For 125 years, the New York Junior League has been at the heart of New York City’s philanthropic community—empowering women, transforming neighborhoods, and advancing opportunity through volunteer action.
12 5 Y E A R S O F T H E N E W YO R K J U N I O R L E AG U E
I. COMMITMENT
II. EMPOWERMENT
III. ENGAGEMENT
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 7
PIONEERING VOLUNTEERISM
EMPOWERING VOLUNTEERS
WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT
From New York to the Nation
Training Tomorrow’s Leaders
Community Impact
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CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 8
INTRODUCTION
WOMEN MAKING CHANGE
IN SERVICE TOGETHER
FUNDRAISING AND PHILANTHROPY
Jeri Powell
125 Years of Civic Advocacy
Camaraderie in Creation
Celebrating to Serve
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CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 9
PARTNERS IN PROGRESS
ON LEADERSHIP
PAST IS PROLOGUE
Influence in the City
Committed to the Cause
In the Room and at the Table
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THANK YOU TO OUR DONORS 4
FOREWORD Mary Rocco, Ph.D 6
PARTNERS IN BOOTS ON THE PROGRESS GROUND INFLUENCE COMMUNITY IN IMPACT THE CITY
I
n the late 1980s and early 1990s, parks and playgrounds around New York City were often the refuge for people experiencing addiction. The crack epidemic was at its height, and the Central Park Conservancy was a mere 10 years into its restoration of Central Park. Playgrounds, if they could still be called that, were often strewn with drug paraphernalia or worse. In 1986, artist and activist Keith Haring painted his famed “Crack Is Wack” mural on the wall of an abandoned handball court in East Harlem at Second Avenue and East 128th Street. Haring was initially arrested for vandalism, only to be invited back three months later when then Parks Commissioner Henry Stern asked him to repaint the mural. New Yorkers were beginning to reclaim civic spaces that had been ceded to drug dealers. In many cases, painting a mural was all that could be done, as equipment sat unused, rusted, or broken. “The playgrounds didn’t exist at all. They were depressing. There was no landscaping. There were no brightly colored murals. It was horrible,” said Marian Bott, who helped launch what would become NYJL’s Playground Improvement Project, aka PIP. Marian saw what Haring saw: mile upon mile of cracked asphalt and decay. The desolate playgrounds represented an opportunity to help neighbors while resuscitating the founding mission: volunteering on location. By the late ’80s, on-theground volunteering had understandably fallen out of favor; it had become dangerous. By that time, there were volunteers who had “never seen a public school, let alone a New York City public school.” She pressed the NYJL board, and in 1990, volunteers showed up at the Emily Dickinson School playground at 95th Street and West End Avenue. “It became a bonding experience for these girls to get into a T-shirt, to pick up a paintbrush, get their hands dirty, and get out of their suits,” she said of the time. The work that followed included clearing, painting, assembling, rebuilding. It marked a shift back to how the NYJL initially engaged with the city and from planning back to participation. The program quickly became popular for Provisionals fulfilling their volunteer requirement, which it still is to this day. From Hell’s Kitchen to the East Village and from the Lower East Side to Washington Heights, volunteers have shown up at
In May 1993, the Playground Improvement Project revitalizes safe play spaces for students at P.S. 169 Robert F. Kennedy School. Using a detailed floor plan of the playground, volunteers from the NYJL and the community fix cracks, paint cement, and recreate a colorful new area for children to play.
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i. commitment
partners in progress
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playgrounds and parks, year after year, shovels in hand, ready to work with neighbors to care for neglected spaces. In a metropolis the size of New York, these are relatively small gestures. But scale has never been the point. From the start, volunteers have always used their on-the-ground experience to inform practical solutions to citywide problems, such as in 1907, when the NYJL worked with the Board of Education to obtain vacant lots for use as temporary playgrounds. That same year, Past President Dorothy Whitney Straight (1907– 1910) supported the work of four “School and Home Visitors.” “These women occupy themselves with the ‘difficult’ school children; those who fall below the standard in attendance, in scholarship or in behavior,” she wrote. “After seeing the children in school and satisfying themselves as to the complaint made by the teachers, the visitors go to the homes and ascertain the cause.” Supporting four “visitors” may sound modest in terms of impact, but the effort also influenced development of the then-nascent field of social work, not only as a profession but as an academic discipline. As such, NYJL leadership used their on-the-ground experience in the same manner as they used it to advocate at City Hall, in Albany, and in D.C. To borrow a phrase from a past president, they “got underneath the hood” and then approached the problem systemically. “It is a great pleasure to the League to be able to lend its meagre support to the movements for civic betterment, which are being conducted by the larger organizations of the city,” Dorothy wrote, rather modestly. One need only look at the names of the early volunteers— Whitney, Corcoran, Olmsted, DeWitt, Chase—to realize that Dorothy and her contemporaries held influence well beyond their “meagre support” for a chosen project. When NYJL women showed up, men in positions of power sat up and took notice. Such was the case when Dorothy met with the City and Suburban Homes Company to build the Junior League Hotel at 78th Street and the East River. The hotel was created to help working women, as well as a few families, find a safe place to live. The NYJL raised $287,550 toward the effort, the equivalent of nearly $10 million in 2026 dollars. The project, though grander in scale, still represented an intervention on the part of the NYJL to solve a problem,
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The Junior League Hotel for Working Women, a 274-room hotel for young career women of all religions and nationalities, opens in 1911.
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A postcard advertising the Junior League Hotel for Women dining room, 78th Street and East River, New York City, circa 1912.
which in this case was providing a safe environment for single women. At the time, the building was by far the largest providing housing to women and the only one in Manhattan that did not discriminate on the basis of nationality or religion. From identifying vacant lots for use as playgrounds to providing housing for single women, NYJL volunteers engaged with the built environment in a strategic manner. In 1909, Mary Harriman took over an abandoned ferry boat, the Susquehanna, to host schoolchildren with tuberculosis who were banned from classrooms. Placemaking became a thread that wove its way through NYJL’s history from the 20th century to today. “It’s not just about coming to people where they are, but coming prepared,” said Past President Diann Rohde (1994–1996). At the end of the 20th century, NYJL volunteers were known for their professionalism and training. By then, NYJL’s work had expanded into long-term partnerships with scores of nonprofit organizations, city agencies, and community groups. “The joy of having the Junior League come in is that they manage themselves,” Diann said of partners who engaged with NYJL volunteers. “They made sure there were people there; they planned everything. It was a very different experience than running your own volunteer program.” Through generations of training, the NYJL was able to scale its efforts across multiple sites. In 1985, they established a signature project with the goal of providing transitional housing for families experiencing homelessness. They partnered with the Children’s Aid Society to fund the purchase, renovation, and
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ABOVE RIGHT
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Milbank Pelham Fritz Family Services volunteers work on a project with children. An artist’s rendering of the proposed Milbank Pelham Fritz Apartments.
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“It became a bonding experience for these girls to get into a T-shirt, to pick up a paintbrush, get their hands dirty, and get out of their suits.”
A PIP volunteer applies paint to the new mural at P.S. 125 The Ralph Bunche School.
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i. commitment
partners in progress
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NYJL volunteers lead a crafts workshop with children at Bellevue Hospital in New York, 1970s. In 1917, the NYJL established the first volunteer program in an NYC hospital outpatient department, working with Bellevue Children’s Clinic. Stanley Seligson
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what it’s all about
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DONE IN A DAY From serving hot meals to seniors at Carter Burden Network centers to organizing the toddler and baby closet at Room to Grow, Done in a Day volunteers aren’t afraid to roll up their sleeves and make a difference. Done in a Day (DIAD) is a signature volunteer initiative adopted by many Junior League chapters, designed to meet immediate, short-term needs for both new and longtime community partners. The NYJL has put its own spin on the DIAD concept. Through the DIAD committees, NYJL volunteers over the years have prepared and served or delivered meals, tutored middle school students, hosted social activities for underserved populations, sorted and bundled donations, prepared basic hygiene kits for survivors of domestic violence, held toy drives, and staffed food pantries. Done in a Day’s first offshoot, the Done in a Day on Demand committee, was formed to respond to community organizations’ needs for volunteers on short notice for one-time and short-term projects and programs, such as packing backpacks for families affected by a devastating Bronx apartment fire in 2022 or hosting
blood drives during emergency shortages. In 2025, NYJL’s two DIAD committees, Done in a Day and Done in a Day on Demand, reorganized once again into three DIAD committees with clear focus areas—City and Health, Children and Families, and Flexible—to expand NYJL’s impact, increase volunteer opportunities for members, and reach more partner organizations. Beyond their far-reaching impact on the New York community, volunteers on these committees benefit from the flexibility and variety of shifts, getting their hands dirty in a park one day, and handing out groceries to pantry visitors the next. The work that the DIAD committees do is defined by small, powerful moments of connection, whether it’s the look of excitement on a child’s face after picking out a holiday toy or the conversation shared with a senior receiving a hot meal at their door. Today, the three DIAD committees partner with over 40 organizations, including Bowery Mission, YMCA, Urban Outreach Center of NYC, Her Village, Mary Manning Walsh Nursing Home, Catholic Charities Community Services, and Gigi’s Playhouse, to name just a few, maximizing NYJL’s impact across the city.
Jan Seymour, chair of the Environmental committee (holding the tire), and the Done in a Day committee clean up a beach on the Harlem River in Inwood, October 1991.
Done in a Day committee volunteers sort donated books and help teachers find volumes for their students and classrooms at a Project Cicero book fair on March 11, 2023. Thousands of books are distributed to city educators at no cost at the annual book drive.
Done in a Day committee volunteer Andrea Conte sorts cooler bags for the Citymeals on Wheels program on February 27, 2023.
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“My place is in person with other women who want to serve the city in which I’m now living. That’s really the power of the League.”
Members of NYJL’s Annual Fund committee pose for a photo in 2015. The committee was responsible for raising money to support the organization’s community work, leadership initiatives, and advocacy efforts. Seated, from left: co-chairs Catherine Hawthorn, Caroline Tyburczy Donohue, and Aneesa Sheikh. Standing, from left: Anne Koski, Pauline Millard, Helene Zhu, Sarah Cloonan, Allison Davis O'Keefe, Elizabeth Pavone, Dayna Barlow Cassidy, Mary Beth Black, Cristina Hagglund, and Sharon Bonanni.
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fundraising and philanthropy
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