Every year, Brooklyn Org — the borough’s hometown community foundation — picks five local nonprofits and hands each one a $100,000, no-strings-attached grant through its Spark Prize. The 2026 winners were named this spring, and the list is a useful map of the people doing the quieter, less photogenic work that keeps Brooklyn livable.

If you have not heard of any of these groups, that is partly the point. Spark Prize winners tend to be organizations that have been grinding for years, often outside the spotlight, building programs that serve neighbors most other systems miss. Reading the 2026 list as a Brooklyn resident is a little like flipping the lid off a borough you thought you knew.

The 2026 Honorees

Asiyah Women’s Center provides shelter, advocacy, and culturally specific support for Muslim women and families navigating crisis, including domestic violence. The Center has worked for years to fill a gap that mainstream services often handle clumsily.

Black Trans Femmes in the Arts (BTFA) builds community and economic opportunity for Black trans femme artists in New York City, with programming that spans grants, fellowships, mentorship, and live arts events.

Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.), founded in Brooklyn in 2019, fights discriminatory surveillance through litigation, research, and community-led digital safety trainings. They are a small team that has had outsized impact on how the city debates police technology.

The B.R.O. Experience Foundation runs trauma-informed mentorship and healing programs for Black and Latino young men in Bed-Stuy, Brownsville, and Bushwick. Their programs lean heavily on emotional resilience, leadership development, and long-term mentorship rather than one-off events.

YVote is a youth-led civic engagement initiative that trains high school students across the city — including a strong Brooklyn cohort — to be informed voters and organizers. The program is nonpartisan and known for taking teenagers seriously as political actors.

Why The Spark Prize Matters

What makes the Spark Prize different from a typical grant is the lack of strings. Recipients can use the money where it is actually needed, which for most small nonprofits means rent, payroll, technology, or quietly retiring debt. That kind of unrestricted funding is rare and often more useful than a bigger check earmarked for a single program.

For Brooklyn residents, the prize doubles as an annual reading list. The 20 finalists each year sketch a useful map of where neighbors are organizing, what gaps they are filling, and where it is worth getting involved.

How To Plug In

Each of these organizations accepts donations and, in most cases, volunteers. Some of the most useful contributions, particularly for smaller groups, are not money. Web work, graphic design, grant writing, and translation help are perennially in demand.

If you are looking to give locally and want your dollars to stay in the borough, Brooklyn Org itself maintains a directory of vetted Brooklyn-based nonprofits at brooklyn.org. The site is searchable by neighborhood and issue area.

The Bigger Picture

Since 2019, Brooklyn Org has nearly doubled its assets under management, crossing $146 million in 2024, with annual grantmaking around $19.5 million. That growth reflects something Brooklynites already feel in their daily lives: the borough’s civic infrastructure is increasingly homegrown, funded by people who live here, run by people who live here, and accountable to neighbors.

What You Need to Know

• The 2026 Spark Prize winners each received $100,000 unrestricted from Brooklyn Org.
• Honorees: Asiyah Women’s Center, Black Trans Femmes in the Arts, S.T.O.P., The B.R.O. Experience Foundation, and YVote.
• The full directory of Brooklyn-based nonprofits is searchable at brooklyn.org.
• Skill-based volunteering — design, writing, translation, web — is often more useful to small nonprofits than money.
• The Spark Prize finalist list is a yearly snapshot of where civic energy in Brooklyn is concentrated right now.

For more on how the borough is changing, see our Brooklyn neighborhood coverage, and if you want to spend a Sunday walking through some of the neighborhoods these groups serve, the Brooklyn walking guides are a good place to start.