The Bronx Community Foundation held its inaugural Day of Collective Action and Giving in Hunts Point over the weekend. The event brought together more than 250 community members, elected officials and nonprofit leaders to distribute over 200 laptops to local schoolchildren.
The Bronx Community Foundation also distributed $45,000 in grants — $7,500 each — to six community-based organizations serving the Bronx, highlighting the vital roles they play in the community.
The event, the first of its kind for the nine-year-old foundation, drew families who arrived well before the start time.
“Families and children started showing up at 10:45am to be in line,” said Executive Director LaToya Williams-Belfort.
According to a 2025 report by a Center for Urban Future, the Bronx has the lowest rate of broadband adoption in New York City, with 22.4% of households lacking home internet access and one in three households — over 184,000 homes — without a computer.
The expiration of the federal Affordable Connectivity Program in 2024, in which 44% of Bronx households were enrolled, has made things worse.
“If we don’t get devices into the hands of young people and families, the technology cycle is moving so fast. In a borough that’s already been left behind, we just deepen the divide,” Williams-Belfort told the Bronx Times.
Among the recipients were five brothers, who had previously shared two or three laptops between them. Their father, Christopher Love, said he is excited that each child can do school work and play games without interfering with each other’s screen time.
“Now all of them have a computer,” he said. “That’s gonna be pretty cool.”
The laptops were donated in part by the Open Society Foundation New York, whose representative Gladys Garcia described how a conversation with her manager years ago sparked the partnership.
“You may have planted a seed in somebody right now,” Garcia said. “They’ll take that laptop, and who knows where they can take them, and they can go back, years later, and say that it was this laptop that got my career going.”
The day was also about grant-giving to six community organizations. Saturday’s six recipients reflected the breadth of need in a borough where over 2,000 nonprofits operate, says the Bronx Community Foundation, many of them under-resourced and under the radar.
One of the recipients is Nazareth Housing, a homelessness prevention organization serving the Bronx and Lower East Side. Its executive director Rachel Levine said the organization will direct its $7,500 toward its food pantry operations.
“Particularly now with the need being on the increase and the impact of the changes in the federal regulations on SNAP, this will definitely help us serve our community,” Levine said.
Sapna NYC, which serves South Asian immigrant women and families in Parkchester, received a grant to expand its digital literacy program. It offers digital courses taught entirely in Bangla that take students from turning on a computer through Google Suite proficiency.
Last year, 200 students completed it and there’s still a waitlist. Diya Basu-Sen, Executive Director of Sapna NYC, said this grant will help the organization design a higher-level digital literacy class and offer more classes to the community.
Elected officials including city Councilmembers Amanda Farias and Justin Sanchez, and Assemblymembers Emerita Torres and Amanda Septimo attended the event.
Councilmember Amanda Farias has worked with two of Saturday’s grantees directly: Sapna operates in her district, and she and Afrikana go back to pandemic-era food relief.
“It’s just really great to see two women-led organizations being recognized here and supported by the Bronx Community Foundation in this way,” Farias told the Bronx Times.
Assemblymember Amanda Septimo, who has worked with BxCF on a Small Business Security Initiative to install cameras in bodegas experiencing violence, praised the foundation’s multi-pronged approach to change.
“They focus on making change at every level, at the direct level with laptop giveaways, but then also thinking about larger tech systems and how to build them,” Septimo told the Bronx Times
Since its founding in 2017, BxCF has delivered over $15 million in grants and resources, reaching 175,000 Bronxites, according to Williams-Belfort. The goal over the next decade: 800,000. Saturday was the start, said Williams-Belfort.
“this is our first, but we’re hopeful to have many more to come.”
Carol Chen is a student at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. For more coverage, subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram!
