PRESS RELEASE – Organization teams up with FJC to create a Donor Advised Fund to support new supportive housing developments in New York City

Finding housing options to support the successful reentry of formerly incarcerated people back into society is no easy task. Homelessness remains a significant challenge for those coming out of prison and jail – especially here in New York City.

That’s why The Fortune Society, a nonprofit organization that empowers homeless, formerly incarcerated individuals and their families to build better futures through supportive and affordable housing, is working together with FJC – A Foundation of Philanthropic Funds (FJC) – to create a fund that will enable The Fortune Society to initiate these complex housing development projects.

The initiative bridges people across a vast array of inequality – some of the most vulnerable New Yorkers and New Yorkers whose wealth allows them to set aside funds specifically for philanthropic purposes – in Donor Advised Fund accounts.

Nonprofit organizations face a significant gap in available financing relative to for-profit companies. While they want to be entrepreneurial, they can’t raise equity in the same way as private companies. The Fortune Society, which wants to develop more supportive housing options for its target population, often faces challenges moving quickly to initiate these kinds of projects. To have a competitive chance, the organization must pull cash from its operating budget to cover pre-development expenses. At the same time, wealthy individuals have significant resources invested in stocks and bonds, hedge funds, and philanthropic assets.  

“This opportunity creates a solution to meet an urgent social need,” said JoAnne Page, CEO of The Fortune Society. “We currently do not have a source of ready money that can be put down up front for housing development. This collaboration would be a lasting solution to this problem.”

FJC, a sponsor of Donor Advised Funds, is providing a structure where multiple individuals who support The Fortune Society’s mission can pool their philanthropic dollars together to help the organization cover the pre-development costs to initiate these capital-intensive housing projects.

“The Fortune Society and FJC are collaborating to demonstrate how these individuals can provide the kind of catalytic “equity-like” capital that nonprofits can use to move major real estate development projects forward,” said Sam Marks, CEO of FJC. “This effort will harness large capital commitments from public and private sources to help the organization fulfill its mission.” The revolving nature of the fund is intended to give The Fortune Society the resources it needs throughout the life of the fund to act aggressively in pursuit of mission-critical real estate development opportunities and finance up-front costs. The goal is to recycle these philanthropic dollars multiple times for multiple initiatives, and to leverage the money along with other resources to create a long-term impact.

The DAF sector has grown rapidly in recent years, but also come under criticism for aggregating philanthropic capital without quickly deploying it. This initiative showcases the flexibility of DAFs and the creative ways they can be used to advance an organization’s mission.

“FJC has creatively enabled individual DAF account holders to be meaningful partners in mobilizing resources to create desperately needed affordable housing,” said Gary Hattem, the former Head of Global Social Finance at Deutsche Bank. He joins Theodore Huber and A to Z Impact as some of the first donors of this initiative.

At the end of a five-year term, all the funds will remain charitable by the conversion to flexible DAF accounts, which can be deployed as grants to nonprofits as the donors see fit or remain with The Fortune Society for use as the organization deems necessary for its critical work.

“This kind of revolving fund will allow The Fortune Society to finance up-front costs related to mission-driven affordable housing projects, giving the organization a chance to act quickly and nimbly when opportunities arise,” said Page. The Fortune Society is currently in the pre-development stage as a first venture of this fund through the proposed Just Home initiative, a project to house New Yorkers with complex medical needs after they leave jail on the campus of NYC Health + Hospitals/Jacobi in the Bronx. Donors are excited about the prospect of seeing the fruition of the work live on for generations to come.

For more information on this initiative, please visit our FAQ page.

About The Fortune Society

Founded in 1967, The Fortune Society has advocated on criminal justice issues for over five decades and is nationally recognized for developing model programs that help people with criminal justice histories to be assets to their communities. The Fortune Society offers a holistic and integrated “one-stop-shopping” model of service provision. Among the services offered are discharge planning, licensed outpatient substance abuse and mental health treatment, alternatives to incarceration, HIV/AIDS services, career development and job retention, education, family services, drop-in services, and supportive housing as well as lifetime access to aftercare.  For more information, visit www.fortunesociety.org.

About FJC

FJC is a boutique public charity that offers a diverse menu of philanthropic services to a range of stakeholders. With over $380 million under management, its over 1,000 accounts include Donor Advised Funds (DAFs), fiscal sponsorships, collective giving accounts, revolving funds, and many other philanthropic vehicles. FJC acts as an intermediary between the financial services sector and the nonprofit sector, enabling nonprofit organizations and their supporters to focus on their missions, rather than be burdened with the details of operations and compliance.

##

Safe, Affordable Housing with Services is Focus of FJC’s First-Ever Multi-Donor Revolving Fund

What are the goals of FJC’s Revolving Fund for The Fortune Society?

FJC, a boutique sponsor of Donor Advised Funds, has arranged a fund that will empower The Fortune Society, a nonprofit serving vulnerable New Yorkers coming out of incarceration, to scale its housing development work. People re-entering society from prison are overrepresented in the homeless population, and supportive housing (affordable housing with services) has proven to be an effective strategy to keep vulnerable New Yorkers stable and out of crisis systems (like homeless shelters, hospitals, and jails). The initiative will help The Fortune Society double its housing portfolio over the next five years.

Specifically, the fund will:

• Support people coming out of prison with stable, permanent supportive housing and services;
• Provide The Fortune Society with the capital necessary to invests in its future and organizational growth by doubling its real estate portfolio over the next five years; and
• Allow FJC to demonstrate how Donor Advised Fund (DAF) accounts can be put to work for maximum impact, thereby helping them be more creative with their resources and support a greater number of people in need.

How are funds in the Fortune Society Revolving Fund different from other Donor Advised Fund accounts at FJC?

The Revolving Fund has been funded with philanthropic capital with a specific intention to help The Fortune Society act entrepreneurially to expand and scale its mission.  The goal is to use the same dollars multiple times to initiate multiple projects, preserving the capital for donors to recycle again for philanthropic purposes.

A typical Donor Advised Fund (DAF) account at FJC provides recommender privileges to donors regarding how the philanthropic dollars in their accounts are invested for growth or deployed as grants. With the Revolving Fund, donors have agreed to “lock up” their funds for five years, to allow The Fortune Society to use them to advance their mission to expand their portfolio of permanent supportive housing for people coming out of incarceration.  This agreement is documented in a simple Memorandum of Understanding between the donors and FJC. 

The participating donors have agreed to allow The Fortune Society to draw on these funds as needed, as loans at 1% interest, instead of the typical ways funds in DAF accounts are used (i.e. granting funds out, or investing them for tax-free growth to make grants at a future date). At the end of the five-year term, The Fortune Society will repay the loans, and funds will return to the donors’ individual DAF accounts.  These loans are documented in a loan agreement between FJC as lender and The Fortune Society as borrower.

Who is The Fortune Society?

Founded in 1967, The Fortune Society has advocated on criminal justice issues for over five decades and is nationally recognized for developing model programs that help people with criminal justice histories to be assets to their communities. The Fortune Society offers a holistic and integrated “one-stop-shopping” model of service provision. Among the services offered are discharge planning, licensed outpatient substance abuse and mental health treatment, alternatives to incarceration, HIV/AIDS services, career development and job retention, education, family services, drop-in services, and supportive housing as well as lifetime access to aftercare. 

Developing, owning and operating housing is core to Fortune Society’s work.  Low-threshold access to supportive emergency, transitional, and permanent housing is provided at their congregate facilities, The Fortune Academy (“the Castle”) and Castle Gardens, along with their Scatter-Site Housing program.

What is supportive housing?    

Supportive housing is affordable housing with onsite services that help formerly homeless, disabled tenants live in dignity in the community. Supportive housing came into being in response to the homelessness crisis in New York City in the 1970s and is the most humane and cost-effective solution to ending homelessness for vulnerable people: individuals and families dealing with mental illness, trauma/abuse, addiction, and chronic illness including HIV/AIDS.

Supportive housing is permanent and affordable: All tenants hold leases and pay about a third of their income in rent. The residences are owned and operated by nonprofit organizations and are accountable to their city, state, and federal funders. Because supportive housing either replaces a blighted building or lot, it jump-starts neighborhood renewal. Because it provides 24-7 front desk coverage and other      security features, supportive housing frequently contributes to increased community safety. As a result, studies have shown that supportive housing increases property values. For more about the cost effectiveness and impact of supportive housing, see these great resources at The Supportive Housing Network.

Depending on the site and service contracts, supportive housing is made available to vulnerable populations who are disproportionately represented in the homeless shelter system: such as people who face substance abuse, HIV/AIDS, serious persistent mental illness, veterans, and—in the case of The Fortune Society—people re-entering society after incarceration.

Why does The Fortune Society need resources from a Revolving Fund?

Nonprofits face particular business challenges when launching entrepreneurial activity. The ownership and governance structures of nonprofit organizations don’t allow them to raise equity.  As a result, when nonprofits need to fund the earliest and most risky pre-development stage of a real estate venture, they must fund pre-development expenses from rainy day funds, if they exist, or else pull cash from their operating budget.

To scale its work in developing supportive housing, the Revolving Fund will provide The Fortune Society a dedicated source of capital that can be used to initiate these time-intensive, critical projects.

The total development costs of a typical supportive housing development may run into the tens of millions of dollars, depending on size, which is financed through a combination of private financing and federal, state, and city subsidies.  To secure these resources, The Fortune Society incurs significant soft costs during the pre-development phase, which can run in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. These costs include deposits to secure sites for acquisition, feasibility studies, environmental reviews and architectural design work.

How will The Fortune Society repay loans and replenish the Revolving Fund?

Fortune Society will replenish the revolving fund when their affordable housing projects secure construction or permanent financing, or bridge loans from more traditional financing partners.

The federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) is the principal subsidy for affordable housing development, and the New York City region receives an allocation of LIHTC through its housing finance agencies NYS Housing & Community Renewal (HCR) and the NYC Department of Housing Preservation & Development (HPD).  These resources are supplemented by tax-exempt bond financing, grants from other public and private sources, and traditional bank financing. In addition to these capital sources, nonprofits must secure service contracts from other city and state agencies.

The Fortune Society has a long track record of securing these sources, as well as the necessary public approvals from community boards and other elected officials.

Is there a risk that loans won’t be repaid? 

No investment is risk-free.  FJC mitigates this risk by working with The Fortune Society to fund activities that have a high likelihood of repayment, on real estate projects that have already secured significant public approvals and/or soft commitments of public resources.  The primary motivation of this fund is philanthropic (and at 1% interest, the loans are being made available at below-market interest rates).  Nevertheless, this project will be deemed successful if the loans are repaid and the donors have the opportunity to recycle them for other philanthropic purposes. 

The loans made from The Revolving Fund are general recourse obligations to The Fortune Society, meaning that if the real estate projects in the early planning stages don’t go forward (the primary source of repayment), The Fortune Society is still “on the hook” to repay them (the secondary source of repayment).  The Fortune Society is in a strong financial position, and has never failed to repay any debt obligation on time.

Working on behalf of its donors, FJC will make all efforts to recover the full loan principal in the event that things do not go as planned.  In the remote possibility that a loan recovery becomes impossible, FJC will convert to a grant any portion of the loan deemed to be uncollectible.  

We have worked closely with donors to understand the risks involved in this Revolving Fund.  Our expectation is that every dollar dedicated to this effort will be used multiple times to initiate multiple projects and then returned to donors’ DAF accounts so they can be redeployed as grants. 

What happens at the end of the 5-year term?

At the end of a 5-year term, funds will be returned to the initial donors’ DAF accounts.  The account holders will then have the flexibility to recommend their funds be granted to the nonprofits of their choice.

Where does the initiative stand now?

Four DAF account holders at FJC have joined this effort, including Gary Hattem, Theodore Huber, A to Z Impact, and an anonymous donor. As of this writing (5/15/23), The Fortune Society has drawn $400,000 to cover pre-development expenses on two projects:

• Just Home Project is an innovative housing initiative that will provide permanent, supportive housing with services for medically complex homeless New Yorkers returning after incarceration. Residents of this project suffer from medically complex issues that require constant medical attention. The project is a partnership with the NYC Health + Hospitals Corporation and will be built on City-owned land at the Jacobi Medical Center (Bronx, NY).
• Illegal Hotel Conversion. Redevelopment of “illegal hotel” to supportive and affordable Single Room Occupancy (SRO housing at 258 West 97th Street in the Upper West Side. The completed project will have 59 supportive housing units and 25 affordable units. The project was the subject of a New York Times article “From ‘Illegal’ Hotel to Housing for the Homeless on Upper West Side” (3/28/22).

Funds will be used to cover architectural services, environmental reviews, consultant fees, and staff management costs.  It is anticipated that over the next year, these projects will close on pre-development or construction financing that will enable The Fortune Society to repay the loans and draw on the fund again for other projects in their supportive housing pipeline.

Earlier this year, FJC began hosting a funding collaborative of corporate, family, and private foundations that have aligned their funding in an effort to transform New York City’s homelessness systems.   FJC has disbursed over $525,000 in grants on behalf of The NYC Fund to End Youth and Family Homelessness, which expects to make a total of $3 million over the next two years.

The vision of the collaborative goes beyond funding social services.  The Fund seeks to “transform major systems so that they operate to promote housing stability as part of their core function” by influencing a constellation of interlocking systems: housing and shelter; education; foster care; child and family welfare; health, including mental and behavioral health; law enforcement and justice.

“We’re looking to make strategic grants where if you can just push in the right spot, you can have a compounding effect on impact,” explains Lisa Talma VP of Philanthropic Initiatives at Deutsche Bank, one of the funders.  Among the grants the Fund has made include the development of technology applications that enable homeless individuals to access public resources and programs more quickly, and initiatives that provide direct cash transfers to homeless individuals and families. 

The Fund’s governance structure ensures that the philanthropic strategy is being shaped by people with the lived experience of homelessness.  The Fund currently reserves four seats on its Steering Committee for the two Co-Coordinators of New York City’s Youth Action Board and the two Housing Policy Fellows of New York City’s Family Homelessness Coalition.  By explicitly advancing equity and lived expertise as core values, the collaborative has attracted both national and local funders looking to support cutting-edge programs and interventions.  UPDATED 6/17/21: One of the projects supported by the Fund to research the impact of direct cash transfer payments to homeless youth has attracted follow-on investment from the City of New York.  Read the press release about the Trust Youth Initiative, a program of Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago and Point Source Youth.

To assist the Fund in achieving its goals, FJC arranged a Collective Giving Account (CGA), a variation on a Donor Advised Fund that allows for incoming contributions from multiple philanthropic actors.  “We considered fiscal sponsorship as an option, but the CGA account’s ease of use and efficient fee structure made it the right vehicle,” explains Bea De La Torre, Co-Chair of the Fund, and Managing Director of Housing and Homelessness at Trinity Church Wall Street. 

“Very often our CGA accounts are used by individuals to mark life occasions,” says FJC Chief Operating Officer Meghan Hudson, “Weddings, bar mitzvahs, and the like.  It was easy enough to apply this vehicle to the needs of these more institutional foundations, and we hope to do more in the future.”

List of funders

• Block-Leavitt Foundation
• Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation
• Helmsley Charitable Trust
• Melville Charitable Trust
• Pinkerton Foundation
• Stavros Niarchos Foundation
• Trinity Church Wall Street

Grants to date

• Settlement Housing Fund – supporting the NYC Family Homelessness Coalition’s Housing Policy Fellows program, which hires and trains advocates with lived expertise of family homelessness in NYC to help the Coalition’s policy, advocacy, and communications initiatives.

• Empire State Coalition of Youth and Family Service – supporting the Coalition for Homeless Youth in launching a first-of-its kinds Peer Navigator Program, which will train a corps of young people with lived expertise of homelessness to work at youth homelessness service organizations throughout NYC as part of their client service teams, helping their peers find permanent housing and access other benefits programs and support.

• Rethink Food NYC – as fiscal sponsor for Streetlives, an initiative to co-design, build, and operate a technology platform with youth with lived expertise to better connect young people facing housing instability with the information, services, and support they’re seeking to improve their lives.

• Funders Together to End Homelessness – to join this national organization and benefit from its learning on national best practices in grantmaking and its public policy advocacy, and to join its cohort of Foundations for Racial Equity.

• Chapin Hall at University of Chicago – to support a groundbreaking pilot and rigorous evaluation of a Direct Cash Transfer Program, which will study the impact of providing monthly flexible cash support for two years to young people experiencing homelessness in NYC and compare their outcomes with control groups who receive significantly more costly, non-fungible supports like shelter.

For more information, visit the Fund’s home page.

A Korean-American woman majors in History, Political Science, and Anthropology and spends her summer volunteering to rebuild Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.  A Colombian man lives with his grandmother, following his mother’s deportation, while studying to become a journalist.  A first generation Chinese-American college student serves as President of the Chemistry Honor Society, where he tutors other students who struggle with chemistry.

What do these students have in common?  They are among the seven Queens College students that received financial support from Queens College alumni, as part of the Phi Epsilon Pi Endowed Fund.  One of this group of Queens College alumni is Robert Jacobs who actively uses FJC to support his philanthropic efforts.

In November 2018, Mr. Jacobs had an epiphany. By chance, he read a newspaper article about former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s generous donation to Johns Hopkins University—a gift ensuring that no accepted student would be unable to attend because of financial circumstances. In that moment, Jacobs knew that his time had come to make a difference at his alma mater, Queens College. Within a month, he established a scholarship to benefit students of academic merit who need financial assistance. 

But that was just the beginning. After receiving touching letters of appreciation from his scholarship recipients, Jacobs shared the notes with his fraternity brothers and planted the idea of doing something greater. During a biannual Phi Epsilon Pi dinner, he proposed starting an endowment at the college. This was a chance for this group of friends to leave a legacy and to assist students for many years to come.

“All of us have forgotten whatever we learned in Contemporary Civilization, but we have not forgotten the opportunity that Queens College provided a bunch of poor, hardworking, smart kids from the five boroughs and Nassau and Suffolk Counties,” Jacobs says. “Queens College gave us a chance to succeed in ways that our parents, as products of the Depression and as second-generation Americans, could have only dreamt about.”

With the help of 26 fraternity brothers and more participating each month, the Phi Epsilon Pi Endowed Fund has raised over $176,000 and continues to grow with consistent gifts from the fraternity brothers.  It has given them the opportunity to further the bond that was initiated so many years ago.. To date, the endowment has funded seven student scholarships over the past two years and it is expected that it will fund another two this year , and the funders are adding a mentoring component to the program.  Further, it has inspired a fellow fraternity to establish its own fund in support of student scholarships.

The demographics of Queens College are quite different from the institution they attended fifty years ago.  When Mr. Jacobs graduated in 1970, white students made up the vast majority of students at the school. Today, students of color represent nearly three-quarters of the student population, and nearly one-third are foreign born.  Another major change is tuition.  As part of the City University of New York system, Queens College began charging tuition since the mid- 1970’s.  While tuition of approximately $7,000 a year for a full-time undergraduate degree is quite modest compared with private colleges, it is still a hardship for many students.  Almost half of Queens College students come from households earning less than $30,000 per year. 

While the demographics are different, Jacobs and his fraternity brothers would rather focus on their similarities.  “They’re just like we were.  They’re strivers,” Jacobs states.  “None of my college friends were born with a silver spoon.” He also notes that public education was the foundation for his successful career, which included being a partner at Ernst & Young and now managing his own healthcare consulting practice.  “How can we not give back when we paid $46 a term?”

With their philanthropy, Jacobs and his peers are having a major impact on today’s Queens College students like Joss Montano.  The scholarship, Montano writes, “…guarantees that I will continue my education, a possibility I would be unsure of without the assistance it provides me. It is a nod at what I have been working toward, and an affirmation that the sacrifices my family has made for me to get an education, have been worth it.”

Portions of this article appeared in the Fall 2020 issue of Queens College magazine and appear courtesy of Jennifer Beiner and the Queens College Office of Institutional Advancement.

Our Vision

All New York City youth and families with children will have a safe and stable place to call home and a community of support.

Our Strategy

The NYC Fund to End Youth & Family Homelessness uses its resources and influence to transform our city’s homelessness systems.  Currently, those systems function primarily to manage the crisis of homelessness.  We seek instead to prevent and end that crisis.

To do this, we support innovative, evidence-based, promising approaches that help youth and families facing housing instability keep their homes or move quickly into a new permanent home that is safe, stable, and affordable. In each approach, we seek to leverage and transform major systems so that they operate to promote housing stability as part of their core function (e.g. housing and shelter; education; foster care; child and family welfare; health, including mental and behavioral health; law enforcement and justice).

Shelter offers a place to sleep at night, but the solution to homelessness is a home.  Investing in access to quality, affordable homes is investing in our children’s – and our city’s – future.

Our Values

The Fund’s core values are to advance racial equity, LGTBQ equity, and lived expertise in the design of our housing and homelessness systems and in our own governance and operations.

Contrary to what many believe, people are not homeless simply because they made bad choices or had bad luck.   All of us make bad choices and have bad luck at different points in our lives, but all of us do not become homeless.  Those who do are those of us who do not have the protection of wealth and ownership – either in our own household or in our extended network – to cushion us when we have bad luck or make a mistake. 

Since our society has long excluded people who are Black, indigenous, and people of color from wealth and ownership opportunities (especially those who are also LGBTQ), we have limited the ability of these individuals, households, and communities to build that cushion of net worth.  As a direct result, it is disproportionately people in these communities who face homelessness when something goes wrong.

Moreover, the systems we have built to manage homelessness often reinforce inequity rather than reduce it, all too frequently denying people dignity, autonomy, and control over their own lives.  These systems are often also inefficient, expensive, and counterproductive, offering take-it-or-leave-it, one-size-fits-nobody interventions that don’t help people quickly find a stable home.

Instead, we must build systems founded on principles of equity and dignity that give people the resources they need to design their own solutions and achieve their own goals.

Our Governance

The Fund is committed to centering racial and LGBTQ equity and lived expertise of youth and family homelessness in its governance and operations.  As part of that commitment, the Fund currently reserves four seats on its Steering Committee for the two Co-Coordinators of New York City’s Youth Action Board and the two Housing Policy Fellows of New York City’s Family Homelessness Coalition. 

These Steering Committee members draw on their own lived expertise in New York City homelessness systems and partner with our philanthropic members to lead the Fund’s strategy, policy, and grantmaking work.  They also currently lead the Fund in developing a longer-term strategy for how to continue to advance equity and lived expertise as core values of what we do and how we do it.

The Fund is currently co-chaired by Beatriz de la Torre, Managing Director of Housing & Homelessness at Trinity Church Wall Street, and Rhonda Jackson, Housing Policy Fellow of the New York City Family Homelessness Coalition.

Our Contributors

The Fund’s current contributors are:

• Block-Leavitt Foundation
• Booth Ferris Foundation
• Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation
• Helmsley Charitable Trust
• Melville Charitable Trust
• Oak Foundation
• Pinkerton Foundation
• Robin Hood Foundation
• Stavros Niarchos Foundation
• Trinity Church Wall Street
• van Ameringen Foundation

Special thanks to FJC – A Foundation of Philanthropic Funds for hosting the Fund.

Contact

For information about contributing to the Fund, applying for grant, or for press inquiries, please contact the Fund’s senior advisor – John Kimble (jgkimble AT gmail DOT com).

In times of global crisis, philanthropy can play a critical role in deploying resources quickly as governments and multi-lateral organizations mobilize for action. In our latest webinar, “Global Health in the Pandemic Age,” Kate Dodson, VP of Global Health at the UN Foundation spoke about how individual donors came together with corporate, foundation, and others to enable to the distribution of personal protective equipment (PPE) to over 173 countries. “We used a nimble mix of partnership to get this done,” said Ms. Dodson, which included over 631,000 individuals from 193 countries (FJC donors among them!). The conversation was moderated by FJC’s Chief Executive Officer, Sam Marks. See the full recording here.

FJC’s first-ever Collective Giving Campaign, focused on addressing the Covid-19 pandemic, raised over $147,000 for six outstanding organizations that are tackling the impacts of the pandemic in a range of ways: food security, employment, grassroots organizing, small business support, public health, and research and development. During the campaign period in May 2020, donor contributions were matched dollar-for-dollar by FJC’s Special Initiatives Fund.

Over 90 percent of participating donors who responded to a post-campaign survey found many compelling reasons to participate, such as the elevation of strong, effective organizations (many of which were new to them); the ability to align their resources with other donors at FJC; and the opportunity to have their gifts matched, effectively doubling their giving. As one donor said in her survey response, “Let’s do more work together!”

The Center for Effective Philanthropy published a blog post by Sam Marks, CEO of FJC, with further reflections on the successes and challenges of the campaign. “The initiative suggests the power that DAF sponsors can bring when they provide focused guidance to rally disparate donors around a common cause,” he writes.

FJC also hosted a subsequent webinar highlighting the work of Food Bank for New York City, the top choice among FJC donors. Food Bank CEO Leslie Gordon spoke of the operational and logistical challenges of keeping food flowing where it has been needed most during the pandemic, and cautioned that the economic fallout of the crisis may create even greater need. “This is not a sprint, it’s a marathon.” See a summary and link to the full webinar recording here.

Leslie Gordon, CEO of Food Bank for New York City, joined FJC’s CEO Sam Marks and dozens of FJC donors for our first-ever “Lunch and Learn” webinar on June 30 to discuss Food Bank’s extraordinary work during the Covid-19 pandemic. Food Bank was the most popular choice by FJC donors during its recent Collective Giving Campaign, receiving over $85,000 from FJC and its donors to mitigate the effects of the pandemic among New York City’s most vulnerable.

Gordon placed her own professional journey in a multigenerational family context, contrasting the informal approach to voluntary food delivery service in her grandfather’s day with the scale, sophistication and data driven approach of the Food Bank. Food Bank’s network of food pantries, community kitchens, and local, civic, and religious organizations are committed to preserving the dignity and choice of the individuals and families they work with, and they address food insecurity with the larger goal of developing New Yorkers’ self-sufficiency with other programs and services. Across all the partners, she said, “This is a human-centered problem, we want to treat people with respect and care.”

She also spoke of the operational and logistical challenges of keeping food flowing where it has been needed most during the pandemic, and cautioned that the economic fallout of the crisis may create even greater need. “This is not a sprint, it’s a marathon.”

See the full webinar recording here.