The mission of the HCNY Foundation is to serve students and alumni/ae who have ties to our home: New York City. We pursue numerous programs year after year to achieve our goals including:
- Making a large annual gift to the Harvard College Financial Aid Program;
- Mentoring five new Harvard College Students from low income backgrounds, who are often first generation college students. At any given time we support 20 students (five from each class) by creating an additional network of current students, recent alumni/ae, and older alumni/ae for these students to access. Regularly we offer stipends, career opportunities, interviewing practice, resume review, and perhaps most importantly, friendship;
- Serving as a safety net for many students to give a helping hand financially when there is a need. For instance, when the entire Harvard Community learned in March of 2020 that they had to leave campus within a week, we provided financial support to ease the burden of this sudden move for many students;
- Creating in-person events for students on campus and in NYC, furnishing stipends for Harvard College students looking to work in New York City over the summers in non-paying, or low paying fields including the arts, academia, public service and government;
- Providing Tuition Grants for members of the New York Police Department to attend the Kennedy School’s mid-career Master in Public Administration program;
- Offering stipends for Harvard Law School students who wish to work at select low paying New York City legal related jobs, including environmental law, poverty law, child advocacy law, and voting rights law;
- Creating opportunities for graduate students at The Graduate School of Design to tackle problems of urban development in our city;
- Supporting the The Graduate School of Education in its important work to address the quality of education in our city;
- Hosting frequent speaker series on Journalism, Security, Criminal Justice and other pressing issues facing our city;