If It’s Bad Enough for the Mayor…

Blog Category: Uncategorized — Blogged by: editor on October 22, 2008 at 10:10 am

We now are officially in an economic crisis.  How do we know?  It’s not the credit crunch, the plummeting stock market or even imminent budget cuts.   We know because the Mayor is being forced … apparently against his will and possibly against the will of the people …to run for a third term.  The City, it seems, needs his wisdom, experience and steady hand on the tiller during these perilous times.

Now, I am not a fan of term limits.  Having worked in government, my sense is that it takes a couple of terms for elected officials and their administrations to figure out what they are doing.   Why throw somebody out just when they have finally made it around the learning curve? But that’s beside the point… at least the point I am trying to make right now.

Many nonprofits which provide services under contract to New York City feel like they have been in a serious financial crisis for some time now.  Year after year, the real value of the reimbursement they receive for services declines in relation to the rising costs of providing those services.  

As both our past coverage and this month’s cover story imply, this crisis has deepened dramatically during the course of the current State and City fiscal years.   The enacted and adopted budgets at both levels of government have already stripped away additional critical resources.  New multi-billion dollar cuts being proposed by the Governor and Mayor will devastate the delivery systems for a broad range of human services.

Nevertheless, despite these extraordinarily threatening circumstances, nonprofit service providers are being forced to devote enormous time, energy and resources in response to various Requests for Proposals which will dramatically reshape the design and delivery of human services in New York City over the next decade.  They prepare programmatic plans, goals and budgets even as they watch the resources to support these efforts disappear. Adding to their frustration is the knowledge, based on long experience, that they likely will be held contractually to these proposal commitments, regardless of the level of resources the City actually provides.

Providers and advocates have been pleading with the City for months to indefinitely postpone an imminent RFP for the entire Senior Center system – a system which has seen significant cut backs in resources and will likely see more with the next round of 2.5% and 5% budget cuts.  Most troubling is the as-yet unresolved potential loss of funding for 100 senior centers housed in New York City Housing Authority projects – fully one-third of the entire DFTA  system. 

More recently, child welfare providers have begun talking among themselves about the need to pull back the new 599-page ACS RFP which takes the Improved Outcomes for Children (IOC) service model citywide.  Their concerns:  that many of the enhanced funding streams supporting the current IOC pilot are evaporating while caseload ratios and length of treatment standards for families are moving in the wrong direction.

This is not, many providers say, the right time to be “rearranging the deck chairs”.  It would serve the City well to delay implementation of all these major service delivery initiatives until the economic and fiscal outlook is more settled.

If it’s bad enough for the Mayor to run for a third term….

Let us know what you think.  Click below to see other comments and post your own.

The Financial Crisis: What Does It Mean for You?

Blog Category: Uncategorized — Blogged by: editor on October 14, 2008 at 9:49 am

 

The global financial crisis is having a devastating impact on our local economy, government funding and philanthropic giving.  What does it mean for you, your colleagues, your agency and your clients?   We want to know.  Share your thoughts at NYNP Community Forum or email me directly at editor@nynp.biz. 

 

Four More Years? What Do You Think?

Blog Category: Uncategorized — Blogged by: editor on October 3, 2008 at 8:18 am

Few New Yorkers have more at stake in Michael Bloomberg’s move to run again — against term limits and for another four year term as Mayor — than the nonprofit human services provider community and the people we serve. 

            Over the past several years, the Bloomberg administration has launched major policy initiatives to completely redesign the delivery of many City-funded human service programs – beginning with the Out of School Time initiative and moving on to ACS’ “Improved Outcomes for Children”,  day care’s “Project Full Enrollment”, the “modernization” of senior services and more.   Many of these efforts are only just reaching the procurement stage with Requests for Proposals either recently published or still in the works. 

For some time now, many providers and advocates had expressed concerns that these initiatives were being rushed out the door in order to create a Bloomberg “legacy” in the form of new contract structures to shape the delivery of services for the next decade.   Even more troubling was the prospect that many of these dramatic contract and programmatic changes would be simply handed over to a new, incoming administration for implementation.

What do you think?  Would four more years of the Bloomberg administration be a good thing for human services in New York City?  How do these programmatic initiatives affect your attitude towards the debate over term limits?  Should they be a consideration at all?   And, should the Bloomberg administration be moving forward on these significant program redesigns at all, given term limits and the City’s increasingly dire budget situation.  Share your thoughts on NYNP’s Community Forum.  Click below to read comments and/or post your own.

 

Should McCain Reject “Community Organizer” Comments?

Blog Category: Uncategorized — Blogged by: editor on September 10, 2008 at 6:25 am

Senator John McCain’s upcoming appearance at the September 11th ServiceNation Summit here in NYC comes in the wake of remarks by several speakers at the Republican National Convention mocking the role of “community organizers”.  (See our Breaking News stories on September 4th and 5th for deatils on  remarks by former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin and former Governor George Pataki.)

Ironically, the very vision of ServiceNation and its goal of creating ”a new era of service and civic engagement in America” appears to celebrate the valuable contributions which community organizers have made, still make and must continue to make in this country.  Therefore, Senator McCain’s participation would appear at odds with what appear to be a carefully choreographed slandering of the community organizer role by his running mate and other leaders in his party.

Consequently, we hope that Senator McCain will take this opportunity to clarify his own position regarding the worth of Community Organizers by rejecting these negative and divisive comments.

If he doesn’t do so on his own initiative, we hope that PBS Senior Correspondent Judy Woodruff and TIME Managing Editor Richard Stengel – who will be moderating the “Presidential Forum on Service” at which both McCain and Barack Obama will speak — will take note of this contradiction and call on Senator McCain for a clear and unambiguous statement of his own views.

What do you think?  Share your thoughts with other NYNP readers by posting a comment. 

Community Organizing: What’s the Joke?

Blog Category: Uncategorized — Blogged by: editor on September 4, 2008 at 10:48 am

Many members of the nonprofit community went to bed a little angry and a litte hurt last night after their work and life’s calling became an object of ridicule at the Republican National Convention.

“He worked as a community organizer. . . . What?” said former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani with a chuckle during an attack on the experience and credentials of Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama.    Giulani’s comments drew an extended round of derisive laugher from the convention delegates.  It was a theme which Republican Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin would continue when she described her role as small town mayor as being “sorta like a community organizer – except with real, actual responsibilities.”
 

“It was despicable,” said Terry Misrahi, Ph.D., Professor and Chair, Community Organizing, Planning and Development Program at Hunter College School of Social Work.  “Not only don’t they understand what community organizers do but they obviously don’t respect them.”

 “Fundamentally, community organizing is a strategy where regular citizens come together to make their communities stronger,” said Richard R. Buery, Jr., Executive Director of Groundwork, Inc., a community-based organization which now provides a wide range of after-school, youth development, employment training and family services in the in East New York section of Brooklyn.  “Community organizing is the Montgomery bus boycott, the march on Selma and 3000 Nehemiah homes in BrooklynCommunity organizers are hardworking, underpaid people who help their neighbors.”

“Settlement Houses have been doing this since their founding,” said Nancy Wackstein, Executive Director of United Neighborhood Houses.  “It is democracy. It is involving people in the decisions that affect their lives.”

Several observers expressed little surprise that Giuliani would ridicule the field. “For eight years, he was trying to hold power and fight organized communities,” said Buery.         

The attacks by Palin were more of a surprise, according to others, particularly given her proud claims to past experience on the PTA and as a “Hockey Mom”.  “How can you celebrate that and then voice this disregard for community organizing?” asked Buery.   “An effective PTA is community organizing.”   Others noted that hockey leagues, like soccer and little league baseball, are only possible because community members come together to organize.  “As a mayor of a small town, she should understand how difficult it is to get people organized to get anything done,” said Buery.

“It is particularly hypocritical because so many of the people they are attacking on the one hand are the very armies of faith based compassion they are lauding on the other,” said Joel Berg, Executive Director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger.     

“Community organizers are essential partners within the faith community,” said Rev. Joel A. Gibson, Director of Faith Based Services at Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies. “They help unite people of different religions, class, and cultures around a common purpose, and build vital relationships among churches and the social service infrastructure to help feed the hungry and house the homeless.”
 “Not to understand the function and the critical role of community organizers is really not to understand people who suffer in our country,” said Rev. Terry Troia, Executive Director of Project Hospitality, which itself began a grass-roots clergy response to homelessness on Staten Island.  Today, the organization serves over 10,000 separate individuals every year through soup kitchens, food pantries, a homeless shelter, permanent supportive housing, substance abuse treatment and more.

“Our staff, our VISTAs and our entry-level organizers are people who are making a fraction of what they could be earning down the street,” said Berg.  “To have their legitimacy as human beings and as Americans attacked is really offensive.  If a Democrat had said this, we would be equally outraged.

“It is interesting that we have now made the list of villains,” Berg added. “We have joined public employees, teachers and the media.  It is a bit much.”