A new report from the Change Capital Fund, a collaborative of New York City’s leading banks and foundations, offers a cache of ideas from and for low-income neighborhoods across the city.  The report, Innovations, Ideas to Make NYC Neighborhoods More Livable, Sustainable and Resilient, summarizes the 30 proposals submitted from New York City to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Community Change Grant Program last year.

The submissions tackle issues at the heart of the community development agenda, Change Capital Fund’s primary focus.  The strategies would support safe, healthy, and affordable housing; economic opportunity through job training and creation while integrating features to enhance the livability of neighborhoods, from a public health, quality of life, and infrastructural resilience perspective. If implemented, the proposals, summarized in the report, would transform highly polluted, unused public spaces into accessible green space, create parks that both protect residents against flooding and mitigate toxic discharge into NYC’s waterways, create safe and healthy housing in basement apartments, make e-bikes safer and more available to delivery workers. Proposed projects would create hundreds of jobs in composting, energy efficiency improvements, and community solar installations.

The proposals “represent solutions to our city’s needs,” says Elijah Hutchinson, Executive Director of the Mayor’s Office of Climate & Environmental Justice, which assisted many organizations and city agencies to apply to the federal government.

When one of Change Capital Fund’s grantees leveraged a modest grant into a federal award of $4 million, several of the collaborative’s members were inspired to raise a fund to enable NYC organizations to apply for federal grants. Ten grantees submitted ten proposals with the collaborative’s help, one-third of the 30 proposals submitted from New York City. The proposals were labor intensive to prepare, requiring strategies that could be implemented within three years, partnerships codified in written agreements, detailed plans, timelines and budgets. When Change Capital Fund reviewed all the proposals submitted from New York City, its funders found a treasure trove of forward-looking, actionable ideas. Their report is meant to lift up these ideas.

“We hope our report inspires continuing conversation and, ultimately, implementation of these ideas to help improve the health, economic prospects, and quality of life of New York City’s neighborhoods,” said Mike Pratt, President of Scherman Foundation and Change Capital Fund Co-Chair.

“At United Way of New York City, we believe bold solutions are born when those closest to the challenges are empowered to lead, asserts Grace Bonilla, Esq., President & CEO, United Way of New York City, “The ideas surfaced through this report reflect the ingenuity and urgency of our neighborhoods.”

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Change Capital Fund (CCF) is a collaborative of NYC’s leading foundations, financial institutions, the United Way of New York City, intermediaries and the Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity. It works to increase economic opportunities in NYC’s low-income neighborhoods by strengthening community-based development organizations.

Change Capital Fund members include: Altman Foundation; Amalgamated Bank, BankUnited, Capital One, Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation, Enterprise Community Partners, Goldman Sachs, HBSC, JPMorgan Chase, LISC NYC, The M&T Charitable Foundation, Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity, ex-officio, New York Foundation, Principal Foundation, Santander Bank, Scherman Foundation, The New York Community Trust, Trinity Church Wall Street, U.S. Bank Foundation, United Way of New York City, Wells Fargo.