A longtime nonprofit leader is joining a state fund that has awarded $3.9 million in grants for certain organizations that suffered losses amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
On Thursday, the New Jersey Arts and Culture Recovery Fund announced it hired Lynn Toye as its first executive director.
She will take up the new post on Nov. 8.
The New Jersey Arts and Culture Recovery Fund was created in 2020 with an initial gift from the Toms River-based Grunin Foundation. Hosted by the Princeton Area Community Foundation, the fund provides grants to nonprofit arts, culture and history organizations.
According to NJACRF, New Jersey’s nonprofit arts industry reported losses of more than $100 million in 2020, with more than half of its workforce furloughed or losing their jobs.
“We are thrilled to welcome Lynne as the inaugural executive director of the New Jersey Arts and Culture Recovery Fund,” said Jeremy Grunin, co-chair, NJACRF and president of the Grunin Foundation. “With her dynamic and diverse experience, Lynne will provide strategic vision and lead NJACRF to its next phase of development.”
Toye most recently served as chief administrative officer at the Harlem School of the Arts in New York City. In that senior leadership role she managed marketing, communications and administration functions in addition to creating campaigns to support the school’s programs and development departments, NJACRF said.
Previously, Toye served as chief operating officer for Jazz House Kids in Montclair, as director of the Center for Innovation Management at SUNY Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City and director of the Stern School of Business Executive Education at New York University.
In January, NJACRF will open its next opportunity to apply for funding, focusing on grants for nonprofit organizations that can serve as intermediaries to “re-grant funds to individual artists, teaching artists, and culture and history workers negatively impacted by the COVID-19 crisis and other recent disasters affection our state.”
