The New York Community Trust has announced grants totaling $8 million to nonprofits working to improve opportunities and quality of life for all New Yorkers.

Grants were made to fifty-one nonprofits, including The New 42nd Street, which was awarded $600,000 to train, in partnership with Arts Connection and Community-Word Project, nearly five hundred artists to provide arts education for students with disabilities; PEN America, which will receive $250,000 in support of its work to defend a free press, counter hate speech, and advance local human rights legislation; and Chalkbeat, which was awarded $65,000 to report on school segregation in New York and engage policy makers and parents from low-income communities in addressing it. 

The foundation also awarded $150,000 to the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center to expand counseling, legal aid, immigration assistance, and HIV/AIDS prevention services for transgender New Yorkers; $200,000 to the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy to fund scholarships that improve the diversity of students enrolled in its industrial hygiene master's program; and $700,000 to CancerCare to help offset the costs of care for an estimated twenty-two hundred low-income cancer patients. 

Other recipients include the Brookdale Center for Healthy Aging at Hunter College, which was awarded $200,000 in support of an intergenerational housing experiment in East Harlem that will pair older low-income adults with student roommates; HeartShare St. Vincent's Services, which will receive $160,000 to expand a program that matches middle and high school students in foster care with in-home tutors; and the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, which was awarded $73,000 in support of its efforts to advocate for higher wages and labor protections for taxi drivers.

For a complete list of recipients, see the NYCT website.

(Photo credit: Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center)