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A Rocky Season


When Michael Bloomberg takes office in January, he will be mayor of more than the city's sagging economy and the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center. He will also be taking the reins of a government that relies on private, nonprofit agencies for the day-to-day care of human beings that the rest of us take for granted. Watching over children while parents work, feeding the elderly at senior centers, clothing and sheltering the homeless. Even when there is no special emergency, much of the city is held together by a brittle web of government contracts and underpaid social workers.

That web has been strained by a double blow from the state budget and the falling towers. First, lawmakers in Albany delayed this year's budget from April until August, when they passed a "bare bones" budget -- lower than last year's and minus funding for crucial needs. In mid-September, they followed up with a supplemental budget restoring less than half the funds that human service agencies counted on to keep their operations going.

Since September 11, ripples of destruction have spread far beyond Ground Zero. Soup kitchens found themselves feeding families of unemployed downtown restaurant workers, and community service centers wrestled with the crippled computer system of the welfare bureaucracy. While millions of dollars flow into charities serving World Trade Center survivors, agencies that serve people with needs unrelated to that disaster face the threat of reduced donations from sympathetic individuals and foundations, and the certainty of cuts from the city's shrunken coffers.

How do small human service agencies cope with large financial uncertainties? In normal times, the City of New York takes an average of 4 months to start payments, from the day a contract is signed with a nonprofit provider. Most providers start work long before they receive payments, borrowing money to stay afloat. However, lenders usually want to see a signed contract as collateral, and contracts are hard to finalize these days, when the city has announced 15 percent budget cuts, and state legislators have not yet decided how to spend "member item" money, seven months into the state's fiscal year.

Instead of the $500 million individual state lawmakers controlled last year, this year they will have only $200 million to distribute. Small programs can be entirely dependent on these unstable funds. "Two hundred million dollars sounds like a lot of money, and make no mistake, we're happy for it," said Megan McLaughlin, executive director of the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies (see "Down and Out"). "But it's basically 211 elected officials battling over what amounts to less than $1 million each."

CHILDREN HIT HARD

Children are particularly hard hit this year. A new five-year limit on welfare benefits, combined with the weak job market, will force more parents into jobs that pay too little to cover unsubsidized day care slots. Advocates recommended an increase of $210 million in state spending for day care this year, to fund slots for 42,000 more children; only $32 million was approved.

State law says that by 2002, there should be enough room in free pre-kindergarten programs for every four-year-old to attend. However, the new state budget provides less than half of the $500 million needed. The state Senate Majority Leader, Republican Joseph Bruno, named the pre-K program as an example of the kind of spending New York cannot afford after September 11.

"We were asked to take in more children, but we just don't have the space," says Bernadette Wallace of Boys and Girls Harbor, which received no increase in funding this year for its three pre-K programs. "If there was to be additional money, we would probably open a new site."

RAINY TODAY

About $3 billion in state funds are being held in reserve "for a rainy day", much of it from savings due to welfare reform. To Michael Kink of Housing Works, the rainy day is today. "It would be wise to spend some of the surplus money on lifeboats," he says, "but Governor Pataki seems more interested in putting aside reserves for his election-year budget."

In addition to reduced state funding, many groups were directly affected by the events of September 11. Offices of some agencies were damaged: many had to delay or relocate services. Housing Works estimates that the disaster and its fallout have cost the agency over $300,000, including the cancellation of its 10th anniversary gala fundraiser.

The Haitian Women's Program hasn't been paid by the state for the last six months. "My accountant told me I couldn't go past October 31," says Gabrielle Kersaint. "We had no money." So the Brooklyn agency started laying people off, including a bilingual family specialist who provided permanency planning services to immigrants with AIDS. Now these parents will no longer have her help in figuring out how to provide for their children when they become too sick to do so themselves.

Legal Services of New York City is facing the possible loss of up to $3 million, nearly ten percent of their total budget. According to Communications Director Edwina Frances Martin, this jeopardizes their domestic violence program, whose lawyers represent survivors in court, in child custody cases, and in securing the benefits needed to become independent of abusive partners. Another program at risk helps welfare recipients to stay in school when their education is threatened by the demands of the city's Work Experience Program.

Brooklyn Legal Services laid off half of their lawyers in early November, and the Citywide Task Force on Housing is planning to close down in December, laying off their entire staff. Lawyers at the Task Force and Legal Services protect tenants from homelessness by fighting illegal evictions.

ELDERLY TOO

Worthwhile new programs may not be funded for a second year. The Park Slope Geriatric Day Center's program for Spanish-speaking elders depends on state funding that is still in question. "The state is finally recognizing a need and then -- boom," says Marianne Nicolosi of Park Slope Geriatric. The program's loss would deprive clients with Alzheimer's disease and severe physical conditions of the chance to take part in individual and group activities that give them physical, mental and social rewards.

The city was about to hire social workers to provide mental health services at senior centers, reaching elderly clients who would otherwise be reluctant to admit a need for it. "We fought for that money for four years," says Bobbi Sackman of the Council of Senior Centers, noting that as a new program, this item is particularly vulnerable to the planned city budget cuts.

AFTER 9/11

The World Trade Center tragedy intensified the need for many agencies' services, while placing new barriers in their path. "We're feeling the crunch of more people needing food," says Rita Marie Trucois, director of social services at Riverside Church, which has extended its food pantry's hours in response to a 30 percent increase in families seeking help. Citymeals-on-Wheels is finding it harder to deliver meals to homebound older people in downtown Manhattan. "Our mission remains the same," notes its director of program services, Andrea Kopel, even though it now costs more to deliver the same level of service.

"In light of the September 11 attack, we have become more lenient," reports Shawniqua Ottley of the Fund for the City of New York, a major source of the bridge loans that sustain struggling nonprofits. "A lot of agencies are on the brink." Applicants for the Fund's loans are experiencing unusually long delays in processing contracts, particularly with city agencies displaced by the World Trade Center disaster.

Instead of requiring that an agency have a signed contract in hand, the Fund is now granting loans as long as it can verify that a contract is on the way to being signed. Borrowers are being given six months to pay back loans, twice as long as usual. Applications for loans have increased from about three a week to fifteen or twenty, according to Ottley. The Fund has had to draw on the Ford Foundation and the September 11 funds for an emergency injection of cash to meet increased demand.

Patrick Markee of the Coalition for the Homeless expects a time lag before we see the full impact of the sagging economy and the attacks on the World Trade Center. "The bigger question is, what's going to happen in the future with the city and state budgets?" Both the governor and the new mayor are facing large budget gaps in the next few years. Neither leader seems eager to raise taxes, even though higher unemployment will swell the need for social services. The Fall of 2001 may prove to be a dress rehearsal for uncertainty on a whole new scale.

Linda Ostreicher, a former budget analyst for the New York City Council, is a freelance writer and consultant to nonprofits. She is currently on the staff of Bronx Independent Living Services.

 

Administration for Children's Services


It is amazing what a city agency can do when given direct access to the mayor, $600 million in additional funding, and a new start free of former ties. Tragically, it took the beating death of six-year old Elisa Izquierdo in 1995 to bring about this attentiveness, but with these resources Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta has been able to turn around the city's child welfare agency, renamed the Administration for Children's Services (ACS) when he took the helm and separated from the Human Resources Administration.

Scoppetta raised salaries, increased staff training and education requirements, reduced caseloads, and appeased litigants that wanted the federal government to take over the agency. He agreed to have the agency monitored for two years from within by a panel of child welfare experts led by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Last year, in a report issued at the end of that surveillance, the agency won high praise at the "remarkable progress" it has made.

In early September, Scoppetta ordered the closing of one of the city's own foster care offices in Harlem because it placed rock bottom on an evaluation of 46 agencies that provide group homes for adolescents and children. Three private agencies that scored just above the Manhattan city-run office were put on probation and will be required to submit improvement plans.

Critics say Scoppetta did not act soon enough, that staff in the Harlem office had been complaining for years that caseloads were too high and supervision was not adequate. But according Jennifer Falk, spokesperson for ACS, "This summer was the first time we had the ability to do a comprehensive study. Prior to that, the information was just anecdotal."

Some fear that closing the office -- one of only four run by the city -- might lead to a dependence on private agencies for direct service foster care. This concern stems from the fact that the city entered into the foster care business in 1959 when hundreds of minority infants were being rejected by the religious agencies that controlled the foster care beds.

Scoppetta has acknowledged the need to keep the city in the business of direct foster care but with the requirement of quality and accountability.

Most observers credit Scoppetta with great strides. There are 30,000 children in foster care in New York City today, mostly adolescents, but that is down from 43,000 when Scoppetta took the job. The average caseworker's load has been reduced from 27 to 12, and over 1500 new ACS caseworkers have been employed with higher educational requirements.

In early September, however, the commissioner announced that he will not continue on in his post under the new mayor. Instead he plans to take to the road, speaking and writing about his experiences, in order to help other communities across the country whose child welfare systems are not as far along.

But is the city itself far enough along?

"You have to give the commissioner credit," said Gladys Carrion, executive director of Inwood House, one of the contract agencies for foster care that works with ACS. "He is the first one to admit that there's a lot of work undone. He's devised the structure and support, like a grid, but it is in the very beginning stages. The transformation of the agency has not yet taken place.

"How families interact with ACS hasn't changed," said Carrion. "There have been cultural changes at the top, but it still hasn't trickled down. How we view biological parents, and the changing role of foster parents to become mentors to biological parents, this is still at the beginning stages."

Carrion is optimistic that ACS can keep on track without Scoppetta and continue to better serve families and children. Her own wish list would include replicating what Scoppetta was able to bestow on city staff -- increased salaries, benefits and training -- for the contract agencies as well. "We have a serious problem with retention of staff," Carrion acknowledged.

Unfortunately, increased funding for child welfare is not a decision the commissioner himself makes. It comes from the state, with matching funds from the federal government. Scoppetta has consistently lobbied the state to provide more funding, according to the ACS press office.

Mayoral candidate Mark Green came out with a report from the Office of the Public Advocate that focused on shortcomings that still exist in the foster care system including:

  • Abuse: one in forty children throughout the city is reportedly abused, and the number jumps to one in twenty for children in foster care
  • Neglect: children in foster care often fail to receive basic medical care
  • Failing with adolescents: a study of ten foster care agencies in 2000 found that 17 percent of the adolescents in those agencies were discharged to a homeless shelter
  • Retention of staff: there is a 40 percent yearly turnover ratio among caseworkers.

Scoppetta and Mayor Giuliani addressed some of these issues in their next phase of reform for ACS, entitled A Renewed Plan of Action. The plan promised development and expansion of neighborhood-based services, strengthening the availability, affordability and quality of child-care services, improving the achievement of permanency (with family, with placements, or with adoption) for children, as well as continued efforts in services for child protection, medical care, and adolescents.

Scoppetta wishes his successor (yet to be announced) the support of the new mayor, and he acknowledged that predecessors have often been scapegoated at the first crisis (the average tenure for his post was one-and-a-half years) and not given the time or resources he has been given to bring about change.

Unfortunately, the new commissioner will not have the same funds to work with. Since the World Trade Center disaster, all city agencies have been asked by Mayor Giuliani to submit a plan to cut their budgets. ACS is presently working on that plan.

In addition, besides a mayoral shift, a new commissioner, and less funding, ACS may lose its autonomy unless voters in November support an amendment to the New York City charter that would permanently make the Administration for Children's Services a city agency.

Like many downtown social service agencies, ACS administrative staff, Youth Development staff, and Teen Congregate Care staff were displaced as a result of the terrorist attacks on September 11th. Provisions planned for possible mishaps at the millennium proved to be useful during this time, including a toll-free phone number and the immediate loading of web pages alerting staff and families about temporary relocation sites and services. Staff were able to return to their offices by September 25th. Counseling sessions have also been made available for ACS staff, contract agency staff, and the families and children they serve.

 

Hanging Out


It is 4:30 p.m. on a Tuesday in the Bronx, in a precinct known for the second-highest rate of juvenile arrests in the city, the 44th. Inside a storefront on 174th Street, local teenagers gather. Sawdust and lumber litter the floor; strains of Bob Marley play in the background, punctuated by laughter and occasional chatter. Two boys use a carpenter's plane to shape a piece of mahogany. "It's the stem," one of them explains, using the nautical term as if he had been born on the sea. The storefront is a boat building workshop, and these teens are building a wooden boat.

Rocking the Boat is one of many teen after-school programs offered by New Settlement Apartments in the Mount Eden area of the southwest Bronx. New Settlement's teen programs range from community service to sports to homework help, and serve some 360 local teenagers, many of whom live in the New Settlement housing project. Though teen after-school programs vary widely both at New Settlement and throughout the city, all programs meet one critical need: they provide teenagers with supervised activities during the hours after school.

TEEN TIME, TEEN TROUBLE

According to various studies, juveniles are most likely to be both the victims and the perpetrators of crime in the four hours after the end of the school day. The Federal Bureau of Investigation notes a tripling in juvenile crime between 3 p.m. and 8 p.m. "Most kids have parents who are working and out of the home between 3 and 6," said Samantha Vincent, director of an after-school program administered by the Educational Alliance in Manhattan. "What are their options? To go home to an empty house, or to go hang out on a street corner."

Unsupervised time after school puts children at great risk of being involved not just in crime, but also substance abuse and teen pregnancy, according to studies by the National Center for Juvenile Justice; the risk is greatest during the teenage years.

"The majority of kids in this neighborhood don't have that rich menu of things to do after school that kids in affluent suburban communities have," says Jack Doyle, director of New Settlement Apartments, a middle-income development that houses 900 families, 300 of whom are formerly homeless.

Despite the need for teen after-school programs, there are many fewer programs for teens than for younger children, according to Jason Schwartzman of the Partnership for After-School Education, who surveyed some 1,073 youth programs in the city, and found that only 35 percent provide activities for teenagers.

"Programs for teens are considered more difficult and more expensive," said Vincent. "The potential risks are higher. High school kids can do drugs, have sex, and be violent."

One of the greater challenges facing providers of teen after-school programs is keeping them interested. "The older the kid, the more difficult it is," Schwartzman said. "Teenagers have independence, and if they're bored they can leave if they want to."

"You must provide something pretty exciting to get kids off the streets," said Vincent.

BUILDING BOATS

Rocking the Boat, one of the more unusual after-school programs available to New York City teens, seems to have no trouble keeping kids interested. "I wanted to develop something kids and parents couldn't say no to," said Adam Green, the program's director.

Each semester, Green recruits 16 teenagers to construct a 14- or 17-foot Whitehall, a traditional Hudson River rowboat. The project takes an entire semester of after-school work, during which students learn and practice basic carpentry skills as well as some applied mathematics, science and history. Green's crew will finish their current boat in June, and plan to launch it from Hunts Point and row down the Bronx River.

Begun in 1998, Rocking the Boat has grown popular - this semester, 23 signed up, although Green can only take 16. Students grow to feel invested in the project as they see the boat begin to take shape, and gain an unusual sense of accomplishment.

Meliza Pena, 16, a student at William Howard Taft high school, is building her second boat this semester. "When I first saw it, I wondered, how are we going to build a boat in the Bronx when there's no water?" Now, she is sold. "If I can accomplish something I never thought I could do, I can accomplish anything!"

BUILDING KIDS

Rocking the Boat provides more for teens than just a reason to stay off the streets. "The purpose of Rocking the Boat is not to build boats," Green said, "it's to build kids."

Some teens are most excited about the hands-on skills they are learning. "It's not really the boats that interest me, it's the building," explained Elliyaas Carter, 15, who hopes to someday repair airplanes. "It's the practical skills," said Ronnie Perez, 14. "We've also built things like tables for the workshop. It's so easy!"

Other teenagers value the less tangible skills they have gained. "I've learned a lot about leadership," said Meliza Pena, who has learned how to speak in public by representing the program at various events and festivals, and who gained work experience as a boat-building apprenctice. Students are given much of the responsibility for organizing the boat shop and the construction process and other activities.

Successful after-school programs for teens are not just about keeping kids out of trouble, but about respecting and valuing them, according to Megan Nolan, a social worker at New Settlement. "A successful program has the view that teens are a resource in the community rather than a problem to solve."

"If students are made to feel like their work or their participation is integral to the success of the overall program," Vincent said, "they'll want to come."

TEEN TIME

It is 7:45 p.m. on a Tuesday in the Bronx. A parent chats with Green, while a group of staff and students lingers in the office. They seem reluctant to leave. Edmanuel Roman, 15, looks at some photos taken throughout the afternoon. He likes what he sees. "It really looks like I'm doing something, like we're all working together."

 



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