Play to Thrive
Date
March 26, 2026In 2025, the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund launched Play to Thrive, a $10 million, multi-year initiative that supports organizations using sports to improve youth mental health outcomes, expand access for underserved communities, and promote equity across New York City and Northern New Jersey.
Access to sports in New York and New Jersey is deeply inequitable — too often, a young person’s zip code, gender, or income determines whether they get to play at all. At the same time, young people are facing rising levels of anxiety, depression, and social isolation, making access to sports more important than ever.
This matters because research shows that sports and physical activity are powerful antidotes to the mental health crisis facing young people today. At a time when rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness are at historic highs, participation in sports can improve emotional well-being, build resilience, and foster community.
With the World Cup coming to our region this summer, there is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to harness the excitement around soccer and accelerate this work, ensuring the legacy is not just a tournament, but a future where every young person has a safe place to play, a trusted adult, and the chance to thrive.
The young people who could benefit the most from sports are too often those facing the greatest barriers to getting in the game.
The initiative builds on the Fund’s nationally recognized Arts in Health initiative, launched in 2018 to support organizations using the arts to address mental health stigma, trauma, and aging-related diseases. Sports and the arts may look different, but they both create spaces for belonging, joy, and resilience. They’re about people, not performance.
The opportunity is evident: expanding access to sports and play is a powerful avenue to improving the well-being of young people across our communities.
Our goal is a future where every young person, regardless of income, neighborhood, gender, or identity, has a safe place to play, an adult they trust, and a chance to feel joy in movement.
To get there, Play to Thrive invests across the youth sports system, supporting organizations that are tackling inequity in sports from multiple angles: expanding who gets to play, where they play, and how systems support their growth and success.
Grantees include
A Family Legacy in Sports and Community
Play to Thrive carries forward a deeply personal legacy. Laurie Tisch was the initial spark behind Take the Field, a public-private partnership with the City of New York that rebuilt 43 public high school athletic fields across the city. Having seen what strategic investment could do for arts programs, she inspired her father, Bob Tisch, co-owner of the New York Giants, to do the same for public school athletics. That vision led him to create Take the Field, and its impact continues to shape how the city thinks about sports infrastructure and access.
Today, through Gotham FC, the Tisch family’s commitment to sports as a force for good extends to a new generation. As a member of the Gotham FC ownership group, alongside her daughters Carolyn and Emily, Laurie brings a rare vantage point: connecting professional women’s soccer, institutional philanthropy, and long-term community investment.
