Organizations serving low-income and underprivileged residents of Ossining stand to benefit from a $1 million endowment from a Florida-based foundation whose late founder was an Ossining native.
The Patterson Foundation has established the $1 million Dorothy Patterson Fund with the Westchester Community Foundation, the Hartsdale nonprofit recently announced. With the funds, it will administer a competitive grant program serving the “less fortunate” in the Ossining community “in perpetuity,” according to a spokesperson for WCF, the suburban division of The New York Community Trust, the fund”™s fiscal steward.
Philanthropist Dorothy Paterson, who created The Patterson Foundation in 1997, was the wife of the heir to a newspaper publishing fortune made in Chicago and New York. Westchester Community Foundation officials said her generosity was seen in Ossining, where she and husband James Patterson first met in high school and where she was an active supporter of her church and provided goods to the poor.
Upon her death in Sarasota  in 2007, the widow left generous bequests to her relatives, according to the Patterson Foundation website, while transferring the remainder of her estate to the family foundation, making it a $200 million fund.
