BUILDING A BETTER Westchester
Since 1975, the Westchester Community Foundation has been helping generous residents endow charitable funds to support the causes they care about and discover the most effective way to give back to their community.
We are Westchester's community foundation.
We’re helping protect and preserve the Hudson River and Long Island Sound watersheds. We’re ensuring that businesses and communities can address the harmful effects of climate change by going green.
YOUNG ADULTS
Hundreds of Westchester teens and young adults are preparing for college while others are training for middle skill careers.
From Yonkers to Mount Kisco, Mamaroneck to Ossining, thousands of immigrants are getting help to become self-sufficient.
With anxiety, depression, and suicide on the rise, we’re making sure that behavioral health crisis services are expanded. Children who have experienced trauma, anxiety and depression are getting the help they need.
SOCIAL JUSTICE
We’re supporting advocacy to improve access to safe and affordable housing and to secure and enforce worker rights.
REFORM
We’re reducing youth involvement in the criminal- and juvenile-justice systems by providing critical social service supports.
Millions of public and philanthropic dollars are spent on programs that help children, youth, and adults overcome obstacles and lead productive lives. By supporting new approaches to education, employment, or health services—and rigorous assessments of the outcomes—our grants contribute to the collective knowledge of what works and what does not.
Our grants help nonprofits continuously improve the services they provide.
By combining the experience and networks of multiple funders, we are able to tackle new problems that arise, such as the land use and transportation reform; address areas that require bold approaches, such as workforce development; or restore our environment, such as the Long Island Sound.
Whether helping to roll-out successful sustainability initiatives, improving outcomes for youth, or ensuring that small businesses thrive, formal and informal relationships with local government go a long way to achieving results. Our grants support new projects that government can then expand, help communicate results to the field, or provide the flexibility that leverages larger government resources.
Systemic change often can only be achieved through efforts to change or establish new public policies or programs. Advocacy combined with savvy lobbying at the county, state, or even federal level accomplish policy changes over time. Our policy support in housing affordability, immigrant protections, criminal justice reform, environmental health, and community planning have all yielded lasting improvements.
None of our grant objectives can be achieved without a vital nonprofit sector. Our capacity building efforts have included large-scale programs to promote management excellence, train mid-level managers for leadership positions, and help nonprofits negotiate better public contracts.
So she started a permanent fund at the Westchester Community Foundation.
Henriette Suhr loved gardens, and she loved to support emerging environmental organizations. In her estate, she provided for a fund to support environmental causes in Westchester. A grant to the Untermyer Gardens Conservancy from the William and Henriette Granville Suhr Fund for the Environment has helped Yonkers high school students learn about horticulture through paid summer internships at the gardens. For one student, the experience provided a much-needed respite during the summer of 2020, a love of the outdoors, and a decision to pursue a career in environmental law.
