As the coronavirus pandemic brought our city to a halt, The New York Community Trust and several philanthropic partners reached out to each other and quickly organized a powerful mobilization of funds to strengthen the city’s safety net.
The 18 lead partners created the NYC COVID-19 Response & Impact Fund to, in part, get urgently needed money to arts nonprofits whose survival was suddenly endangered. The needs across the city were enormous. But, because of our experience with previous catastrophic events such as September 11 and superstorm Sandy, we knew how we could respond: our grantmaking needed to be well-informed, precise, and go to where it would do the most good.