The city’s helpers are starving for aid

In a given month, there are nearly 24,000 children in New York City receiving preventive child welfare services that keep them safe and with their families; more than 1,700 unaccompanied, homeless youth who have no parent advocating for them; more than 67,000 children whose families rely on cityfunded child care.

The thousands of workers who perform these services every day rarely receive much attention. But the care provided by these professionals — counseling new parents, digging for resources, building community connections and keeping our city strong and whole — is sometimes the only thread holding families together.

Sadly, in New York City these lifesaving services are in critical condition themselves, as non-profit providers struggle to stay financially solvent while staying true to their mission. Year after year we have done more with less, shielding our clients and our employees from the impact. We have restructured. We have renegotiated contracts with all of our vendors. And we have changed health plans, yet still had to shift a greater portion of health costs to our employees.

Thus far, we have borne the rising costs alone. But the reality is that we cannot do so any longer. Our funding is no longer sufficient to support the hiring of trained and experienced workers. We cannot provide them with salaries high enough so that they don’t have to hold second jobs, nor can we offer the technology and training required for a professional workforce. We are facing turnover rates of more than 30%, losing valuable expertise and have already had to reject government contracts that do not fully cover the cost of providing services.

Yet in a city where the gap between rich and poor continues to grow, the demand for our services is at an all-time high. Which means that, without our services, those hurt the most will be the very New Yorkers most at risk, those who it is our mission to serve.

In recent weeks and months, we have seen terrible stories that illustrate just how critical these services are: children’s lives lost when understaffed and overburdened child welfare workers neglected to properly investigate or follow up with families; homeless students forced to travel hours to school because the only shelter available was miles far from their original home; funding and service cuts to summer camp programs that will jeopardize the ability of working parents to keep their jobs.

The challenges we are already seeing will only get worse if the funding situation is not remedied.

That’s why more than 200 organizations, including Good Shepherd, have asked Mayor de Blasio to make an immediate 12% investment in New York City’s human services infrastructure on top of current contracts, both to retroactively account for a decade without cost adjustments and to stabilize the human services sector for the challenging work ahead. A 2016 study shows that a staggering 18% of New York City’s health and human service non-profits are insolvent and 40% have zero margin for error.

We know that the mayor understands how important the social service agencies are in a city where 21.7% of children live below the poverty line, more than 45,000 families with children are in shelter, and one out of five children relies on local food banks or pantries for sustenance. Indeed, he regularly and publicly articulates the inequality facing New Yorkers and had made it a point to highlight the plight of our most vulnerable citizens.

Which is why it is so surprising that he has proposed only a 2% wage increase, with no retroactive relief, for only a portion of our staff. It is simply insufficient to address the ballooning costs of rents, liability insurance, health care or even just turning on the lights every day.

For the administration, it does not seem to be an issue of money, but instead of priorities. Many of our friends in labor have benefited from generous wage increases with retroactive compensation. The mayor has negotiated longoverdue contracts with the city’s municipal unions. But social service providers are just as critical to keeping the city safe and keeping our most vulnerable out of the criminal justice system and homeless shelters, with the skills to be financially independent.

Why we haven’t received the same level of attention isn’t just perplexing, it’s threatening to our solvency.