Penny Harvest Charitable Group to Stay Afloat With City Money New York City's penny harvest will live to see another year of children collecting a small fortune in stray pennies and then discussing how to dispense it to help the sick and the bereft. The City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, said on Wednesday that she had approached mayoral officials, and that they had found $550,000 in city money needed to save the charity Common Cents, which oversees the penny harvest. Common Cents offers innovative service programs for elementary school children, serving 721 public and private schools. "We've been pulled back from the financial brink, absolutely," Teddy Gross, the founder of Common Cents, said on Wednesday. Our teachers can come to our trainings now, and their kids and their schools can count on having penny harvest for the year. The charity has been struggling, badly hurt by the recession-driven decline in philanthropic giving from the foundations that underwrite it. With an annual budget of about $1 million, it coordinates the penny harvest, and trains teachers and principals in how to let children take the lead in interviewing the heads of hospital cancer wards and food banks and the like. The children often decide which charity will receive their collected pennies. Common Cents does not charge schools for this service. At Public School 19, on Staten Island, Jeanne Raleigh, a teacher, has run the program for years. "I wanted to show the kids, "Hey, you can make a difference in this world!" " she said recently. These kids become our ambassadors. Common Cents and the city's Education Department have been locked in a long battle that centers on a large misunderstanding. Several years ago, education officials asked Mr. Gross to put together an ambitious program to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Sept. In exchange, the department agreed to pay the charity $200,000 and to help it scrape up another $200,000 to cover shortfalls for the next year. But nothing came of the offer to provide money in future years. Education officials said they tried to help but made no promises. Mr. Gross of Common Cents said that city officials had, in fact, promised long-term help. To back up his claims, he produced two tapes of his conversations with education officials. This impasse threatened the charity with extinction. At this point, Ms. Quinn stepped in and carved out a deal with mayoral officials to save the charity. She offered a verbal shrug when asked about the angry recriminations between education officials and the charity. "Look, my perspective is that whatever mistakes were made by whomever, that's done," she said. This is a good, creative group that does solid work. Let's move forward and fix it.