Human Services = Healthy Communities
Last year, 218 New York City human services organizations, which represent over $5 billion in human services spending in the City, sounded the alarm about how decades of underinvestment have left the sector on the brink of collapse.
We called for immediate investment on our contracts to stop the closure of essential services that make New York a safe, diverse, and inclusive sanctuary for all. To ensure New York is able to respond to policies that impact all of us, the City needed to shore up our organizations and make long-overdue investments.
After months of organized advocacy, the Mayor and City Council announced an $85.2 billion budget deal that included investments aimed at addressing the concerns we raised through our Sustain Our Sanctuary campaign about the fiscal challenges facing nonprofit human services providers, the first in recent history to begin to address the systemic, long-term underinvestment in the City’s nonprofit human services sector in a comprehensive way.
We are extremely grateful to the Mayor and the City Council – and in particular, Councilmember Julissa Ferreras-Copeland who brought this issue into the budget debate, Councilmember Helen Rosenthal who took on this issue early and with great tenacity, and Councilmembers Stephen Levin and Carlos Menchaca who were among the most vocal supporters – for their investments in our sector.
Below is a brief outline of what has been included:
While we have more work to do, we are now set on the right trajectory and have taken an important step forward for our sector’s financial health.
HSC will continue to engage with the Administration on next steps. Implementation details matter and we will work hard to ensure these new investments are operationalized efficiently. Expect updates from HSC as this progresses and please plan to share with us your experiences as these changes move forward.
