NEW YORK — Mayor Zohran Mamdani is appealing to philanthropists to raise $20 million to support his free child care agenda as he sets to deliver on a campaign promise that is popular but challenging to fund.

More than $3.5 million has been raised so far through what his administration is calling the Child Care Action Fund, Mamdani said at a news conference Thursday at City Hall. Officials hope to meet their financial target by the end of the year.

The donations will not directly fund program operations, but go toward family outreach, workforce development, ongoing support for providers, physical space needs, and research and innovation.

“I’ve heard from philanthropists, foundations and business leaders who rightly recognize the benefits that universal child care will compound,” Mamdani said. “That they will be measured in children with better educational outcomes, in parents that can return to the workforce and in a local economy supercharged by top talent.”

“To those people who want to help, I say: the Child Care Action Fund is your way to get involved.”

The fund does not take donations from people or organizations with business before the city, according to his spokeswoman, Dora Pekec.

Mamdani campaigned on the promise of universal child care for all New York families, regardless of income, with kids as young as 6 weeks old. He estimated the initiative would cost $6 billion each year at full scale.

About a week into his administration, Gov. Kathy Hochul came up with $1.2 billion to underwrite a dramatic child care expansion in the city, including $73 million to launch the first 2,000 seats of child care for 2-year-olds or “2-K” this fall. The governor said that investment will grow to to $425 million for 12,000 seats in 2-K’s second year, though she has not yet budgeted for the program in the latter years.

Also part of that investment was funding to stabilize two existing programs: Free preschool for 3-year-olds or “3-K” and child care vouchers for poor families.

The voucher funding was enough to keep the program afloat, but fell short of the dollars needed to register eligible families who have been on waitlists since last spring. The dollars for 3-K will allow the Mamdani administration to open 1,000 new seats in the program in neighborhoods with unmet demand. Of those, 240 seats will be in seven child care centers that have been sitting vacant, despite the sites already being ready for use, Mamdani announced in a separate news release Thursday.

The Child Care Action Fund is part of the broader Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City, a decades-old, city-run nonprofit that solicits donations from individuals, foundations and corporations to further the mayor’s agenda.

The Mayor’s Fund currently focuses on initiatives including medical debt relief, disaster relief, career programs for young people, and now child care, according to its website.

Philanthropic organizations that have already contributed to the new child care fund include the Marguerite Casey Foundation, NYC Forward Fund and Robin Hood, the mayor said during the news conference.

“The Child Care Action Fund will give us the opportunity to test and pilot and innovate new ideas that we then can take and scale with government funding,” said Emmy Liss, Mamdani’s child care czar.

“It gives us an opportunity to address immediate-term needs that are not necessarily covered in the governor’s investment in our child care expansion, so that we can move quickly, move nimbly and supplement the work that we are doing with the governor’s investment,” she added.

In announcing the new child care push, Mamdani said his chief of staff, Elle Bisgaard-Church, would chair the board of the Mayor’s Fund. He also re-appointed Kate Smith to continue as executive director and tapped several new members, including a Bronx public school teacher, Christina Cover.

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