The New York Community Trust recently announced that Amy Freitag will be its next president after an eight-month national search.
A seasoned executive, Freitag has many years of experience in executive and leadership positions. She arrives to the Trust after more than eight years leading the J.M. Kaplan Fund as its executive director. Prior to that, she also served as executive director of the New York Restoration Project, an organization working to improve the quality of and access to green spaces in New York City’s most disadvantaged communities.
While she has spent most of her life and career in New York, Freitag attended the University of Pennsylvania. After earning a master of landscape architecture and historic preservation in 1994, she quickly began her career the year after as a historic preservation officer at the Historic House Trust of New York City.
Her first executive position came two years later when she took the job as executive director of the Fairmount Park Historic Preservation Trust in Philadelphia. Splitting her time, she continued working in New York City, also accepting a promotion to the position of planning and development administrator. After more than two years serving in both positions, she left Fairmount Park Historic Preservation Trust and became executive director of Historic House Trust of New York City.
Nearly three years of leadership there saw Freitag get noticed by the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. In May 2002, she joined it as deputy commissioner, a position in which would spend more than six years of her career. From there she took another executive directorship at the Tortora Sillcox Family Foundation, an education-focused nonprofit in New York City. A two-year stint as a program manager at the World Monuments Fund would follow before she would make her move to the New York Restoration Project in 2010.
“Amy is a dynamic and proven leader who is the right person to lead The Trust into its next century,” said Valerie Peltier, Chair of The New York Community Trust in a news release about the appointment. “Her expertise and relationships, paired with her passion for New York make her uniquely qualified to guide The Trust through its work to improve the quality of life for our entire community.”
Amy Freitag will begin as president of The New York Community Trust this summer, succeeding Loria A. Slutsky, who has led The Trust since 1990.
