The Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund, which was created two days after the brokerage firm lost six hundred and fifty-eight of its employees in the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, has become a major funder of nonprofits and causes in New York and beyond, the Chronicle of Philanthropy reports.

Since it was launched with $1 million and a pledge to dedicate a quarter of the firm's annual profits to the relief fund for a period of five years, the fund has awarded grants totaling more than $270 million to hundreds of individuals and organizations. In addition to providing the families of employees who were killed on 9/11 with health benefits for ten years as well as direct financial aid, the fund has provided assistance so that family members could memorialize their loved ones and even helped a number of families create their own charities. It also has broadened its scope beyond the families of 9/11 victims employed by the firm and fourteen other companies in the World Trade Center, supporting wounded veterans and victims of disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy, and the 2013 tornado in Moore, Oklahoma. "Although the 9/11 families were our primary focus, we had the opportunity to take what we had learned from that community and use it in other natural disasters and emergencies and to assist other organizations that were giving direct services," said Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund CEO Edie Lutnick, who lost her brother Gary in the attacks.

The fund has not been without its critics. Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick, Edie's brother, was criticized for halting the paychecks of employees who were killed on 9/11, although his sister argued in a 2011 book that with 658 of its 960 New York employees dead, the firm had to be revived quickly or the relief fund would have had no money to help victims' families. More recently, when Cantor Fitzgerald pledged $10 million for families affected by Superstorm Sandy, it was noted by others that the firm has yet to follow through on a $10 million pledge to the National September 11 Memorial and Museum.

In 2004, the fund launched its annual Charity Day, through which all global revenues generated on September 11 by Cantor Fitzgerald and its affiliate, BGC Partners, are earmarked for the relief fund — which then re-grants the funds to charities in the region and for disaster relief and other causes. "We wanted there to be a legacy for the six hundred and fifty-eight men and women who perished that day and wanted it to be a positive one," Lutnick told the Chronicle. "We wanted it to be a day where even though it's going to be an extraordinarily difficult day for us, it's one where you can focus on a mission that is larger than yourself."