What Happens When Federal Funding Disappears? A Preview From the Bronx

On a sweltering summer day, children leap between rocks along the Bronx River while cyclists pedal on newly paved paths. Kayaks rest on what was once an industrial dumping ground, now transformed into a bustling promenade along the city’s only freshwater river.
 

The Bronx River Greenway, a series of stitched-together waterfront parks built atop once largely abandoned and polluted wasteland, is a hard-fought victory for the country’s poorest congressional district — one that local organizers call a “beacon of environmental justice” built by federal dollars and water pollution settlements from the borough’s wealthier neighbors.
 

Now, like thousands of nonprofits around the country, the organizations that steward this green oasis say its future is in jeopardy. The Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to federal grants have left communities nationwide in precarious straits, but few places face as stark a reckoning as the Bronx, where federal funding has proved indispensable for revitalizing green spaces, protecting survivors of domestic violence, and preventing youth violence.
 

Over 84 percent of nonprofits based in the Bronx — which total 342 organizations — rely on federal grants now at risk under the Trump administration’s policies, according to an analysis by the Urban Institute. It’s a significant increase from the statewide share, 70 percent, which would be largely defunded without the government dollars that often flow from a mixture of federal, state, and local coffers.
 

The Urban Institute found that in all but two of the country’s 437 congressional districts, the typical nonprofit could not cover its expenses without government grants. It’s a dependence that reflects how nonprofits have increasingly served as contractors for government services — like operating homeless shelters or maintaining parkland — since the 1960s.

In the Bronx, if such grants were to disappear entirely, the borough’s hundreds of nonprofits could face a collective deficit of nearly 30 percent — cuts that have begun to force layoffs, program cuts, and austerity on dozens of groups connecting Bronxites to low-cost health care, food assistance, and preschool slots.
 

“When America sneezes, the Bronx gets the flu,” said Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-15), who represents the district. “I think we in the Bronx feel we have been and will continue to be the hardest hit by the impact of a Trump presidency.”
 

From Revival to Reversal
Nestled in a corner of parkland atop the site of an abandoned amusement park, the headquarters of the Bronx River Alliance is located in what’s often called the borough’s greenest building, boasting nature classrooms, samples of the river’s flora and fauna, and a storage space teeming with kayaks and canoes.

In March, the group received formal notice that it would be losing $1.5 million in federal grants promised under the Inflation Reduction Act last year for improving water quality in the river and engaging residents in climate-resilience projects. After years of rising momentum, cubicles now sit empty. Leaders held off on hiring in anticipation of the Trump administration’s cuts, and now they don’t know if they’ll get the money to fill those roles.
 

“I’ve met some of the folks who were pulling cars out of the river in the ’70s and ’80s,” said Daniel Ranells, the group’s deputy director of programs. Back then, the area was a “dumping ground” so inundated with industrial waste, tires, abandoned cars, ovens, and microwaves that “folks didn’t really understand there was a river there.”
 

That has shifted dramatically in recent years thanks in part to decades of federal investment. The results are visible everywhere. Just south of its headquarters, the Bronx River Alliance restored salt marshes along the riverbanks of a shuttered concrete plant and transformed abandoned storage silos into copper-colored art sculptures, towering testaments to the park’s revitalization.

In 2007, the first beaver appeared on the Bronx River in over 200 years — named “José the Beaver” in honor of former Congressman José E. Serrano, who helped direct millions in federal funds to community groups dedicated to the river’s restoration.

“The Bronx River is a shining light of environmental justice and restoration,” Ranells said, and millions in federal funding over the years has helped “make it a destination” after years of neglect.

Progress Frozen
Now staffers at the Bronx River Alliance describe a sense of “whiplash” in seeing hard-fought funds dry up and grant language scrubbed of any allusions to racial or environmental justice, just a few years after the Environmental Protection Agency dedicated tens of millions of dollars to addressing environmental justice under the Biden administration.
 

Without federal support, “I don’t think it’ll stop us,” Ranells said, “but it will reduce the scale and the speed at which we can do things, and also the number of different things that we can do.”
 

The Bronx River Alliance has joined other nonprofits in suing the Trump administration to unfreeze funds, but the uncertainty has already disrupted years of planning, a reality that has rippled across the neighborhood, leaving few local nonprofits untouched.
 

Up the street from Starlight Park, the office of the Osborne Association, a group that has worked to prevent youth violence for nearly a century, has grown quieter in recent months. In April, the group received an email from the Bureau of Justice Assistance stating their remaining $666,000 of what had been a $2 million federal grant for gun violence prevention “no longer effectuates department priorities.”
 

The abrupt cut thrust the nonprofit into “triage mode,” said Osborne President Jonathan Monsalve, who was immediately forced to lay off three staffers and reduce the number of annual participants from 75 to 50 in an intensive diversion program that offers young adults facing gun charges an alternative to jail time.
 

“It’s a lifeline for young people, and it’s no longer there for 25 more of them,” Monsalve said. “Without another alternative, it’s 25 young people that will see prison or jail time, and that’s incredibly frustrating.”
 

Why the Bronx Bears the Brunt
The Department of Justice has canceled over $810 million in similar grants to nonprofits working in violence prevention. Likewise, shortly after President Trump took office, the Environmental Protection Agency attempted to cancel $2 billion in grants earmarked for environmental justice work around the country.
 

Nonprofit leaders say the cuts hit hardest in the places that can afford them the least. In the Bronx, almost 30 percent of residents live in poverty, the vast majority of whom are Black or Latino, and nearly one in six schoolchildren experience homelessness every year.
 

“We’ve had decades of disinvestment in these communities, and we had been starting to see some meaningful investment and community-based solutions that were actually working,” said Monsalve. “And then all of a sudden that support just gets yanked away.”
 

The federal government, he said, is essentially telling these communities: “You aren’t a priority anymore. You don’t fit the plan.”

In the South Bronx, just blocks from Yankee Stadium, federal funding shifts are set to scale down a decades-old program that stationed domestic violence advocates in the borough’s criminal court. The loss means that many hundreds of domestic violence survivors will no longer have access to support navigating the legal system and arranging emergency shelter.
 

Safe Horizon, the nation’s largest victim-service organization, operated the program through a three-year, million-dollar federal grant it had long received in partnership with the Bronx Borough President and District Attorney’s office. But when the grant came up for renewal this year, it came with new restrictions that CEO Liz Roberts described as “so extreme, so broad, so radical” that the organization chose to walk away rather than accept conditions which would have prohibited supporting transgender survivors or treating domestic violence as a systemic issue.
 

“It wasn’t going to be possible for us to change the way we talk with our staff and our clients and our funders about our work,” she said, but the decision was agonizing given the volume of domestic violence in the Bronx. The program in the Bronx Criminal Court will still exist due to city funding, but its capacity will be “greatly reduced” with the elimination of two full-time positions.
 

What it means is a victim who has just been assaulted, followed by police documentation, “may not have the opportunity to talk to an advocate about their options, about their rights, or about their safety,” she said. “It directly increases the risk to that person that they could be harmed again.”
 

Filling the Void
The Bronx program represents just one piece of Safe Horizon’s broader federal funding, which comprises about 24 percent of the organization’s budget. Roberts said she’s bracing for cuts across all federal funding streams that could force the closure of domestic violence shelters or reductions to the organization’s 24-hour hotline that serves the entire city.
 

As nonprofits nationwide grapple with similar losses, Roberts said private philanthropy and local or state governments will need to step up in ways they haven’t before. Yet she rejected the refrain that foundations can’t make a meaningful difference.
 

“I hear that line over and over, but it’s kind of all-or-nothing thinking,” she said. “We do need philanthropy to be willing to make some smart and thoughtful and principled decisions about where they can help to fill those gaps.”
 

In places like the Bronx, however, finding alternative funding sources can prove especially challenging. “The not-for-profit sector is often fragile, and nowhere more so than the Bronx,” Torres said of the district he represents, where organizations tend to be more dependent on government funding and have less access to philanthropy than wealthier enclaves.
 

“Organizations spent hundreds of thousands of dollars simply to apply for a contract and hired staff and made all these plans only to see the written contract disappear,” Torres said. “It’s deeply destabilizing, and in the Bronx, we have community-based organizations that do not have the cash flow to absorb those shocks.”
 

Familiar Fights
In recent months, Sean Coleman, who leads the Bronx’s only LGBTQ community center, Destination Tomorrow, has seen organizations across the borough buckle under cuts they can’t absorb. His own organization has about $750,000 in federal grants that could be at risk, though he believes his funding strategy is diversified enough to weather the storm.
 

A bigger challenge, he said, is that demand for services has surged 10 percent in the past year alone, as LGBTQ people from states with hostile policies migrate to New York seeking safety. With so many challenges and defunded organizations competing for attention, he fears that smaller organizations, like those working on HIV prevention in the Bronx, may be overlooked by well-intentioned funders opting for larger organizations with flashier websites and broader name recognition.
 

For Coleman, the current crisis feels familiar. “I’m not sure if the younger members of our community understand that we’ve been here before — these are not fights that we haven’t seen before,” he said.
 

Decades ago, there was virtually no federal funding available for LGBTQ organizations like his, which hosted the Bronx’s second ever Pride Parade last month. The river that children now play in was once so clogged with abandoned cars and industrial waste that residents barely knew it existed.
 

“The fight today is also going to be the fight five years from now and 10 years from now,” Coleman said. “We’re going to have to recognize that this fight for freedom is ongoing, no matter how many times we win.”

Read the article in its original format here: https://www.philanthropy.com/article/what-happens-when-federal-funding-disappears-a-preview-from-the-bronx?