It is a rare moment in a city as fractious as New York when its two most powerful forces, big money and local government, coalesce around the same issue at the same time.
That appears to be happening now, as the city’s largest and most influential charity focused on poverty is poised to make a major push to support early childhood education in the city — just as Mayor Zohran Mamdani has made universal free child care a top priority.
The charity, Robin Hood, announced Monday that it had received a $100 million gift, earmarked for early childhood education, from the Bezos Family Foundation, a philanthropy created by the parents of the Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos.
But it remains to be seen how — and whether — Wall Street’s favorite local charity and a mayor who said on the campaign trail that billionaires should not exist can collaborate to expand child care in New York. It is not yet clear precisely how the gift will be used, or what the city will accept.
Still, Richard R. Buery Jr., Robin Hood’s chief executive, said he was encouraged by the shared enthusiasm for the same issue.
“In a world where it’s so hard to break through the noise, where even people who should be able to agree on facts can’t agree on facts, I think this is a place where we have a set of facts all aligning and pointing in one direction,” he said in an interview.
The gift will form the base of a new $1 billion endowment, the first in the charity’s nearly 40-year-history, but Robin Hood plans to spend the Bezos foundation gift in the near term, Mr. Buery said, to “drive immediate impact.” The endowment is already 70 percent funded and will not exclusively focus on early childhood education.
While cautioning that private money can never replace public funding, he said the donation will help “stabilize” the city’s existing child care system. The Bezos foundation has also pledged another $25 million that, if other donors match it, could boost the total gift to $150 million.
It is not yet clear how much of the money might be directed to the city’s child care expansion, which Mr. Mamdani hopes will include free options for infants as young as 6 weeks old. The mayor’s first steps have been to add more seats to the city’s prekindergarten program for 3-year-olds and create new options for 2-year-olds in some neighborhoods, before eventually expanding citywide.
Jenna Lyle, a spokeswoman for Mr. Mamdani, said in a statement that the city was “proud” to see Robin Hood’s commitment to expanding child care.
“To deliver free, universal child care across all five boroughs, it is going to take a citywide effort — government, providers, working families, labor, philanthropy, and New Yorkers in all five boroughs,” she said.
The Bezos foundation gift was unveiled at Robin Hood’s annual gala, which is one of the largest single-night fund-raisers in the world.
Around 7 p.m. on Monday night at the Javits Center, Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos took their seats at one of the tables closest to the stage. Nearby, Eli Manning, Katie Couric and the tech entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian tucked into char siu chicken and fortune cookies with messages from Robin Hood inside, encouraging guests to donate generously.
Former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg chatted with Miguel Bezos, Jeff Bezos’ father, before shaking hands with the former New York Knicks star Latrell Sprewell.
About 400 tables and roughly 3,000 people away, at the outer ring of the room, Julie Su, Mr. Mamdani’s deputy mayor for economic justice, held her iPhone aloft to take a video of the Lumineers performing a cover of Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind.” At the end of the night, Mr. Buery told attendees that the organization had raised $73 million that evening.
Gov. Kathy Hochul stopped by the gala, but Mr. Mamdani did not attend.
It was not the mayor’s crowd, anyway. Mr. Mamdani, who also skipped the Jeff Bezos-sponsored Met Gala last week, campaigned on a populist message, vowing to tax the rich to pay for a vast expansion of the social safety net for everyone else.
The mayor has not yet found a funding source beyond next year for child care, by far the most expensive piece of his agenda, and he has said the state will need to approve a tax increase in order to fund that program over the long term. Ms. Hochul resisted the mayor’s call to raise income taxes on New Yorkers making more than $1 million in this years state budget but agreed to provide the city $1.2 billion to jump-start his universal child care expansion.
The acrimony between the mayor and the city’s richest residents heated up in recent weeks after Mr. Mamdani filmed a video outside the $238 million home of the billionaire financier Kenneth C. Griffin to promote a pied-à-terre tax.
Mr. Griffin is one of Robin Hood’s most prominent donors. He gave the foundation $15 million in 2017. In 2022, he bid $8 million at the gala’s auction to send two local public schoolteachers to space on one of Mr. Bezos’ Blue Origin rockets.
After Mr. Mamdani released the video outside Mr. Griffin’s home last month, Robin Hood’s press office released a statement, saying Mr. Griffin’s “decades of generosity to Robin Hood have helped transform the lives of countless New Yorkers.”
Robin Hood has teamed up with local government in the past. The charity became the economic engine of Mr. Bloomberg’s push to expand charter schools in New York.
Child care costs have emerged over the last few years as a leading cause of the city’s affordability crisis and a primary concern of the city’s business community, its politicians and its voters.
Business leaders and democratic socialists alike are concerned about what the lack of affordable child care could mean for the city’s economy and its future. New York has seen an exodus of families with young children in recent years, and parents leaving the city or the work force cost the city roughly $23 billion in 2022, according to a report from the Economic Development Corporation.
Mr. Mamdani is hoping to raise $20 million for a new “child care action fund” within the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City, a nonprofit run by the government. The city has so far raised about $3.5 million under that fund, which is likely to be used on pilot programs.
Robin Hood does not typically give to other funds, instead preferring to distribute its own money, which means the two philanthropic efforts may run on parallel tracks.
Still, some of Robin Hood’s money does flow into city programs. The charity is currently funding about $6 million worth of child care investments for the city, including a parent survey that will allow the city to understand more about family demand for child care seats.
Robin Hood’s venture arm recently convened a conference to help improve the city’s systems for hiring and maintaining child care staff. It funded research that brought the current crisis into focus, finding that half the city’s neighborhoods are considered child care “deserts” — areas where options are too few to meet the demand — and that a significant share of local parents have stopped using child care or cut back on child care hours because of the cost.
The charity’s leader, Mr. Buery, oversaw the creation of the city’s first universal prekindergarten expansion in 2014 and has since helped make child care a priority for Robin Hood.
Robin Hood has so much money that it could be difficult for City Hall not to work with the charity in some capacity.
Mr. Mamdani will need private money to push his agenda forward, said Kathryn S. Wylde, the recently retired leader of the Partnership for New York City, where she spent years connecting the city’s business leaders with its politicians. And child care is the issue where there is the clearest overlap between what Mr. Mamdani and the business community each want.
“This is not a context for mudslinging,” Ms. Wylde said. “I think this is in the spirit of, we put down our swords and march forward together.”
Eliza Shapiro reports on New York City for The Times.
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