[3] The New York Foundation was created by Edward C. Henderson, Jacob H. Schiff, Isaac Newton Seligman, and Paul Warburg in order that they might "distribute... resources for altruistic purposes, charitable, benevolent, educational, or otherwise, within the United States of America".
[3] The Foundation was officially incorporated in April 1909, when the charter drafted by Henderson, Schiff, Seligman, and Warburg was enacted by the New York State Legislature and signed by the Governor, making it one of the oldest organizations of its kind.
[4] That same year the Foundation gave a $4,100 grant to the Henry Street Settlement so that they might provide low-income families who were unable to afford "hospitals beds" with visiting nurse service.
[3] In 1912 The New York Prohibition Association received funds from the Foundation for a "protective league" for "girls... working in factories, offices, and shops".
[3] Two grants were awarded to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, "a newly formed organization" whose Director of Publicity and Research, W. E. B.
Du Bois had personally requested funding from the Foundation for "an investigation of the Negro Public Schools in the United States" as well as for the "Bureau of Legal Redress for Colored People".
[3] In 1934 the Foundation funded a program which helped scholars forced out of Germany by Nazi persecution get jobs at leading American universities.
[3] The Foundation also began giving more grants to groups serving needy children, African-Americans, and the growing Puerto Rican population.
ASPIRA, an organization committed to educating and training young Puerto Ricans so that they might achieve leadership roles in their community, was initially funded in part by grants from the New York Foundation.
[3] In 1958, David M. Heyman was asked by Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. to head a commission studying the deterioration of municipal hospitals in the city.
40.4% of those grants were given as "'seed money' to stimulate research and expansion and modernization of existing medical school and hospital and nursing service programs.
President David M. Heyman said that the Foundation's goal was "to identify new areas of need and... put financial resources to work on those particularly pressing problems whose solutions would promise the greatest good".
The New York Times wrote that the program "promises the first important break-through in decades in reducing mounting costs of hospital care... for the chronically-disabled".
Grants made funded everything from a study of lead poisoning among children in the South Bronx to a program of financial assistance for students from disadvantaged urban areas and from fuel cooperatives for tenant-managed buildings to the advanced training of minority personnel in various professions.
In the wake of the "devastating impact that the financial crisis [had] on the City's already ravaged neighborhoods" the Foundation "redoubled its efforts" and commitment to "the young and the aged, the poor and minorities" as well as "people and groups working to improve their own communities".
Challenging the status quo of the times, the Foundation was "willing to take calculated risks to assess local resources and mobilize and deliver them at the neighborhood level".