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Meeting the Gray Wave


chinatown senior center
Photo (c) Daylife
Seniors playing Chinese Chess at a senior center in Chinatown

While rest of Lower Manhattan grumbled through a Monday, the basement of 100 Gold Street was hopping. In one brightly lit room, a cluster of Chinese immigrants practiced English. Next door, others gyrated in unison to folk music. In the dining hall, scores of guests chattered while a replay of the Olympics closing ceremony flashed on an overhead screen.

Between bites of glazed salmon and bok choy, Yu Chiao Ho Leung, 71, said she started coming to the City Hall Senior Center, run by the community organization Hamilton Madison House, after she lost her job at a garment factory following 9/11. The dancing and mahjong give her a reason to stay active, she said. Otherwise, "I'd be at home watching television. That would be stifling."

At a nearby table, Muriel Gursky, 80, marveled at a study sheet for the test immigrants must take to become naturalized citizens, circulated by her Chinese tablemates. "That's very advanced," she said. "The Constitution and all that... This is very hard stuff."

That same afternoon, a more somber senior gathering took place up the street, on the steps of City Hall: a protest against budget cuts to senior centers in the city's public housing projects.

Standing behind Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, who likened the closure of senior centers to "the bulldozing of [a] town square," elder protesters held up a hand-written sign: "Don't break up our family-Marlboro Senior Center."

This is a challenging time for aging New Yorkers - and for the organizations that care for them. As services for seniors are more needed, and perhaps more endangered, than ever, the Bloomberg administration seeks to dramatically change the way these programs work.

Shaking Up the System

By 2030, one in five New Yorkers will be 60 years old or older as boomers retire, immigrants become grandparents, and medical advances continue to lengthen life spans.

The demographic surge looms over a well-worn, tightly stretched network of agencies that have fed, entertained and counseled the city's elderly for generations. Facing the "gray wave," the Department for the Aging wants to implement a plan the administration believes will make programs more comprehensive and better coordinated.

This involves reshaping three "core services": meal delivery to homebound older people; case management, which coordinates care and benefits; and senior centers that have long anchored older adults in their communities.

Many senior centers grew organically out of local civic and faith organizations, said Caryn Resnick, the aging department's deputy commissioner of external affairs. Now, she said, they need restructuring to adapt to emerging needs - from promoting fitness, to engaging immigrant communities, to reaching out to elderly gay people.

"A lot of it is being able to work with existing resources with really just a different mindset," she said.

But while service providers and officials around the country agree that the aging process is evolving, the city's plan has met resistance from some organizations, who fear it will undermine homegrown, grassroots programs and impose a stiffer, corporate model.

"You do your best job when you can provide meals [and] services locally," said Bobbie Sackman, public policy director with the Council of Senior Centers and Services, "so you understand the community, you understand the culture, you know where the resources are."

The administration's initiative, she said, "is moving away from, 'What does it really mean to be community based... What does it mean to really have a presence within a community?'"

The New Old Age

The rumpled patchwork of senior programs has begun incrementally reworking itself. The city has already launched a new case-management system, and meal delivery is currently being restructured.

The city's plan makes case managers "gatekeepers" who connect seniors to other programs, like meal services, legal help and home-based care. In April, the Department for the Aging initiated new contracts under a revised geographic scheme that reduced the number of case management regions from 32 to 23. Agencies will cover broader swaths of the city, which might encompass various language and cultural groups.

A number of service providers fear the consolidation does not adequately consider the personal and cultural nuances that form the bedrock of more localized programs.

As agencies turned their clients over to new case managers, some groups criticized the handover as abrupt and bureaucratically haphazard, leaving both staff and seniors disoriented.

In Chinatown, seniors who previously received less formal case management from local groups - in tandem with meal deliveries - are now served by a larger organization not based in the Chinese community. Some advocates worry that the new case managers may not be as attuned to Chinese seniors' everyday lives as neighborhood-based providers.

Hong Shing Lee, chief operating officer with the Asian American Federation, which represents community agencies, said cultural competency is a key concern. Even a bilingual provider could be out of touch with cultural norms and fail to monitor clients comprehensively. Under the previous system, which integrated case-management assessments with daily meal delivery, staff would have a "more holistic" view, he said. "They would know where the gaps are."

Meal programs, meanwhile, also are being reshaped. To boost efficiency, the Department for the Aging has consolidated service districts so that providers may ship meals, fresh and frozen, over larger regions. Critics worry that the attention to economies of scale will chill the warmth of traditional, locally rooted programs that deliver hot food from local kitchens, often within the same neighborhood, catering to dietary preferences from Hindu to Kosher.

staff at the Henry Street Settlement's Senior program
Photo (c) Henry Street Settlement and Sari Weintraub

Henry Street Settlement, a Lower East Side-based organization, has partnered with other local groups to apply for a contract under the new scheme. The agencies hope this will enable them to keep delivering meals while maintaining community ties. But administrator Janet Fischer worries that the city is departing from a relatively intimate approach to a "bigger is better" concept.

Under the new contract system, she predicted, "you'll lose the sense of community. You'll lose the sense of involvement... 'Bigger and better' may be great as a machine, but it takes away everything that human service organizations stand for."

Senior Centers of the Future

A basic premise driving the city's plan is that the traditional senior center, which served as a simple gathering spot for meals and conversation, does not fit the lifestyle of increasingly active older adults.

"Today, seniors are looking for volunteer opportunities, they're looking for health promotion programs, they're looking for lifelong education," said Ron Soloway, of UJA-Federation of New York. "So there is a need to transform the senior centers that exist in the city up to the next level."

To upgrade senior centers, Resnick said, the city will establish "a very flexible model that would go from being citywide... to the community." Smaller centers would focus on local services and health-related activities, while larger "multi-service centers" would offer a wider array of programs on a larger scale. In light of the concerns that community groups voiced about the case-management restructuring, the city has slowed down the plan for senior centers and says it has been consulting with community groups to ease the transition.

Covering the Costs

Much of the anxiety the providers express may not stem specifically from the overhaul, but rather from the overarching budget crises that could cripple many senior programs. While budget strains affect the state government, on the city level, aging-services providers face a 3 percent cut to contracts. Federal funds for public housing have also crumbled, threatening scores of senior centers in public housing projects. (About a third of city Housing Authority households are headed by people over age 62.) It is unclear how all this will affect the restructuring efforts.

The idea of modernizing in the face of the fiscal crunch seems unreal to Fischer of Henry Street Settlement.

"Maybe if we're lucky, we'll win this program contract," she said, referring to the group's bid for the meal program. "On the other hand, we may not have a senior center to work from. It's crazy."

"We're setting up systems that continue the basic inadequacies," said Sackman, pointing out that many programs have long waiting lists. The city's overhaul would have been more beneficial, she said, if "it had brought with it maybe some additional funding, maybe lower caseload sizes, maybe a way to do more intensive case management for people that need it. But none of that exists. We just rearranged boundaries."

Nancy Wackstein, executive director of United Neighborhood Houses, an umbrella group, said the dollars lag behind the rhetoric of modernization.

"It's great to talk about enriched services. It's great to talk about expanding needs," she said, "but we haven't seen any plan that talks about how those are going to be addressed and paid for."

Resnick acknowledged the current fiscal uncertainties, but said that service providers could fulfill the aging department's goals while staying within current budget limitations. Ultimately, the city promises to improve services and ensure efficient spending by developing new ways to track the performance of programs.

Citing statistics on meals served at senior centers -- a measurement that critics say is too limited -- the city concludes that more than 40 percent of centers are "chronically underutilized."

"It's very hard to say we need to bring additional dollars to bear when, in fact, we weren't spending the dollars that were actually in the network," Resnick said.

Many providers say that they too want to revamp programs, but that funding gaps impede change, as groups struggle to make even basic improvements, like boosting staff and renovations.

Isabel Ching, who helps run senior services at Hamilton Madison House, wants an opportunity to build on her group's own ideas for innovation, such as offering educational programs, fitness initiatives and group travel overseas. "We can make it a bigger and better program," she said, "but give us that flexibility, give us resources."

Stuart Kaplan, chief executive officer of Selfhelp, which manages several senior centers in Queens, said the modernization is moving in the right direction, but faces "the perfect storm."

"The population's growing, the dollars are down, and innovation is supposed to go up," he said. "Well, it sounds like this triangulation will make it more challenging to achieve the objectives."

Michelle Chen is a freelance reporter in Manhattan and a native New Yorker. 

When Foster Children Become Pregnant


(Adapted from Child Welfare Watch Vol. 16)

Correction: This article originally stated incorrectly that in order to participate in the Nurse-Family Partnership, teens must sign up by their third month of pregnancy. In fact, any low-income, first-time mother-to-be living in one of the Nurse-Family Partnership's service areas can sign sign up for the program as long as she is no more than 28 weeks pregnant. The partnership also has an initiative that targets teens in foster care, where a nurse travels to meet the mothers wherever they reside. The article below has now been corrected.

foster children with kids
Photo by Arpan Munier
Mayra Pacheco with her daughter, now 5

Just before Mayra Pacheco gave birth at age 16, she moved in with a foster mother who owned a brownstone in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Pacheco had two rooms, a bathroom and even a tiny kitchen for herself, her brother and her soon-to-arrive baby.


READ MORE:

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Giving Foster Teens a Place to Call Home

What she didn't have was much guidance. Arriving home from the hospital with her newborn daughter, Pacheco was terrified. "It was crazy," Pacheco, now 21, recalls. "It was very scary. I was so young. And I don't have any family members here."

Pacheco found prenatal care for herself at a nearby hospital and took a birthing class there with her boyfriend. But she says her agency never referred her to parenting classes. Her foster mother wasn't around much and did not offer any advice on how to care for a newborn.

As a group, teen mothers face many of the same daunting odds as teenagers in foster care (see related story). Both groups are more likely than their peers to live in poverty and drop out of high school. Yet in New York City, the foster care system has largely overlooked pregnant and parenting teens. The city's Administration for Children's Services does not provide the privately run foster care agencies it oversees with guidelines on services for pregnant and parenting teens. Nor does it keep track of how many teens in the system are pregnant or parenting.

A 2005 survey by the public advocate's office estimated there to be 437 pregnant and parenting teens in the system. But there are only about 42 beds for pregnant teens in the city's maternity shelters and 157 beds for teen moms in residences for mothers and their children. This means most pregnant and parenting teens in foster care live in foster homes.

Yet there are no citywide standards for how foster parents should be trained to help young mothers, and ACS does not measure whether pregnant teens receive prenatal care and instruction in parenting skills. The agency does conduct periodic random reviews to determine whether foster children-pregnant or not-are receiving appropriate medical care. ACS also encourages agencies to refer pregnant teens to the Nurse-Family Partnership, which provides intensive in-home support to new moms for two years.

For teens in foster homes, supervision and assistance generally falls to the foster parents, who must negotiate caring for a teen who is in the foster care system and a baby who is not. "Some foster parents take over and try to parent the baby themselves," said Miranda Seaton, a caseworker at Good Shepherd Services. This can prevent the teen from stepping into the parenting role, she says.

In 1968, Inwood House created the city's only foster home program for young mothers. The agency recruits foster parents to work with teen mothers and has tailored the foster parent training program to include topics like talking to teens about contraception and how to allow your teen to be a teen while teaching them to be a parent. The agency also holds offers a support group for foster parents and provides them with lots of attention, says Norma Uriguen, director of teen family support services.

At 17, Melissa Cueves had a new baby who'd been born with disabilities and was living in a kinship foster home with her aunt, who had four other kids. "I needed all the help I could get," she recalled. Cueves and her aunt went to Inwood House's program. There, Cueves took classes on budgeting, domestic violence and parenting skills. Her social worker accompanied her on doctor's visits and taught her how evaluate daycare centers. And Cueves met a group of peers, some of whom she's still in touch with six years later.

"Everyone was dealing with the same issues as me," she said.

Child Welfare Watch is a joint project of the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School and the Center for an Urban Future. Edited by Andrew White.

 

Keeping Former Prisoners Out of Prison


Photo by Rob Salmon
Photo courtesy of Rob Salmon

People come to Damon Moore every day needing a lot of things - a job, help staying sober, a decent apartment. But mainly, they need help remembering how to live. Most have been behind bars long enough to have forgotten what it is like to put a paycheck in their pockets, decide what they want for breakfast or hold their child.

Moore helps run Network in the Community and Network in the Prisons, a set of programs for formerly incarcerated New Yorkers founded by Episcopal Social Services. At Moore's branch in East New York, former prisoners receive services ranging from job counseling to anger-management therapy - whatever they need to move forward.

"We try to change your system of thought," he said.

In a typical year, more than 25,000 New Yorkers walk out of prison into an unfamiliar world. Stigma and instability await them at every turn, and everything from opening a bank account to grocery shopping can be an alien experience.

Moore, 33, has traced that shaky path. He got involved with the network's prison-based programs in his 20s when he was imprisoned for armed robbery. The counseling he received helped him assess his own potential as an advocate. Inside, he spoke out for better conditions for prisoners. When he got out, he carried that social consciousness back to his community, while continuing to lean on the network to stabilize emotionally.

Today, in his work as a counselor with the network, Moore embodies a keystone of progressive reentry programs: enabling people who have been in prison to create new roles for themselves as community members.

"A lot of times," Moore said, "people say stuff like, 'Oh, Damon, you're different.' And I go forward and ask them, 'What makes me so different?' I mean, we all have this ability to change."

The Downside of Freedom

"When you come out here, to be free is painful," said Paulie Santos, 64, who was released in 2005 after serving time for murder. "'Cause you gotta be responsible. You gotta get up early. If you want to eat, you gotta go out there and earn the money. You decide when you're taking shower, when you go to the bathroom. In prison they tell you everything. So when you come out here... a lot of people can't deal with that."

Though the state prison system offers some transitional services, such as vocational training and substance-abuse treatment, former prisoners often come home to the same instability that drove them toward crime in the first place. The state Department of Correctional Services, which oversees the facilities that house most of state's incarcerated population, reported that among prisoners released in 2002, nearly four in ten returned to the system within three years.

People continue to stream out of prison into uncertainty. According to corrections authorities, about 26,400 people were released in 2006. Those leaving prison for the first time were mostly male, mostly from New York City, and disproportionately Black and Latino compared to the state population overall. The median time served was about two and a half years and the average age at release was 34.i

As part of a program to identify and address prisoners' needs, the corrections department assessed nearly 14,700 inmates and found that 85 percent needed substance abuse treatment, 67 percent needed further schooling, and 54 percent needed help controlling aggression.

Guiding a Seamless Transition

As the main lifeline for struggling former prisoners, community-based groups have worked to reintegrate people inside and outside prison walls.

Episcopal Social Services' network aims for a "seamless" transition by engaging prisoners well before their release. At nine state facilities and one city jail, prisoners voluntarily enter supportive communities within the prisons. They attend support groups led by the inmates and, when space is available, live in communally run housing. Once immersed in the program, people who have spent years staring at concrete and bars suddenly find themselves sharing chores and socializing with colleagues. The constant isolation of conventional prison is replaced by a mini-society centered around daily therapeutic meetings.

By giving the prisoners a sense of fellowship and purpose within a broader community, said program director Anne Williams, the network drives participants "to look for and meet the best part of themselves ... and exchange a dysfunctional lifestyle for a functional one."

Outside prison, the organization's close ties with parole officers encourage referrals for released individuals to the network's community-based sites in the Bronx, Manhattan and Brooklyn, linking them to long-term peer support and other services.

Of the hundreds of clients served by those community programs from 2004 to mid-2007, only 12 percent reentered the prison system-about a third of New York's overall three-year recidivism rate.

Beyond helping people meet basic needs, re-entry programming propels clients into advocacy work. Many become activists on prison-related issues like sentencing reform and HIV/AIDS prevention, or turn past struggles into a teaching example. Moore recently coordinated a gang prevention program in which former gang members spoke with at-risk youth about their experiences with crime and incarceration.

"We've taken a lot out of the community," Moore said. "It's time to put something back."

Finding a Home

From Crack House to Safe House

Softening the plunge into the "outside" world, programs for former prisoners offer support from peers dealing with similar challenges.

At a towering gothic landmark in West Harlem known as the Castle, the Fortune Society houses about 62 people who became homeless after prison. They're welcome to stay as long as they need, supported by counseling, employment assistance and legal help while preparing to live and work independently.

The building itself, a converted crack house, encapsulates its mission of redemption: It has harbored more than 500 men and women since 2002. Clients live in apartment-like housing with others going through similar transitions, along with former clients who have graduated to positions as service providers. Once anchored at the Castle, clients can receive various services, including GED classes and substance abuse treatment. Parents can engage in therapeutic programs to help reconnect with their children.

Glenn Martin, Fortune's associate vice president of policy and advocacy, who served time himself, said an acute housing shortage thrusts many former prisoners into the city's chaotic shelter system.

"I hear clients all the time saying that the city-run shelter system is worse than prison," he said.

Bad Rap

Rebuilding a life after prison means finding honest work, but employers often turn away people with conviction records. Despite statewide anti-discrimination protections, former prisoners face an extraordinarily high unemployment rate. In New York City, the mayor's office estimates that a criminal record undercuts an individual's chances of landing a job by 35 percent for whites and nearly 60 percent for blacks.

Santos, who earned a college degree during prison and has tutored residents of the Castle in computer skills, said joblessness drives many former prisoners into a familiar spiral of desperation.

"That's where the recidivism rate takes place," he said. "Because how long could you be out here, doing nothing? You need a roof over your head."

On the flip side, employment can vastly improve a former prisoner's chances of success. The New York-based Center for Employment Opportunities has placed about 10,000 formerly incarcerated people in full-time jobs over the past decade through targeted training . In transitional work-preparation programs, clients develop workplace cooperation and communications skills - qualities that can persuade employers to give former prisoners a chance . A recent independent evaluation found that, one year out, participants were reincarcerated at about half the rate of similar group of former prisoners who were not in the program.

But advocates say helping people navigate a biased job market only goes so far if the system is rigged. Groups like Fortune have pushed the state government to strengthen anti-discrimination protections for former prisoners, boost tax credits for employers who hire them and expand prison-based educational programs.

"It's great that we provide all these services," said Martin. "But sometimes it's a little bit like standing in the emergency room putting Band-Aids on cancer."

Prison Prevention

In an effort to curb incarceration, state correctional authorities have in recent years emphasized re-entry services, working closely with health and welfare agencies and local service providers. Still, relatively stagnant funding has left community organizations scrambling to catch up with the growing needs of freshly released prisoners.

Federal legislation passed earlier this year could provide additional resources. The Second Chance Act authorizes grants to states for reentry programs aimed at preventing recidivism. The law's actual impact, however, will depend on how much money Congress decides to pump into it. Re-entry service providers generally rely on yearly grants from state and local coffers.

But money can only chip away at the obstacles bombarding former prisoners. Activists point out that the fundamental problems that originally ensnared them in crime await them when they leave prison: violence, failing schools, chronic unemployment. To stem the cycle, some re-entry organizations operate alternative-sentencing programs in the courts, routing people away from prison and into drug treatment and other community-based programs.

"People are going back to the very neighborhoods that are hardest hit by poverty and racism, and ... incarceration itself has depleted them of social capital," said Marsha Weissman, executive director of the Center for Community Alternatives, which runs re-entry and alternative-sentencing programs in Syracuse and New York City. If incarceration patterns reflect deeper ills, she said, "Why do we only focus on the back end to address those issues?"

"We need to do more in terms of asking ourselves, what's going on in those communities?" Martin said. "What can we do better, so that people are making more appropriate decisions? The question to me is: Can we reinvest to get better outcomes?"

 



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