Starting this month, a mobile food pantry will roll into the same Stamford, Conn., zip code as Steve Cohen’s Point72 Asset Management.
A $400,000 grant from the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation is making the customized, refrigerated pantry possible. It’s one of the 25 gifts included in the Bloomberg News Philanthropy Tracker for the month of March.
The Cohens’ gift, announced two months after he began managing outside investors’ money, is going to Person-to-Person, founded just days after the assassination of Martin Luther King. The organization has sites in Darien and Norwalk, Connecticut, which both have lower poverty rates rates than Stamford’s 9.4 percent.
“Instead of setting up a bricks-and-mortar situation, this gives us the flexibility,” Person-to-Person Executive Director Ceci Maher said. “If one site isn’t working out, we can move to another.”
One place the truck will park is at Building One Community, which teaches immigrants English as a second language and is just a mile away from Point72’s leafy campus. Other locations are the Ferguson Public Library, the Boys and Girls Club at the Yerwood Center, and Domus, which serves disadvantaged youths.
The truck can provide as many as 200 families with a week’s supply of food they get to select. A caseworker is also on board, in an office up front, to serve clients’ other needs, like preventing eviction or paying their utilities. The Cohens’ gift also helped secure a warehouse for the truck and its provisions. The couple has supported Person-to-Person since 2012 and funded a renovation in Norwalk.
Each month, the Bloomberg News Philanthropy Tracker rounds up big, small and interesting gift announcements. Email tips to [email protected].
March gifts
$150 million: Susan and Richard Rogel, founder of Preferred Provider Organization of Michigan, to the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center. The sum includes $40 million given as an unrestricted gift in 2013 that has now been earmarked for the cancer center. Richard’s father, both of Susan’s parents and Susan’s daughter died of cancer.
$30 million: Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s Chan Zuckerberg Initiative for Reach Every Reader, a program of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Integrated Learning Initiative. Researchers will develop and test an online tool to build reading skills based on an assessment of the child’s difficulties. The goal is to help children read at grade level by the end of third grade.