Employees flee Thrive
Despite average 104G pay
Chirlane McCray’s mental-health initiative, ThriveNYC, has had a sky-high staff turnover rate of more than 40 percent since its August 2016 inception — even though the average salary is a hefty $104,000.
ThriveNYC has created 41 positions over the past three years, and 17 employees have left their jobs.
The average time a ThriveNYC staffer stays in their position is just 10.5 months, and 16 people are new to the initiative within the last year alone.
A former staffer said the $1 billion program — which has been criticized for its lack of transparency and results — has a muddled mission, leading to an early exit by frustrated workers.
“I think a lot of people are there for a mission that hasn’t always been clearly and consistently stuck with,” the ex-staffer said, faulting ThriveNYC’s leadership for failing to communicate goals clearly to the public.
ThriveNYC’s abysmal retention rate is even lower than that among employees of the city’s Administration for Children’s Services, which handles emotionally fraught cases of abused kids. Most ACS caseworkers stay on the job for three years, according to a 2017 City Council report.
“Our mental-health system is a failure. Alot of people came with the commitment to really change the system . . . and sometimes doing the work for that can take awhile,” said the former Thrive employee.
“There may have been some second-guessing on how much to put that aspect front and center. People may have become frustrated with that hesitancy.”
Politics, including a probe by City Comptroller Scott Stringer, has also damaged morale.
“There’s expectations to show results very quickly in ways that may not be realistic,” the former staffer said, adding that the lynchpin mental-health program of Mayor de Blasio’s administration has not lived up to its potential. “That’s been disappointing to people who came to work for it with big expectations.”
The initiative’s staff budget has ballooned from $1.6 million in the first year to $2.6 million as of October. An executive assistant to director Susan Herman makes $93,000 a year, while Herman makes $233,000.
De Blasio’s press secretary, Freddi Goldstein, said that salaries for staffers’ “hard and strenuous work” are commensurate with those of other city employees, and added that some turnover was due to the fact that ThriveNYC didn’t create its central office until January.