Robin Hood Releases $40 Million in Poverty-Fighting Grants During the Fourth Quarter of 2024

NEW YORK, NY — Today, Robin Hood, New York City’s largest local poverty-fighting philanthropy, announced $40 million in additional grant investments that will combat poverty across the city’s five boroughs. The grants will fuel direct service work at 72 nonprofit organizations serving low-income New Yorkers. Year-to-date, Robin Hood has invested more than $120 million in the local fight against poverty and since 1988, has invested nearly $3 billion in programs and initiatives that seed opportunities for the 2 million New Yorkers who either live in or near poverty.

“We are proud to support effective solutions to poverty-related challenges,” said Matt Klein, the Chief Program and Impact Officer at New York City’s largest local poverty-fighting philanthropy. “Robin Hood funds nonprofits serving low-income New Yorkers in every borough across the city, and our latest round of grants support high-impact services in a range of critical areas, including education, employment, hunger, and health. This funding enables both longstanding, evidence-informed models, and the launch of innovations to test new approaches. Using evidence and innovation has guided our grantmaking for more than three decades and supporting the most effective organizations and strategies to help New Yorkers move out of poverty has never been more important.”

Robin Hood’s Q4 grant docket includes 82 grants to 72 nonprofit organizations.  These grants support financial security, high-quality education, stable housing, thriving communities, health, and career advancement, as well as capacity building and cultivating the use of data —all core domains of human investment necessary to enable low-income New Yorkers to reach and exceed milestones associated with upward economic mobility.

• High-Quality Education: During Q4, 34 grants totaling $24.5 million will boost literacy outcomes in high-poverty school districts, improve teachers’ abilities to apply the science of literacy in classrooms, build computational fluency and integrate computational thinking into academic programs for public school students, strengthen instructional quality and promote staff retention at community-based child care centers, provide intensive and individual counseling for low-income students who want to go to college, help improve high school persistence rates for young low-income men of color, and continue to build upon a three-year commitment to scale an evidence-based, field-tested school leadership development model that will elevate student achievement in literacy and math, especially in low-performing, low-income schools.
• Financial Stability: 17 grants totaling $5.2 million will fund the distribution of emergency food across locations in every borough. Additional grant support will help eligible low-income families navigate a labyrinth of government documentation and complicated application processes to access benefits more easily for food and nutrition, housing vouchers, income supports like tax refunds and credits, immigration programs, and quality health care.  These grantmaking investments provide low-income New Yorkers with autonomy and independence and give their families longer-term stability.
• Mental & Physical Health: 11 grants totaling $3.9 million will support mental health initiatives, maternal health outreach efforts, neonatal and doula education and training programs, as well as support for two pilot efforts that will test the efficacy of scaling an opioid hot spotting program and a program to expand access to contraceptive care at the City’s primary care clinics.
• Career Advancement: 11 grants totaling $3.5 million will provide job training and readiness, counseling, placement, and work experience in growing, high-wage earning sectors for adults and young adults from high-need communities.
• Stable Housing & Thriving Communities: 8 grants totaling $2.4 million to support efforts to develop new affordable housing and preserve existing affordable housing units, enable tenant organizing, protect tenants from evictions, activate new decision-making requirements for public housing residents, and explore the feasibility of a Direct Rental Assistance pilot in New York City.
• Capacity Building & Data: 1 grant totaling $500,000 to the Center for Public Research and Leadership to expand and measure promising school-family engagement strategies that strengthen blended literacy and computational thinking skills.

Learn more about our grantees and the impact of our grantmaking at robinhood.org/our-work.

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About Robin Hood:
We are NYC’s largest local poverty-fighting philanthropy and since 1988, we have invested nearly $3 billion to elevate and fuel New Yorkers’ permanent escapes from poverty. In 2023, through grantmaking with 250+ community partners, we created pathways to opportunities out of poverty through our strategic partnerships on child care, child poverty, jobs, living wages and more. We are scaling impact at a population level for the nearly 2 million New Yorkers living in poverty. At Robin Hood, we believe your starting point in life should not define where you end up. To learn more about our work and impact, follow us on X @RobinHoodNYC or go to robinhood.org.

MEDIA CONTACT

Kevin Thompson, Managing Director of Communications, Robin Hood
press@robinhood.org