Issue 186: Jersey City nonprofits are in really big trouble.

Plus: all aboard the Hot Mess Express, ICYMI, and a feral of the week.

Good morning! For this week, I decided to dig in a bit into an issue that’s been brewing in JC for some time and is not being made any better by our current political climate: local nonprofit funding. And my friends, the news is not good. But — I hope you’re staying cozy and warm during this snowy Sunday, and as always, thank you for reading! — Amy

---

Jersey City’s nonprofits are in really big trouble

I started hearing grumblings from our nonprofit sector when the Trump executive order freezing federal funding was issued (it was later stopped by a judge but that’s a whole other story), and again when AG Pam Bondi made her statement about cutting off federal funds to sanctuary cities. Well, “grumblings” isn’t exactly accurate; “anguished screams” is probably a lot closer. Suddenly, every person I know who works for a JC nonprofit seemed immediately on edge, and a lot of people suddenly found themselves laid off or on furlough. It’s like somehow, almost overnight, it seemed like all of our local nonprofits were in trouble all at once, and I wanted to understand how we got here.

To really dig in and understand, we have to start with one uncomfortable truth that Jersey City has been facing for decades: our local nonprofits have never really done very well, ever, in terms of fundraising. Even under Biden and before, it was pretty tough here for the various nonprofit orgs that serve our community. I’ll break down why that is to the best of my abilities below, but needless to say, the added pressure of what Trump is now bringing to the table means that I’m worried that many of them simply may not survive the next four years.

In talking to different folks about what’s going on, I reached out to Carol Sainthilaire, Executive Director of the Waterfront Project. I’ve written about WFP in this newsletter many times before — they provide free legal services to people in Hudson County who are facing eviction and other housing issues. Essentially, they are an organization that tries to keep people housed — they quite often represent people with few other options available to them who are staring down the very real possibility that they may become homeless. Obviously this is a very important service that we need to have for all kinds of ethical and humanitarian reasons, but also for financial ones as well — once someone becomes actually, totally homeless, the cost to local municipalities spirals.

Carol was extremely frank and honest with me with the challenges Waterfront Project is facing right now. She shared with me that she put herself on furlough back over the summer, giving back a chunk of her salary to the organization so that they didn’t have to cut their staff. But now, after many months of working on a reduced salary herself, she’s having to seriously think about what their next move will be, as their funding for the foreseeable future is not looking great, certainly not with the way things are going in Washington.

WFP — like most orgs in our city — depends on government funding. It gets most of their money from the city, county, state, and federal governments. Yes, there are individuals and companies that donate, but I’ll break down the issues with that below. The vast majority of their budget comes from the government, as is the case with many, if not most, JC organizations. And a lot of the money that comes from the government relies on a “spend money to get money” model — meaning, an org is expected to first lay out the money for a program and then get a grant to pay for it. I’m sure you see the potential issues here — for a small organization with no endowment and few corporate/individual donors, this means you’re constantly moving money around and potentially digging holes for yourself with no guarantee that the next grant will come through. (I have heard this exact same thing from numerous orgs in JC — this seems to be the situation that many of them are in.)

So now take this very tenuous situation and add in Trump. With a President at the helm who makes sweeping changes via Executive Order nearly every other day, a great deal of chaos gets added into an already pretty crazy situation. A delay of even a couple of days can easily mean an organization finds themselves with literally no money to pay their bills and with emergencies that simply cannot wait. Because so much of the money they depend upon is intermingled — a grant from the county may be paid for in part by a grant from the federal government, for instance — there’s a million little places where something can go wrong. And in a time of absolute chaos, where the tiniest little shift can affect so many other things like a huge game of Jenga, these organizations are struggling to find some sort of way to survive.

So, is there any solution to this? And if so, what? In talking to Carol, my feeble brain immediately just spat out “well, sounds like we need more individual/corporate donors to step up in Jersey City,” which yes, thank you stupid brain, has absolutely been thought of by many people before. But now I want to talk a little bit about why this is more difficult in JC than it is in other places, and why our city may be hit much harder by the Trump administration than most people are ready to admit right now.

As I mentioned up top, fundraising in Jersey City has always been very difficult. It’s been an issue our city has dealt with for decades. For instance, when talk of the Pompidou coming to JC first started, you immediately heard from local arts nonprofits a collective gasp as they all feared their grip on funding possibly being wrested away. Regardless how you feel about that project, that wasn’t a totally ridiculous reaction to have. What art galleries and nonprofits have been saying for years is that while the income level of Jersey City keeps slowly rising, local charitable giving simply isn’t. JC doesn’t have a billionaire class like NYC does, where super-rich donors with seemingly unlimited money can donate to all sorts of organizations at once and not even feel a tiny ding. We certainly have a lot of people who earn a lot of money, but for those that donate, a lot of that seems to be going to NYC nonprofits (more on that in a moment). What those orgs fear about the Pompidou is that the very few people who do donate might just redirect their money to that large, flashy French museum, and away from them.

At the same time, we don’t have the kind of corporate giving culture that similar sized cities often have. Over in Newark, there is Prudential — a massive company that hires over 40k people in the city and has a major presence; it returns the favor to the city by underwriting a number of local organizations, events, and charities. There are also Audible, that has close to 2,000 employees, and Horizon BCBS with 5,000, both of which also contribute to corporate giving in the city, just to name a few.

We simply don’t have companies that are at that scale in JC who donate locally. If you look on the list of sponsors for any Jersey City event that thanks corporate partners, you will tend to see the same handful of real estate firms that sponsor events over and over. That’s it. That’s who — other than the government — is paying for stuff here. These tend to be relatively small companies (well, compared to a Prudential). It’s great that they sponsor what they do, but it’s a totally different situation to compare something like Silverman real estate group’s charitable giving to Prudential’s — there’s no way that even the most generous small company could even compete with a behemoth like that.

I wanted to pull up the funding of a similar org in NYC to compare to the Waterfront Project, so you can get a real sense of the difference in funding faced by organizations here. I picked NY Legal Assistance Group, which is larger so it’s not entirely 1:1, but all the same I think my point comes through: if you look at their 2023 annual report, you’ll see that they count donations from major corporations like Pfizer, Mastercard, AIG, and Bloomberg, among many others. On their list of attorney firms that support them are numerous companies many of which have over 1,000 attorneys in their network; this isn’t an organization that’s getting $100 here or there from a local company, but rather they are counting upon major donations from massive, wealthy corporations. Their board is filled with high powered attorneys connected to some of the biggest firms in the world; if you join their board, the networking has to be incredible (so lots of reasons for an individual to want to join), and then the organization can also depend upon those board members to open their own pockets to donate. How can a Jersey City nonprofit compete with something like that?

Imagine you’re some person living in Jersey City who is single and earns $300k a year. If we assume your responsibilities are uncomplicated, that’s a lot of money — and you certainly could afford to throw some of that cash around to support various causes you like. And so, you will face a choice: will you donate that money locally in JC, or will you just zip over to NYC and donate it? If you decide you want to do it in NYC, there are nonprofits with boards you can join where you will instantly be in the company of the elite of the city — that same generational wealth/billionaire class we don’t have here. You’ll get invited to great cocktail parties where you can mix and mingle with all sorts of people, way wealthier than you are, and maybe you can also pitch to those people exciting ideas to grow your own business or otherwise get something out of this time you’re spending going to board meetings. I mean, maybe you’ll get to rub elbows with Larry Fink, the billionaire CEO of BlackRock who is on a lot of boards, or people like that. You get perks galore, essentially.

Meanwhile, you know who’s on boards in Jersey City? Put it this way — in the last six months, at least a half dozen nonprofits in JC have asked me to join their board. And like, I’m a nice person and I swear I’m fun at parties and stuff, but I’m not going to help you make lots of money at your company. I would if I could, I swear! But I can’t. I’m an artist and an academic and I probably make way less money than you realize. No one wants to rub elbows with me, nor should they. The other board members I see on boards of local nonprofits are like me or close to it — local advocates, some politicians, a few well-off people here or there. They’re fine, they mean well, but honestly? If you have enough money to buy your way into a NYC board, you’d be nuts not to. With only so much free time and a finite (even if quite large) amount of money to spread around, you would have to be a genuine angel to turn down the perks of joining a board there for one here. For most mortals, joining one in NYC just makes so much more sense.

So, for all these reasons, JC keeps getting left out in the cold. We have thousands, probably tens of thousands of people in serious need here, and yet we’re simply not getting the kind of charitable donations we need from individuals or corporations to serve them. And again, please understand that I’m talking about much more than the Waterfront Project — I’m talking about orgs that administer all kinds of necessary services in our community, saving our local government millions in return for their small investments. We need a massive sea change for how nonprofits get their funding here, because what has barely gotten us by in the past doesn’t seem to really be working now that we have an added stressor in the mix. The chaos coming out of DC isn’t going to end any time soon — and even if cooler heads get elected in the midterms, the fundamental issues these groups have been dealing with for decades still aren’t getting resolved.

So, look. I don’t know any other way to say this but: we’re in very deep trouble. With cuts to government funding either happening now or on its way, I’m genuinely unsure of how our local nonprofit sector is going to survive. We’ve got multiple organizations here who are over 90%+ dependent on government funding and I’m not sure I see them making through what’s coming down the pike with Trump. And if thousands of people in our city are dependent on those orgs, how exactly is this going to work if there aren’t services for them?

We need someone (probably multiple people) with the skill set needed to help guide more money to our city’s organizations. Jersey City orgs that are barely scraping by don’t have the money to individually hire fundraisers to go out and build those kinds of connections, but someone is going to have to step up and do it. We must have someone out there in our community who can help with this, who has the rolodex and social circle and ability to network to make this happen. I’m talking about someone who can go out and talk to the business community in JC and get them more involved, tap funding sources outside of the area, and just generally direct some more private money our way — we need a relentless cheerleader for these groups, and a pro bono one at that. Someone want to step up? Please?

Until then, Waterfront Project really needs your support. Every little bit helps, and every little bit goes to help keep people from becoming homeless. It’s crucial that they survive. We need a better, long term solution to help our local orgs, but for now, this is one thing we can do.

---

Hot Mess Express

Well, on another topic entirely (sort of?), reader Megan Carolan wrote in to tell me about Hot Mess Express, which is opening a branch here. She writes:

Hot Mess Express is a national group who described their mission as to "serve the women in our community with no judgement through cleaning, organizing, and offering a fresh start. " The new Jersey City chapter describes the work further: "Hot Mess Express is a group of women here to rescue each other when we can't seem to get ourselves out of the day to day funk. Through nominations, we dispatch ourselves to the homes of fellow women who need some help. We aim to help with laundry, dishes, organizing meal prep and restoration of household balance." The group organizes around "rescue missions" where volunteers descend on a household in need to clean, organize, or otherwise help out. Individuals can nominate someone in their community or self-nominate for help, and can volunteer through joining the FB group. The group also has a registry of cleaning supplies needed to support the work. It strikes me as a very particular type of mutual aid that highlights the often hidden domestic struggles, especially in a world that disproprotionately puts these burdens - and, judgement - on women and especially mothers. I also think the vulnerability needed to make this work is really beautiful - to open your doors to strangers or people you see in the neighborhood and say "I am not handling this right now, and I need help" is sort of quietly revolutionary.

I think for the right person in the right place in their lives, this could be really meaningful and important. I’m slightly torn about how I might feel if a group of strangers showed up at my door ready to clean my apartment (I think I would be either absolutely thrilled or completely horrified depending on my mood), but again — I think for the right person at the right time, this could be incredibly helpful. And of course, the people-helping-people model that’s being expressed here is wonderful to see. Reach out at the links above if you’d like to learn more!

---

ICYMI

• JC Oddities rescheduled: the JC Oddities Til Death Do Us Part event planned for Sunday, February 9th has been reschedule til February 23rd at Sip Studios (140 Sip Ave) due to weather.

• Some of the saddest news ever: Fox & Crow in the Heights has closed, and Barcade downtown is closing in June.

• Gov Murphy/Fulop stories about undocumented people — ok, this is one of the weirdest things ever but I just wanted to put it out there. There was a whole saga this week where Governor Murphy seemed to say that he was harboring an undocumented person in his home, only to come out a few days later and say he was speaking hypothetically (even though, I’m sorry, based on the initial statement that was not even the tiniest bit clear). Mayor Fulop, meanwhile, made a statement in a governor’s race debate that his father’s building in Newark was raided by ICE and then the next day tweeted out footage of the event. Is everybody ok? What happened after the visit? Were advocates alerted? Why was his building targeted? I have no idea. Somehow the story just kind of died from there. Very odd.

• A few members of the community sent me letters about the FAA and helicopter safety after the plane crash in DC. I noticed that at least one of the letters already got published here, so I’m not going to repeat it since it’s gotten some attention already (also I really don’t want to get into publishing letters to the editor for a whole slew of reasons). I definitely share your concerns; I don’t really think my newsletter is the best forum for a letter like that, but I completely agree with the substance of what’s there overall. What’s happening in our skies is very scary!

---

Feral of the week

Well! I was all ready to start pulling some feral content from a local TNR group I’m excited to tell you about, but then this lil guy entered my life — by which I mean, I ran into him in JSQ where I’m pretty sure he was about to maybe commit some crimes? But maybe just stealing my heart (ok, I have no idea where that corniness came from but it’s been a long week):

Oh little garbage cat. You’re the best. Keep doing whatever it was I caught you in the middle of.

---