Affordable housing advocates have long argued that keeping people in their homes is often less costly — and less traumatic — than trying to stabilize them after an eviction. That’s been the thinking behind TD Bank’s investment in community groups. Through its TD Charitable Foundation, it has awarded $10 million over the last 20 years to 40 nonprofits through its Housing for Everyone program.
This year’s Housing for Everyone awardees were selected for their ability to provide rental assistance, legal services, case management, and other support. They received grants totaling $250,000 — the largest amount the program has ever awarded.
Housing for Everyone began in 2005 as TD’s main charitable housing initiative. Over the years, the program has covered a range of housing issues, such as affordable rental housing, homeownership, rental assistance, and supportive housing.
“Obviously, affordable housing continues to be a critical issue in all of our communities, whether we’re talking urban, rural, suburban, low-income communities, or middle-income communities,” said Paige Carlson-Heim, head of social impact at TD and director of the TD Charitable Foundation. She said the bank uses annual focus groups to identify the most urgent housing issues and then builds the year’s grant theme around them.
That is how this year’s focus on eviction prevention was chosen, Carlson-Heim said. For this, its 20th anniversary year, the foundation increased the program’s total award amount to $10 million after awarding $7.2 million last year. Carlson-Heim described Housing for Everyone as a program that does not simply write checks and walk away: “We want to understand the organizations that are doing the work,” she said. “We want to celebrate the work they’re doing and support it, but more importantly, we want to understand what is it that we can do. What other things can we do, besides writing those checks, that will help your organization be more impactful, grow, and continue to support the community members we all care so much about? … That’s shown up in a variety of ways over the years.”
According to TD Bank, the 2026 awards bring the program’s total investment to more than $73 million. This year’s 40 grantees are in several states; awardees in New York City include the Sunset Park Family Health Centers at NYU Langone in Brooklyn, Brooklyn Legal Services, and RUPCO in the Hudson Valley.
Rebecca Gallager, senior director for Family and Youth Services at Sunset Park Family Health Centers at NYU Langone, said their health center screens patients for issues like food insecurity and housing instability.
“It’s hard to be healthy when you don’t have stable housing or if you live in substandard housing,” Gallager noted. “Unfortunately, that’s the situation for quite a few of our patients. We don’t only work with our patients; we also work with other people in the community who come in as walk-ins. We really make services available to anyone regardless of their documentation status, whether they have health insurance or don’t have health insurance. A grant like this supports our ability to do that.”
If a person says they are having trouble paying rent, live in unsafe or overcrowded conditions, or could be losing their housing, that patient can get a referral for more help to get benefits or other support.
The TD Bank funding, Gallager said, will help pay for a half-time housing attorney and bilingual frontline staff who can help figure out which cases need legal help and which can be taken care of with counseling or referrals. The health center’s efforts are designed to attack the housing issue before a case worsens. Staff can connect that family to someone who can explain tenant rights, look for available benefits, coordinate with legal partners, and — where possible — help resolve any problems before eviction proceedings start.
In Sunset Park, Brooklyn, Gallager said, many low-income and immigrant families are trying to remain in a neighborhood under pressure from rising rents and gentrification, sometimes doubling or tripling up in cramped apartments to stay near schools, jobs, and community ties.
“A lot of the people we work with have children who are in school, and they don’t want to leave the community,” said Gallager. “The only way they can afford to continue living in the community is by, let’s say, having a three-bedroom apartment, with a separate family in each bedroom, and then sharing the kitchen, because the rents are just too expensive. Our families generally are working, but they’re not making high enough incomes to afford the average rent that’s being charged now. That’s been a big struggle.”
The Family Support Center offers several programs, not just housing, she said. “Whenever someone’s referred to us, we see what other needs they have, because if someone is referred because they can’t afford food, in the short term, we have our own food pantry, we connect them to that pantry. In the middle term, we could see whether they are eligible for a benefit, such as SNAP or cash assistance. In the longer term, we also have English classes. We have basic education and GED classes, because that education might put them in a better position to get a higher-paying job. We also support people in connecting them to job training, if that’s something that they want. This grant will enable us to help someone navigate all of the resources for housing and could also connect them to other services we have on site.”
The center expects to serve about 160 people a year through the grant-supported housing program, with legal services available to patients and community members whose cases require them.
Carlson-Heim pointed to the range of Housing for Everyone grantees as evidence that housing instability does not show up the same way. In some communities, the frontline response might be legal representation. In others, it could be rental assistance, case management, or a nonprofit that is not itself a housing provider but has become a crucial early-warning system before a family ends up in housing court. The point of the grants, she suggested, is to meet people where the risk first appears and give community organizations enough support to act in time.