend philanthropy. How's that for a big one? Listener writes, "Taxing the rich would solve a lot of these systemic issues. Non-profits and philanthropy don't actually solve the problems." What would you say to that?

Amy Freitag: I think the whole idea of a community foundation is it's really a community project, right? This is very different than private philanthropy. It's been such a joy for me to have been in and around the New York Community Trust most of my career and now getting to spend this time working here that I feel like it's really the most democratizing part of philanthropy. Many of our donors make grants that are no more than $1,500, and we can open a fund for very little money at the New York Community Trust.

The idea of donor-advised funds in a community foundation really act as a way that pretty much anybody can get off the sidelines and be part of community philanthropy. I think that's very different than how people are maybe characterizing private philanthropy, which by the way, we think is a great ally when we're at moments like we were during COVID when many of the largest private foundations in New York stepped up very generously to help us get dollars out the door, but so did individual New Yorkers.

I think there's an incredible history of generosity in New York, and the community foundation comes at a moment in American history when, I don't know if you've read Robert Putnam's book The Great Upswing, but when we stop being such a me-focused culture of the Gilded Age and we came together in many community ways. I would argue the advent of the community foundation during the 1920s was an example of us coming together to doing for one another.

I like to say, a great city or a great region needs a great community foundation, so everybody can come off the sidelines and put a shoulder to the wheel to help the causes and issues that they're passionate about. I also would say at this moment of tremendous polarization in our country that a community foundation is a big tent. It's a place where we may not agree on every issue, but if we can agree that we want this New York to be the most vibrant, equitable, and just place, this is a place we can work together towards that end.

That would be my response, specifically through the lens of community philanthropy.

Brian Lehrer: Toward that end, a listener who's been hearing you say individuals can set up dedicated trust for specific causes, listener writes, "How much does one have to donate to set up a grant or a fund?"

Amy Freitag: We can open a fund for as little as $5,000, and that then becomes a fund that people can continue to contribute to over years and years. I love this story. We have this wonderful woman donor who's been with us for decades, and she likes to tell me that when she first started working with the New York Community Trust, she had no cash to give, but she did have some appreciated stock. She said, "You know, Amy, my gifts weren't-- they had no commas in them." They were in the hundreds of dollars, not the thousands of dollars.

Over time, she was able to put together appreciated stock, and she two decades later makes many more gifts to the New York Community Trust through her donor-advised fund, and she says they now have commas in them. The idea that we really try to meet donors where they are at the very beginning of their journey of wanting to give back to their community. We also have funds that are opened by Rockefellers and Schiffs.

It's this extraordinary archives of the great New Yorkers names, whether you're a Zabar, an Altman, a Steinway, they all have funds at the New York Community Trust, and Harry Rogers and a bunch of other folks you've never heard of. It's that group coming together over generations that makes us the supportive organization we are today.

Brian Lehrer: I'm going to take one more call for you because a few people are calling in in the same category, and we're going to let Eleanor in Queens speak for them. Eleanor, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Amy Freitag: Hi, Eleanor.

Eleanor: Hello. Hello. Thank you so much for this fabulous program. I really appreciate you talking about the trust and bringing people together to care for New York. I have an idea that has been in my heart for a long time. I'm a dance movement therapist. I'm a psychologist. I teach at the state university, at the FIT, Fashion Institute.

I want to do a project that brings people from different disciplines to not only plant trees, but to provide a project where people can care for the trees, and the trees and the plants would provide a panoramic view of color that would reflect the different colors of people here in New York City so that they can not only appreciate the landscape and our environment, but they can care for it together.

The act of caring for nature is very powerful, and it would not only bridge communities and bring them together to work toward this cause of sustainability in our environment, but it would bridge people who travel through the city. I know that there's a discipline called transport and health, so bridges the two disciplines. People could be actually more mentally sound by working with each other and working toward a cause that benefits all New Yorkers.

I am very dedicated, and I'm working on this project with psychologists, transportation specialists, and people who are interested in providing this for New Yorkers. Our city can look so much better and could feel better and people will want to walk around and be more active. That's my idea.

Brian Lehrer: Eleanor, thank you very much. All right, so trees with all those roots and shoots into the other things she was talking about, Amy.

Amy Freitag: Oh, Eleanor, there are a few things I love more. I had the privilege of being involved in the Million Trees program during the Bloomberg administration, and I am passionate, not just about the planting of trees, but the caring of trees. We know that citizens who care for a tree are more likely to vote, they're more likely to be engaged in their community, so we really do believe in the civic act of planting and nurturing a tree.

We do a lot of work with a lot of the greening organizations in New York City and something called the NYC Green Fund, which is a great partnership of collaboration among the greening organizations. They always need more support, but I love the idea of that kind of tapestry. What a beautiful image that is of New York. I do think that there are so many more benefits to what we like to say are co-benefits to planting a tree.

They absorb carbon, they absorb stormwater, but they also just make the city kinder and more resilient to climate change, especially in the parts of our city that will face the worst impacts of heat-related climate impacts. I love that image, Eleanor. I'm going to hold onto it today.

Brian Lehrer: Amy Freitag, president of the New York Community Trust, which like WNYC is celebrating its centennial this year. They are taking nominations for what areas they should devote some of their grant-making toward. You can vote on the form at thenytrust.org, thenytrust.ora. As you've been hearing, they are also inviting individuals to set up dedicated trusts for as little as about $5,000 for causes that you support, where the money would come from you.

Thank you so much for joining us. This is inspiring, I know, to lots of people who are concerned about a lot of good cause things, and congratulations on your centennial. That's really wonderful.

Amy Freitag: And to our friends at WNYC. Thank you, Brian. Really appreciate the opportunity.

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