How A Brooklyn Org Donor Advised Fund Helped Katrena Perou Turn Personal Success Into Community Power

Learn about Brooklyn Org’s Donor Advised Fund program in this excerpt from our new white paper, The Foundation of Our Future, which documents our distinctive, community-led philanthropic model and reflects more than 15 years of work building and refining an approach rooted in Brooklyn’s neighborhoods: 

When Katrena Perou sold her Bedford-Stuyvesant home, she faced a choice that would define the next chapter of her life. Rather than channeling the proceeds into traditional investments, she invested instead in the people and places that shaped her, putting the “Brooklyn Backs Brooklyn” principle into practice.

Perou opened a Donor Advised Fund (DAF) at Brooklyn Org shortly after founding Inspiring Minds NYC, the nonprofit she leads to provide after-school, leadership, and civic engagement opportunities for Brooklyn youth. That timing created a tension she still names plainly: she was fundraising for her own organization while giving to others.

“A foundation program officer once told me bluntly that, as a Black woman, I would face significant barriers because funders tend to give to those who reflect their own identity,” Perou recalls. “It explained my uphill battle — and fueled my determination to be the kind of funder I needed early on.”

Despite strong results and growth, Inspiring Minds NYC — like many community-rooted, Black-led organizations — struggled to access institutional funding. Perou recognized that the same barriers limiting her nonprofit’s support were holding back a wider ecosystem of leaders across Brooklyn. She wanted her giving to reach people who, like her, built from the ground up without legacy access or insider networks.

The fleeting surge of attention after the pandemic and the racial justice protests of 2020 only reinforced her resolve. As the spotlight faded, so did many financial commitments — leaving grassroots leaders once again asked to do more with less.

The Brooklyn Org DAF offered the structure Perou needed to make her philanthropy strategic, sustained, and proximate. Through her DAF, she designed a long-term giving strategy centered on organizations led by Black, Indigenous and other people of color, aligning her philanthropy with both immediate needs and systemic equity.

Building on that foundation, Perou launched The Table NYC — a community giving model and network supported by her DAF to resource Black grassroots leaders and entrepreneurs in Brooklyn. To put that vision into practice, The Table NYC hosts community-led professional development so leaders build skills with and for one another, exchange time, talent, and services without cash, and collaborate on grants so smaller organizations can compete for — and manage — larger awards together.

Perou has also launched a Shark Tank-style pitch event where participants present community-centered ideas for seed funding. Using her DAF to catalyze support for bold ideas, Perou will fund four projects each year selected through the pitch process and offer incubator spaces to give winning projects room to test, iterate, and grow.

Perou’s approach demonstrates how individual donors can use a DAF to challenge philanthropic norms — moving resources with communities rather than to them. By supporting peer leaders, sharing resources, and lowering barriers to meaningful funding, she is helping to build capacity in ways that institutional funders often overlook.

As Perou puts it, “There are rich resources and smart, capable people within our communities ready to build solutions to problems — solutions that are already there.”

Perou’s journey — from Bedford-Stuyvesant homeowner to strategic community investor — is a practical blueprint for how a DAF can be deployed creatively within the “Brooklyn Backs Brooklyn” movement.

Executive Summary

Brooklyn Org (BKO) is redefining community philanthropy with a democratic, resident‑led model that aligns resources, skills, and power with neighborhood priorities. With an organizational transformation and rebranding launched in 2023, BKO is answering a funding gap that has persisted even as Brooklyn’s economy, wealth, population, and cultural influence have surged.

Through year-round engagement programs, including neighborhood listening events, community forums with elected officials, participatory grantmaking, and nonprofit capacity building, BKO translates community voice into community investment. BKO is the connective tissue of Brooklyn’s nonprofit ecosystem, supporting community changemakers through block-by-block funding programs and through high-profile, boroughwide vehicles like the annual Brooklyn Org Spark Prize. With the federal pullback from funding essential services, Brooklyn Org’s transformative model of mobilizing neighbors, businesses and donors to forge local solutions for local problems demonstrates how a reinvigorated community foundation model can meet the challenges of the next century.