As New York City absorbed the shock that the raging COVID-19 virus would necessitate the city’s shut-down and schools and businesses locked their doors, so, did the staff of community-based organizations head home. Just as an inequitable world was becoming unimaginably worse for the city’s poorest, the lights in community centers went out and, in an instant, thousands of English learners had no classes, children had no afterschool, teens no summer work, job seekers no way to access training, immigrants no kind English-speaker explaining a path to citizenship… It was as if the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come had shown a glimpse of an ugly future in a scary present.

Read the Essential Yet Invisible report online

Download the Essential Yet Invisible report

This report is from the Change Capital Fund (CCF). We are funders who have pooled our resources to support neighborhood-based, community development corporations for twenty-five years. Our long-term relationship with our grantees affords us an opportunity to get to know them well and we are grateful for their dedication, adaptability, and resilience. Born in crises, New York City’s community development corporations (CDCs) formed to rebuild homes and revitalize their neighborhoods, renovating over 100,000 apartments as affordable housing and putting thousands of buildings back on the tax rolls. Today, they remain essential emergency responders that work directly with residents to soften the blows of crises, call attention to the experiences of low-income people, and advocate for public policies that support them. Our grantees were behind successful organizing campaigns that are preventing hundreds of thousands of evictions and that will provide relief for undocumented workers.