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The bike club run by Brooklyn’s El Puente gives 16-year-old Karly Rosa a sense of peace as she explores New York City on two wheels.
For Karly, the club is more than an extracurricular activity; it’s a space for learning and emotional well-being. Through group rides, participants gain hands-on experience taking note of dangerous intersections and advocating for safer streets in their community.
“Here, you’re able to speak your mind…and think [about] how you can better the community,” Karly said about the bike club.
Students like Karly were poised to receive further training as community advocates through a $3.1 million Environmental Protection Agency grant to El Puente, a longtime youth and environmental justice organization. Those at two public schools, M.S. 50 and El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice, Karly’s school, expected to be part of the nonprofit’s new Leadership Development Training Program to advocate for better air quality and climate resilience in their neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Bushwick, where high asthma rates and the effect of urban heat are daily realities.
But the organization lost that grant alongside other federal funding as part of a wave of cuts targeting environmental justice funding under the Trump administration in its effort to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. The push is now threatening hundreds of organizations serving communities of color and low-income neighborhoods, forcing nonprofits nationwide to lay off staff and scale back vital programs.
At El Puente, the cuts have created a domino effect rippling through the organization, forcing it not only to reassess ambitious projects the group had expected to be federally funded, but also to pause its high school programs for the summer to prioritize its work with younger children.
“Some teams are becoming smaller, and we’re going to have to dig deep and prioritize really hard,” said Asenhat Gómez, El Puente’s interim co-executive director.
The organization is now faced with difficult decisions, which Gómez called a “balancing act.”
“Do we keep our staff, or do we put out these large events that we usually do that do require resources?”
The loss of funding has rippled through every corner of El Puente’s work, since the organization had to lay off 15 of roughly 100 staff members across multiple teams. The future of the annual WEPA! Festival, a September cornerstone celebration of local cultural heritage, is uncertain.
Now, only one staff member remains to lead the bike club after two others were laid off this spring. The club lost its only bilingual facilitator, who could assist with Spanish-speaking riders, and a younger mentor, who led bike repair workshops. The organization reduced club participation from 15 regular and six casual participants to just four or five experienced riders.
For the EPA grant, El Puente intended to use it to empower youth of color, public housing residents, and neighborhood elders to take the lead on tackling environmental health challenges in communities that have faced decades of pollution and climate impacts.
Students participating in the Leadership Development Training Program funded by the grant would have been able to run for Environmental Advisory Boards, or representative groups tasked with developing recommendations and plans for city officials on environmental issues. The goal was to empower youth and other neighborhood locals at decision-making tables to take charge of environmental justice in their neighborhoods.
But after months of planning and collaboration, the EPA canceled the grant in a May letter to the organization, saying that “the objectives of the award are no longer consistent with EPA funding priorities.”
This compounded the impact of no longer receiving its longstanding National Endowment for the Arts grant, for which El Puente never received a response after re-applying for a $60,000 award last year. The NEA grant allows organizations to apply for other arts funding, Gómez said.
The EPA and NEA did not respond to requests for comment.
Funding cuts reshape nonprofit landscape
The Trump administration’s budget and policy directives have targeted both the EPA and NEA for sweeping cuts, with the aim of eliminating support for initiatives deemed “outside new priorities.” The EPA has canceled $1.5 billion in grants focused on environmental justice and DEI, despite Congressional designation that these funds reach disadvantaged communities.
These changes have had immediate, devastating effects. In New York alone, nonprofits receive nearly $29 billion of $300 billion in government funding that flows through the sector, said Jamie Levine Daniel, an associate professor at NYU Wagner who studies nonprofit funding.
Around 70% of nonprofits in the state are at risk of funding shortfalls without government grants. Nationally, government funding is the second largest source of revenue for nonprofits, and about 60–80% of organizations rely on some form of governmental support, according to the Urban Institute, a public policy think tank.
Levine Daniel noted that while shifts in government funding priorities are common, what’s unprecedented now is the abrupt cancellation of grants after they’ve already been awarded and work has begun.
“To lose access to grants that were already allocated, to funding that was already allocated that inform budgets and informed ongoing activity, is certainly a change and happening on an unprecedented scale,” Levine Daniel said.
Raísa Lin Garden-Lucerna, El Puente’s environmental justice manager and daughter of the organization’s co-founders, described the EPA grant as the “intersection” of their work. Their program was designed to give community members a direct role in identifying local issues, shaping solutions, and advocating for change at the policy level, she noted.
Growing up with asthma and witnessing firsthand the health impacts in her own family, Garden-Lucerna discussed how she took her first steps at El Puente and was raised to understand the importance of environmental justice work in the neighborhood.
“What the hope would have been with this grant was to be able to build our own capacity as an organization, to be more active and have a greater bandwidth,” Garden-Lucerna said.
South Williamsburg and Bushwick are designated environmental justice areas, shaped by decades of disinvestment and infrastructure like the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, which cuts through the neighborhood. As more affluent residents have moved into the areas over the past years, Brooklyn’s Community Board 1 — its neighborhood government body that advises on local policy — has increasingly reflected the voices of newcomers rather than those historically from the area, Garden-Lucerna noted.
With government grants in flux, El Puente is urgently seeking new funding and rallying support from community members, local organizations, and advocates to keep its work alive. The work will still happen, just with less capacity. Investing in young people is sacred, said Gómez.
“Young people have so much to give and so much to offer, but they’re also growing and they’re exploring their passions, their curiosity, what they want to know,” said Gómez. “Why would you cut from young people?”
Taylor Jung is a New York City-based reporter.