City, foundations team up to help New Yorkers

In the early days of the de Blasio administration, the Human Resources Administration had data on how many New Yorkers were collecting Medicaid and wanted to find out how many of them could also be receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits. That’s where the Robin Hood Foundation and the nonprofit Benefits Data Trust stepped in.

That work ultimately helped enroll 8,000 households in SNAP, and HRA is planning to expand the program next year, a city spokesperson said.

The Robin Hood Foundation, which bills itself as the city’s largest poverty-fighting organization, saw in the partnership an opportunity to learn and innovate.

“We couldn’t have that kind of government data, but we were prepared to take a chance on something that hasn’t been tried before,” said Michael Weinstein, chief program officer of Robin Hood.

While it isn’t an uncommon example of the partnerships between government and philanthropy, it’s a suitable template for how government’s ability to collect data and deliver services at scale can align with funders’ ability to provide money and technological capacity.

New York-based grantmaking foundations distributed about $10.7 billion of the more than $60 billion given to grantees across the United States in 2014, according to the Foundation Center. Though many of the trusts’ and charities’ interests look beyond the five boroughs and across the world, wealthy donors have long helped play a role in the city’s cultural growth, from Andrew Carnegie’s role funding the public library system to Michael Bloomberg, who donated more than $200 million across the city, including at least $30 million for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, according to the New York Times.

Though de Blasio lacks Bloomberg's personal connections and history with heavyweight donors, the use of private foundations has anchored many of his hallmark initiatives like universal pre-kindergarten, computer science training and other policies to tackle economic inequality. And those in government and foundations say their role has been critical in testing unproven initiatives that might otherwise be hard to direct taxpayer money toward.

“I think to solve the problems of the city, so to speak, it’s super complex, and you need a lot of organizations doing different kinds of things,” said Laine Romero-Alston, a Ford Foundation program officer who focuses on “inclusive economies” that build leadership, education and training for low-wage and immigrant workers. “In general, government funding is going to really support the critical programs and service delivery that’s necessary.”

She said organizations who are able to qualify for government funding tend to be larger, leaving philanthropy to help smaller groups that often have more community reach. “Just to compete for a government RFP and implement that, you have to have a certain level of capacity,” she said of the funding. “And oftentimes, it doesn’t then meet the needs of the edges, so to speak.”

City Hall also has an inhouse vehicle to promote its causes, the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City, which funds programs from the Young Men’s Initiative to those run by Department of Cultural Affairs. The fund took in $21 million in 2015, down from $26.6 million the previous year, which was about half of the level it was two years previously. (The fund spiked to $105.9 million in 2013 following a surge of Hurricane Sandy relief money.)

Though revenue has dipped, the fund does have a reliable base of contributors. Last year, budget figures show it received $6.04 million from the Corporation for National and Community Service, a federal agency that’s most notable for running AmeriCorps, more than $2 million from funds based out of CitiBank, and $1.53 million from the Robin Hood Foundation.

The city is now asking funders to help address government goals that are much harder to accomplish. The New York City Housing Authority is seeking donors to fill a $17 billion budget gap through the recently launched Fund for Public Housing; the Fund for Public Health is pushing progressive goals as the city’s public hospitals corporation is teetering.

De Blasio created the Mayor’s Office of Strategic Partnerships to streamline projects aimed at reducing inequality. Possibly the feather in the city’s cap is Computer Science for All, an $81 million venture to teach computer programming in schools, which is funded in part by the Robin Hood Foundation, the AOL Charitable Foundation and venture capitalist Fred Wilson. Another program, Connections to Care, is a $30 million public-private partnership linking mental-health providers to community-based organizations.

“I would say that we try to think about philanthropy and our public-private partnerships as a way to test the model, create impacts at scale, gather our evidence base and prove it,” and not look at philanthropy to fill a budget gap, said Gabrielle Fialkoff, director of the Mayor’s Office of Strategic Partnerships and a senior advisor to de Blasio. When government partners ask her for help to engage the private sector, “it really needs to meet those criteria of systems change or testing a model, innovation, gathering evidence, proving a case. Philanthropic money should be used to leverage public money, or to be used as a test case in ways we want to move the public sector,” she said.

One nonprofit leader, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the individual’s organization receives government dollars, was generally supportive of public-private partnerships if they were the exception rather than the rule. But nonprofits, which don’t have steady income from tax dollars to support their work, are particularly reliant on philanthropies and can be crowded out by the goals of the administration.

“Nonprofits rely on philanthropic dollars to support ongoing programs and operations. It’s extremely difficult when we’re forced to compete with government interests for these finite dollars,” the nonprofit leader said.

Darren Bloch, executive director of the Mayor’s Fund, said in response that, “the vast majority of the Mayor’s Fund work is in partnership with our city’s nonprofit community –  they are the backbone of what we do. Through these partnerships, we address New York City’s most pressing challenges, strengthen safety nets and test models to find new approaches to change the lives of everyday New Yorkers for the better.”

Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, said that foundations can serve as a lab for new ideas or policies because they are “in the risk-taking business.” They can also absorb the blows in the transition of administrations.

“Whenever city governments change, programs are ended, even though they’re good, people come to us,” Gregorian said of some nonprofits. “And even some of them are so desperate, they don’t really even have websites or know if we do that kind work or not, but we try always to come up with imaginative answers.”

Carnegie has been a major backer of libraries, arts and cultural organizations. Its recent grants include multiple donations totalling more than $30 million to New Visions for Public Schools, the CUNY Graduate Center, Medgar Evers College and the CUNY Journalism School.

Donors’ relationships with de Blasio are still cordial, if less colloquial than under Bloomberg, who sat on various charitable boards well before he was elected mayor in 2001. Gregorian, who also headed Brown University and the New York Public Library, has served on nonprofit boards with the former mayor, such as the Institute for Advanced Study, and most recently on the board of directors of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum at the World Trade Center Foundation.

After he became mayor, Bloomberg, at first anonymously, gave the Carnegie Corporation $225 million to distribute among cultural, educational and artistic institutions across the city. Eventually, the “anonymous donor” became the “anonymous mayor,” Gregorian said.

“I don’t have the same relationship with Mayor de Blasio (as with Bloomberg), I don’t think many of our foundation heads have,” he said, noting that there has been lots of cooperation in the area of education.

The Robin Hood Foundation – which Weinstein noted was technically a charity because it spends all of the money it raises and lacked an endowment – spent $143.4 million on programs in 2014. While that makes it a powerhouse among New York charities, that’s a small percentage of the city’s annual budget. He said the organization seeks governments that will step in and invest in a project. “The biggest wins at all are when somebody with far more deeper pockets than even we have steps in and takes over, that’s just great,” Weinstein said.

Some programs don’t make the cut. Bloomberg adopted conditional cash transfers, which gave poor people money for meeting targets such as making dentist appointments or passing Regents exams. There was funding from charities such as Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Rockefeller Foundation, Starr Foundation, Open Society Institute, Robin Hood, Annie E. Casey Foundation and the New York Community Trust. But when it received mixed results, the city ended it.

“That was a classic case that the political authorities wouldn’t want to ask taxpayers to put their money up in the abstract of evidence that it would work,” Weinstein said.

Robin Hood has famously focused on outcomes, emphasizing a framework it calls “Relentless Monetization,” which calculates how to help the most people with each dollar spent. For example, Robin Hood, a heavy backer of charter schools, is agnostic on education policy but instead focuses on data such as graduation rates, he said. “We fixate on that because as a poverty fighter that seat of a high school diploma or the earning of a high school diploma is the most important step that anybody takes out of poverty,” Weinstein said.

The city has become more receptive to the idea of providing metrics that can help Robin Hood evaluate the program outcomes, he said.

The Fund for Public Schools has worked to form a collaboration of education funders to support the city’s computer science, pre-kindergarten expansion, scholarship, internship and arts initiatives, as well as the creation of a School Finder database.

Sarah Geisenheimer, its executive director, says projects start as a two-way conversation between the Department of Education and the organization’s funders about what each seeks to accomplish. The Fund for Public Schools has a unique relationship with the city, Geisenheimer said, because it’s the only fundraising group directly reaching the DOE. “Funding and projects that come through us have the attention of DOE leadership at a very high level and constant attention from DOE leadership, which gives (the projects) a much better potential to scale,” she said.

Geisenheimer, formerly an associate director of the Rockefeller Foundation, called the opportunity to make an impact “huge.” “I mean, 1.1 million students? When I was a funder, I would dream to have that target readily available.”

A version of this story appreared in the November/December issue of the NYN Media Review.