Dear friends in the Greater New Haven community:
For our community, as for so many, COVID-19 is a crisis like no other. Social isolation is altering — perhaps permanently—how we connect with one another, while unemployment at Depression-era levels is redefining who are the needy in our society.
The nonprofit sector in Greater New Haven is facing unprecedented challenges. Demands for service have skyrocketed, not only for healthcare institutions but also for frontline providers of basic needs, particularly food. Cultural institutions, childcare centers and shelters have all been closed for inability to meet social distancing requirements. With big unanticipated expenses and with fundraising events cancelled, nonprofits’ budgets have been devastated across the sector.
Yet in some of the most pernicious ways, COVID-19 seems all too familiar rather than unprecedented. Attacking us at a time when our society is increasingly defined by extreme inequality, COVID-19 is widening the racial and ethnic disparities in our society even more dramatically. No matter how measured—rates of hospitalization and death, access to testing and care, unemployment, businesses receiving Small Business Administration loans, or young people with the connectivity to truly learn through remote schooling—the COVID-19 data in our community tell a terrible tale of inequality defined by race, ethnicity and zip code.
For all these reasons, in responding to the impacts of COVID-19, The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven has both changed our philanthropic strategies and deepened our commitment to addressing racial and ethnic inequities in our community.
From mid-March to mid-June, more than $10 million is going to nonprofit organizations in our community as Foundation grants or through The Foundation’s Great Give 2020, during which 16,400 donors contributed $3.6 million, almost doubling last year’s previous record. These Foundation grants will be funded in part by $2.7 million raised for the new COVID-19 Community Fund, a partnership with United Way of Greater New Haven, and millions in Foundation grants have been accelerated and repurposed this spring to help nonprofits meet the challenges of COVID-19.
Beyond our grantmaking, The Community Foundation is working with public and private philanthropic partners to establish a $1.5 million loan pool targeted to small women-owned and minority-owned businesses.
In response to COVID-19, our community’s deeply-rooted generosity has shown itself once again. Yet our collective response must go much further, because how we emerge from this crisis will determine so much about our future as a community. Rather than being deterred by the social and economic setbacks of COVID-19, The Foundation is pursuing with strengthened determination our vision of Greater New Haven as a community of opportunity for all, and is calling on leaders from the social and business sector to join us. By working together, drawing on our deep reserves of resilience and generosity, building on our economic strengths, and making greater equity a defining element of our common vision, COVID-19 can be a departure point for reimagining the future of Greater New Haven.
William W. Ginsberg
President & CEO
Community Foundation of Greater New Haven
