BUILDING A BETTER LONG ISLAND
For more than four decades, the Long Island Community Foundation has helped 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 Long Island’s community foundation.
Happy Clams & Oysters Make for Clean Water: Our grant helped Conscience Point Shellfish Hatchery grow water-filtering mollusks to boost the clam and oyster populations in our waters.
Although Long Island schools claim to get students college and career ready, the skills they are learning are not connected to the skills needed for local jobs. We’re funding the ECNY Foundation’s digital career map to increase the connections and communication between business and industry, education and training providers, and current and future jobseekers.
SOCIAL JUSTICE
Our Unitarian Universalist Fund supports Rural and Migrant Ministry to educate the public about how to support farmworkers, and advocate for better policies to protect farmworkers.
ARTS
With funding from the Greentree Foundation, we helped Teatro Experimental Yerbabruja open an arts center in downtown Central Islip, bringing ethnic groups together, revitalized neglected commercial space, and spurring economic development.
We want to make sure homebound seniors stay active, healthy, and well fed. A grant to EAC Network provides door-to-door delivery of fresh produce for seniors with its Fresh from the Garden Senior Initiative. It also offers social interaction, tips on nutrition, cooking lessons, and more.
Pointing the Way to a College Degree: With our support, Project Morry, a youth development organization, gives students in North Amityville and Copiague, the tools and confidence to set and reach goals, including a college degree.
Explore how we’ve gotten results.
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 opioid epidemic; address areas that require bold approaches, such as racial equity; or help entire communities, such as immigrants.
We get more attention and channel more money, expertise, and attention when we work together with our funder colleagues.
Whether helping to roll-out a successful pre-K program, generating resources for small arts organizations, or improving health outcomes, 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 city, state, or even federal level accomplish policy changes over time. Our policy support in education finance, criminal justice reform, environmental health, and community planning and zoning 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 he started a fund at the Long Island Community Foundation.
Year after year, Dale Lewis made sure that kids learned about music, dance, theater, and visual arts. When he announced his retirement as executive director of Usdan Center for the Creative and Performing Arts, he opened the Arts Reach Fund at the Long Island Community Foundation.
“Launching a fund at the Long Island Community Foundation was a perfect way to advance the arts,” he explained. “At Usdan, I was on the receiving end of the Foundation’s support. Now I have an opportunity to give back.”
She’s investing in a cure. So she gives to charities from her fund at the Long Island Community Foundation.
Aimee Ackell – teacher, author, and motivational speaker-has lupus. Her sister had lupus and died of kidney failure. Aimee honored her sister’s life by starting the Ann Caroline Corrody Fund. “I turned my struggles and my sister’s challenges into a positive experience,” Aimee says. “Through my fund at the Long Island Community Foundation, I donate money to lupus organizations for research, to find a cure.”
Muriel Pless cares about Long Islanders with disabilities. Through her fund at the Long Island Community Foundation, she is helping the hearing and visually impaired. We put her fund to work with grants to help places like Cinema Arts Centre being able to provide Assisted Devices for the Blind, Deaf, and Hard-of-Hearing.
