Last year, we focused on the outcomes.
Why did some organizations receive large Public Purpose Fund awards while others received little or nothing? Why did certain nonprofits appear to occupy multiple lanes of funding? Why were some long-standing questions about fiscal sponsorships, eligibility, and repeat recipients never fully addressed?
Those questions remain. David Stone’s latest reporting is a reminder that the Public Purpose Fund story did not end with last year’s awards. But the new round raises a different question: not who received the Public Purpose Fund money, but who decided where it went.
Residents were told the process was independent. The New York Community Trust administered the program. Community reviewers evaluated the applications. Awards were announced. End of story.
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Except that independence is not something that can simply be declared. It has to be understood. Who selected the reviewers? What relationships surrounded them? What information was disclosed? And what information, if any, was residents expected to simply trust?
Those questions lead to the same place every transparency discussion eventually arrives: before residents can decide whether the process was fair, they first need to understand who was sitting at the table.
For the 2026 Public Purpose Fund cycle, residents were eventually told who reviewed the applications. The five advisory committee members were Penny Gold, Deolinda Leitao-Greene, Frank Raffaele, Anna Scaglione, and James Shafer. RIOC and The New York Community Trust described the panel as independent and said the reviewers remained anonymous during the review period to keep the process fair and confidential. That gives residents a roster after the fact. It does not give them the path by which those names arrived at the table.
That missing path matters. Who nominated the reviewers? Were applicants invited to suggest names, as they were in the prior cycle? Did RIOC review or approve the final slate? Were any nominees rejected because of conflicts, relationships, or perceived proximity to applicants? What standards did The Trust apply before determining that these five people could evaluate applications for public money? The public announcement does not answer those questions. It tells residents who the reviewers were only after their work was done.
That is where the transparency problem begins. Independence is not proven by calling a committee independent. It is proven by showing how the committee was assembled, what safeguards existed, and how conflicts were screened before decisions were made. The issue is not whether the five reviewers were qualified. The issue is whether residents were given enough information to understand why those five reviewers were selected to help decide where Roosevelt Island’s Public Purpose Fund money went.
The sharper questions arise where the public record shows obvious proximity to Roosevelt Island’s cultural and civic network. Penny Gold is not an outsider to that world. She is an active curator of art, engaged in the Island’s cultural life, and her work has added real value to the community. Sources have also told The Lighthouse that her partner is an artist featured at RIVAA. That does not make Gold unethical. It does not erase the value of her work. It does, however, expose the weakness in the word “independent” when it is used without explanation.
If independence means residents with no meaningful proximity to applicants, then a deeply engaged cultural figure raises obvious questions when cultural organizations receive funding. If independence means only the absence of a direct financial interest, then RIOC and The Trust should say so. The public needs to know what standard was applied, what relationships were disclosed, and whether the same standard was applied to everyone sitting at the table.
This year’s awards did not present the same clear RIVAA double-lane question we raised last year, when RIVAA and RIVAA Gallery Concerts appeared as separate funding streams. But the new award list creates a different transparency problem. Several grantees are identified by public-facing names without enough information for residents to easily confirm whether each is a separate 501(c)(3), operating through a fiscal sponsor, or adjacent to an existing Roosevelt Island organization already inside the funding ecosystem. That matters because legal separation and practical separation are not always the same thing.
Frank Raffaele presents a different kind of proximity. As co-owner of The Sanctuary, he has supported, hosted, and sponsored Roosevelt Island nonprofit activity over multiple years. That makes him an active civic stakeholder, not a detached observer. There is nothing wrong with caring about community organizations, but a person who hosts, sponsors, and works alongside local nonprofits inevitably develops preferences, alliances, and favorites. If that is the reviewer model, residents deserve to know what relationships were disclosed before those same nonprofits were evaluated for public money.
That is the standard residents were never allowed to see. Not just who sat on the committee, but what they disclosed before they sat there. Not just who won the money, but whether the relationships around that money were tested before the awards were announced.
The prior cycle offers a useful benchmark. In 2025, Susan Haberman did not score RIVAA because she occasionally volunteered with the organization. The Trust reportedly did not strictly consider that a conflict, but accepted the recusal out of caution. If proximity mattered then, residents deserve to know how it was tested in 2026. Did any reviewer disclose relationships with funded organizations? Did anyone recuse from scoring particular applications? Were connections to RIVAA, RIHS, The Sanctuary, Cornell Tech, Touro, or other Island institutions considered? Perhaps every answer is reassuring. The problem is that residents were never given enough information to know.
This article is not asking:
Was the process fair?
Instead, we are asking:
Does the public have a right to understand why public money was allocated?
Those are very different questions. It’s about a philosophy of government.
The old system was criticized because residents believed too much discretion was concentrated in local hands. The new system was supposed to solve that problem. Instead, it appears to have created a different one. The decisions are now further away, harder to examine, and largely insulated from public scrutiny.
When we sought records explaining how Public Purpose Fund decisions were made, we were told that many of those records were not RIOC’s to provide. We challenged that position. The challenge failed. By the time the matter reached the Governor’s office, the answer remained the same: residents could know who received the money, but not necessarily how or why those decisions were reached.
That is the transparency gap.
The question raised by the Public Purpose Fund is not whether a particular organization deserved funding. Reasonable people can disagree about that. The question is whether residents have a right to understand why public money was allocated the way it was. RIOC’s position has effectively been no. The state’s position appears to be no as well. The public may see the outcome, but the reasoning behind it can remain largely hidden from view.
If that is the standard, then residents should at least understand what it means. Public money can be distributed. Public winners can be announced. Public celebrations can follow. But the public itself may never be allowed to examine enough of the process to determine whether the decisions were sound, consistent, or influenced by relationships that should have been disclosed. That is not merely a dispute about grants. It is a question about whether transparency ends when the money leaves RIOC’s hands.
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If public money remains public when it is awarded, residents should ask why the reasoning behind those awards can become private.
