MANHATTAN — Mayor Michael Bloomberg is ending charitable giving to a program that has pumped roughly $200 million of his largesse into nonprofit groups across the city, the New York Times reported.
Since 2001, the mayor had donated money to hundreds of neighborhood cultural and arts groups through the Carnegie Corporation of New York, a philanthropic trust. Sources told the paper that Bloomberg's giving would eventually be coordinated through his family foundation, the paper reported.
The shift in the mayor's charitable giving has those nonprofit organizations scrambling to fill potential budget shortfalls in a tough fundraising environment, the paper said.
"It will be extremely hard to replace," Carol Ochs, executive director of the 52nd Street Project, a theater group for Hell's Kitchen children, told the Times. "The scary thing is the threat of it going away."
Since 2002, the group has received $400,000 from the mayor, the paper reported.
Spokespeople for the mayor declined to comment to the Times.
