Funder Spotlight: How the Samuels Foundation Supports the Performing Arts and Healthy Aging
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The foundation frequently backs the New York Philharmonic and other Lincoln Center-affiliated groups. Photo: Bumble Dee/shutterstock
We periodically publish quick overviews of grantmakers on our radar, looking at recent developments and key details about how they operate. Today, we’re taking a look at the Fan Fox & Leslie R. Samuels Foundation (the Samuels Foundation).
The New York City-based foundation has two priority areas — supporting mostly Manhattan-based performing arts organizations and improving the quality of life for New York City's older adults through its Healthy Aging program. Interested nonprofits will be pleased to know that it has an “open door” application policy for both programs and provides critical general operating support to performing arts recipients. Here are a few things to know about the foundation.
Its founders were archetypal old school arts patrons
The Samuels Foundation’s primary mission is to support the city’s “large-scale dance, music, opera and theatre companies of national and international importance.” This goal can be traced back to its founders, Fan Fox Samuels (1896-1981), a third-generation member of a Connecticut-based mercantile family, and her husband, Leslie R. Samuels.
The couple were archetypal “old world” arts patrons who preferred to give consistently, extensively and quietly. After marrying in 1940, they settled in New York City and established the foundation in 1959. In 1965, Fan Fox’s sister sold the family’s G. Fox Department Store to the May Department Stores Company for $40 million. When Fan Fox passed away, William G. Blair noted in the New York Times that despite providing millions to the city’s performing arts organizations and at least $5 million to the Lincoln Center in the preceding five years alone, “very few, outside of [the couple’s] circle of friends and their beneficiaries, knew the full extent of their largesse.”
Fan Fox’s “great love,” Blair wrote, was the Lincoln Center and its affiliated organizations, “particularly the Metropolitan Opera, the City Opera, the New York City Ballet, the Philharmonic and the Chamber Music Society.” To honor her wishes, the foundation continues to support many of the center’s constituent groups, like the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Metropolitan Opera.
Fortunately for new grant seekers, the foundation also supports organizations of any size, as long as they enhance the “aesthetic and intellectual life of New York City.” It also provides a small number of grants to conservatory and artist development programs. It does not consider requests for development campaigns, building projects or endowment support.
Most of the funding flows to performing arts groups
For the fiscal year ending July 2021, the foundation had an end-of-year fair market asset value of $210 million and disbursed 306 grants totaling $7.3 million. A cursory scan of its recipient list reveals that roughly 70% of grants flowed to performing arts organizations that year. Practically all of these grants were earmarked for general operating support. Approximately 27% of grants fell under the Healthy Aging priority area (more on that below), while the remainder flowed to organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, making this foundation something of an under-the-radar progressive funder, albeit at a small scale. Fewer than 30 grants went to organizations outside of New York State.
According to the foundation’s Form 990 for the following year, its fair market value of all assets was $196 million. It disbursed $6.9 million, although the form I accessed did not include a list of nonprofit recipients. That said, I imagine the geographic and thematic complexion of recent recipients closely resembled that of the previous year. (A foundation rep declined to comment for this profile.)
It’s keen on general operating support and has an “open door” policy
The foundation’s support for performing arts organizations comes as leaders are grappling with diminished post-pandemic audience levels, the decline of the subscription model, rising labor costs and sparse cash reserves. It’s against this backdrop that two aspects of the foundation’s performing arts grantmaking come into sharper focus.
First, the foundation makes a habit of agreeing to applicants’ requests for general operating support, which allows organizations’ leaders to allocate funding as they see fit. Recent grants earmarked for general support funded the New York Philharmonic ($200,000), American Ballet Theatre ($70,000), Orchestra of St. Luke’s ($45,000) and Bronx Opera ($10,000).
The Samuels Foundation also has an “open door policy” and “welcomes new applications that fit within our guidelines.” Organizations with no previous relationship to the foundation are asked to drop a line to its manager of program administration to ensure alignment with its grantmaking guidelines.
That said, the foundation reminds applicants that it “receives many more requests for support than it could ever fund” and that “few additional organizations will be added” to the foundation’s roster in 2023 and 2024. Nonetheless, I’d argue that nonprofits could still benefit from reaching out to the foundation to discuss key projects and priorities, even if funding fails to materialize.
It’s a player in the growing field of healthy aging
Last October, my colleague Wendy Paris looked at the Reframing Aging Initiative, a funder collaborative that educates policymakers on the importance of aging-oriented programs and policies at a time when roughly 10,000 Americans turn 65 every day. The Samuels Foundation is a lead funder in this effort, and its support dovetails with its second priority area, Healthy Aging, which “primarily funds patient-based and social service activities that directly help the older adults of New York City.”
Again, the foundation’s doors are wonderfully wide open to nonprofit leaders, who are encouraged to contact a Healthy Aging program officer. If foundation leaders feel a project could be a good fit, they’ll invite the nonprofit to submit a letter of intent. Evaluation criteria include the extent to which the program improves the overall quality of life of or healthcare service delivery to the city’s older residents; if it has a “realistic, achievable work plan and a rational, well-justified budget”; the experience and qualifications of program staff; and whether the program’s sponsoring organization is “stable, competent and committed.”
Healthy Aging grants are almost exclusively earmarked for projects, not general operating support. Recent recipients include $146,000 to Lifetime Arts to strengthen the Brooklyn Public Library’s creative aging program and sustainability efforts through staff coaching, and $75,000 to Riverstone Senior Life Services to fund an additional social worker to provide intensive case management services for residents.
