Westchester County is home to some of the nation’s wealthiest communities, yet it also features cities and neighborhoods with high rates of poverty, along with health, environmental, and socio-economic disparities—issues that are directly correlated with race and ethnicity. The Westchester Community Foundation (a division of the New York Community Trust) seeks to address those inequities, and now Executive Director Laura Rossi is making the most of a new tool they’ve developed, the Westchester Index.
“We want to help donors and foundations target effectively and to help the press access data to tell these stories,” Rossi says, adding that the Foundation is writing a series of articles (the first is about housing affordability) to illuminate what the data is telling us in terms of understanding the complexity of issues our communities face. “We want the nonprofit sector and our communities to become more data driven. People can get lost in data, so we want them to have context for understanding what the data reveals. ”
The Foundation’s board chair, Sarah Jones-Maturo (who is also president of RM Friedland), praises the Index for being “interactive and user friendly,” which she sees as fitting in with the mission of “strategically fortifying nonprofits and supporting the overall economic vitality in the community.”
Users can look at the Index’s key indicators like graduation and poverty rates for education to see where the inequalities are, she explains, which can inform giving strategies as donors seek nonprofits that have had success tackling specific issues. Rossi notes that the Index allows users to focus on one specific topic across all Westchester communities or to look at all the subjects in one given municipality.
(For instance, the housing article shows that homeownership rates countywide among Black and Latino residents are 37% and 35%, compared to 73% among whites, but are even lower in places like Yonkers; the percentage of residents paying at least 30 percent of income on housing is just 23 percent in Scarsdale but hits 50 percent in Mount Vernon.)
The Foundation takes on an array of issues, from workforce development to human services to studying transit-oriented development to environmental sustainability. “We try to find promising approaches, seed them and then bring them to scale,” Rossi says.
The Long Island Sound Funders Collaborative, which the Foundation helped establish with funders from Long Island and Connecticut, has developed a shared standard for water quality testing to measure the health of the Sound. “We provided a strategic framework and supported innovative work by partnering closely with scientists and community groups,” Rossi said. By providing early money, the Collaborative established annual reporting standards that the Environmental Protection Agency is now funding, enabling funders to move on to other Sound-related issues.
One top priority is workforce investment, which grew in importance during and coming out of the pandemic. Rossi says the Foundation’s “multi-pronged approach” involves working with job-training providers, local institutions of higher education and local employers to ensure that training providers are better synced up with employers and potential employees are ready to start on day one. (Programs help with workforce development in fields ranging from construction to health care to information technology.)
Speaking of the pandemic, Rossi says the Foundation is “well-versed in crisis” and how to have the most impact, whether it’s dealing with families displaced by Hurricane Floyd or something bigger, like Covid-19. “We have provided support to the COAD– Communities Organized After Disaster—a group that now meets regularly instead of waiting until the next disaster.”
Overall, Rossi says, the Foundation does a lot of funding to strengthen the local nonprofit sector. “Our role as a philanthropic organization is as a connector and convener and as a funder—we have the flexibility to invest that government often doesn’t have,” she says. “We make strategic investments and work well with the county government to share information and avoid duplication of government funding.“
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