N A f f A I R S N ( W S M A G A Z I N (

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Ime
Y o u r t ax d o l l ar s b u y
r o c k - b o t t o m w ag es f o r t en s
o f t h o u s an d s o f w o r k er s .
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b e t h e p o l i t i c al b at t l e
o f t h e y ear .
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Plugging Away
d
im and sweltering. An economic Eden unplugged. 1977. New York has been having
California nightmares lately, and waking up with one unshakable idea: that the city
and region will face catastrophe very, very soon unless New York State allows com-
panies that generate electricity to go on a building spree in the boroughs.
In January, a consortium of developers and business groups, including the New York City
Partnership and the New York Building Congress, issued a report that urges increasing the
city's electric generating capacity by about 20 percent over the next five years.
The state Public Service Commission is already moving forward in high gear. This winter,
it approved a dozen emergency generators to be located in waterfront neighborhoods ringing
the outer boroughs, circumventing its own environmental review process to do so. It is cur-
rently considering an application for a monster power plant in Sunset Park, and 11 other
proposals to build or expand plants are in the pipeline.
When it comes to electricity, New York has been operating in crisis mode. There's just one
problem. While it has deep structural problems that need to be resolved, New York's power
system is not quite in crisis.
The city could certainly use more electricity. Peak demand has increased by about 20 per-
cent in a decade, and it 's up a third from 1980. State deregulation of the power industry cre-
ated enough uncertainty about the electricity market that many companies that might have
built generators sat on the sidelines until recently, wary of making substantial investments
without a net. Because the metropolitan area has limited capacity to make its own electricity,
out-of-town generators have been able to charge crushingly high prices during peak summer
months. Customers' bills have soared.
But so far, New York's power problem has been largely one of a market run amok. When it
comes to keeping the lights on, we have one thing California doesn't: the luxury to plan. As
the community coalitition Citizens United for Responsible Energy has pointed out again and
again, building a garland of new power plants is not the only option. Existing generators-
outdated, underperforming and very dirty-can be "repowered," converted to new technolo-
gies that both increase their output and keep neighborhood air cleaner. Each new plant to be
built needs to be carefully considered as a piece of the city's overall capacity, to ensure that
neighborhoods aren't littered with redundant power plants built in a speculative frenzy.
Unfortunately, the state has few options for regulating what plants get built, and where. If
a proposed project passes environmental review, then the Public Service Commission is virtu-
ally obligated to approve it. About all it can do is fast-track the application process for one
preferred project or another, and hope that would-be competitors will decide to drop out
before they build unneeded plants.
With power companies falling over each other to plug into New York, rational planning is
not likely to happen without extreme public pressure. There's just one place it can start: with
the understanding that New York is still miles away from California.
Cover photo by Joshua Zuckerman; Dora Diaz. ex-homecare worker
Alyssa Katz
Editor
City Limits relies on the generous support of its readers and advertisers, as well as the following funders: The Adco
Foundation, The Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, The Hite Foundation, The Unitarian Universalist Veatch Program at Shelter
Rock, The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, The Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation, The Scherman Foundation, The North Star
Fund, J.P. Morgan & Co. Incorporated, The Annie E. Casey Foundation, The Booth Ferris Foundation, The New York Community
Trust, The New York Foundation, The Taconic Foundation, Deutsche Bank, M& T Bank, Citibank, and Chase Manhattan Bank.
(ity Limits
Volume XXVI Number 3
City Limits is published ten times per year. monthly except
bi-monthly issues in July/August and September/October, by
the City Limits Community Information Service, Inc., a non-
profit organization devoted to disseminating information
concerning neighborhood revitalization.
Publisher: Kim Nauer
Associate Publ isher: Anita Gutierrez
Editor: Alyssa Katz
Managing Editor: Katherine Pushkar
Senior Editor: Kathleen McGowan
Associate Editors: Annia Ciezadlo, Tracie McMillan
Contributing Editors: James Bradley, Wendy Davis,
Michael Hirsch, Kemba Johnson
Sajan P. Kuriakos, Robert Neuwirth
Intern: Avi Mermelstein
Design Directi on: Sarth Calhoun
Proofreader: Sandy Socolar
Contributing Photo Editor: Joshua Zuckerman
Photographers: John P. Lawson, Gregory P. Mango
Center for an Urban Future:
Director: Neil Kleiman
Research Director: Jonathan Bowles
Project Director: David J. Fischer
Board of Di rectors*:
Beverly Cheuvront. New York City Coalition Against Hunger
Ken Emerson
Mark Winston Griffith, Central Brooklyn Partnership
Amber Hewins, Granta
Celia Irvine, Legal Aid Society
Francine Justa, Neighborhood Housing Services
Andrew Reicher, UHAB
Tom Robbins. Journalist
Ira Rubenstein. Emerging Industries Alliance
Makani Themba-Nixon, GRIPP
Pete Williams, National Urban League
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MARCH 2001
FEATURES
Metropolitan Operatives
Thanks to term limits, scads of city offices will be up for grabs
this fall-but that doesn't mean your favorite neighborhood
progressive candidate is a shoo-in. Three political kingmakers
give wannabe contenders some pointers. By Sajan P. Kuriakos
Losing Business
What has more than $1 billion in subsidies to major corporations
bought for New York City? According to a new study from the
Center for an Urban Future, a lot less than it bargained for. By jonailum Bowles
The New Wage Movement
They clean bedpans, do laundry and take care of children, all for a song.
Meet the people who might be the biggest players in the mayoral campaign:
the thousands making pitiful wages w o r k i ~ g for New York City. By AnnUl Ciezadlo
PIPELINES
Night Watchmen
Every evening, vigilante volunteers take to the street to make sure
homeless people with AIDS get what they deserve: a kind word
and a clean bed. By Avi Mermelstein
Divine Intervention
From youth and seniors programs to food banks and drug rehab, social
service jobs are trickling down to churches. Now, with help from a
new foundation project, they may be able to get some money, too. By Tracie McMillan
Home in One
How can mentally ill homeless people get the housing and the help
they need? Streamline the referral process, say the folks behind a
Brooklyn-based pilot program. By Nora McCarthy
Review
Now and Then
Cityview
Missing Foundation
Editorial
Briefs
Ammo
COMMENTARY
126
By Roger Sanjek
128
By Lynne A. Weikart and Glenn Pasanen
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CITY LIMITS
Urban Decay
The History
Channel
O
nly a hundred years ago, Newtown
Creek, the meandering channel that
splits westem Brooklyn from western
Queens, was a vibrant-if malodor-
ous-working waterfront. A census of
"offensive trade establishments" conducted by the
city's department of health in 1899 found no fewer
than 20 that fit the bill, including fertilizer compa-
nies, manure barges, a degreasing syndicate, and
the almost unimaginable "night soil boat and dead
animal wharf."
But the crown jewel in this collection of noi-
some and toxic commerce was the Laurel Hill
Works, an enormous refinery and chemical plant
that was once one of the country's leading copper
producers. Established in 1866, the factory eventu-
ally sprawled across 36 acres of the creek's north-
ern bank and ushered in a new era of copper refin-
ery and industrial acid production that fueled the
nation's first telecommunications boom in the late
19th century. At its peak, Laurel Hill employed
MA.RCH 2001
1,260 people and processed hundreds of Canadian
ore each day. It. was also the subject of environ-
mental lawsuits as early as the 1920s when local
residents complained that sulfur dioxide fumes
from the massive smelter smokestacks were
destroying their gardens.
The plant, bought by Phelps Dodge Corp. in
the 1950s, was shuttered in 1983 and finally razed
last year. Now all that remains is a scarred lot, a
noxious residue of heavy metals and an ongoing
legal mess.
That was enough for Curtis Cravens. An artist,
history buff, connoisseur of urban decay and
industrial development manager, Cravens first
stumbled across the site eight years ago when a
friend led him through a hole in the fence. He
became obsessed with the place. He spent hun-
dreds of hours wandering the grounds, combing
through the crumbling buildings, taking pho-
tographs and cataloging the detritus: laborers'
abandoned clothing, surveillance photos taken by
management during mid-century strikes, employ-
ee injury records. His fixation even led him to the
Phelps Dodge headquarters in Arizona. Cravens
also tracked down some former plant workers:
Aided by a name written inside a hard hat he'd
found, he discovered the owner's widow in Tea-
neck, New Jersey.
Cravens' obsession became a larger artistic and
historical project-one that did not fit neatly into a
gallery. "It's a very isolated practice, trespassing
for five years on a hazardous waste site," he
admits. "It's a little loony. B l ! ~ the art gave way to
broader urban questions and interests: Does what
happened here matter?"
So this winter, assisted by the urban nonprofit
Place In History, Cravens put out a small book that
compiles many of these artifacts, paired with essays
on the technological, environmental and labor his-
tories of the factory. In part, it reads like an elegy for
a vanishing industrial age, with technical diagrams
of the process of copper refinery, statistics on the
production of industrial sulfuric acid and a chronol-
ogy of this early multinational conglomerate.
But Cravens and his collaborators are careful
to point out that part of the goal of publishing the
book was to create a living document. They plan to
sell the book locally and make it available to class-
rooms and libraries for free. The aim is to provoke
discussion, and perhaps generate ideas about how
to revive contaminated areas in a way that also
commemorates their past.
-Kathleen McGowan
"Copper on the Creek: Reclaiming an Industri-
al History" is available for $10 from Place in
History. Call 718-625-1122 or email paul@
placeinhistory.org.
.. --------------sl
Ad Campaigns
Stamp
Connecting
I
t's food for thought, at the very least: This
winter, New York State launched a new ad
campaign to boost food stamp participation,
targeted at senior citizens and former wel-
fare recipients who have gone to work.
The state will kick in $200,000 to pay for
brochures, posters, television commercials and
grocery bags with information in Spanish and
English about eligibility. The Food Industry
Alliance of NY State will help distribute these
materials in locations such as supermarkets, in
addition to domestic violence centers and senior
citizen centers.
It's an important effort, say anti-hunger advo-
cates. Since 1996, fewer and fewer Americans are
getting these subsidies. Food stamp participation
has declined nationally, statewide and citywide, at
rates between 30 and 40 percent. But despite that
decrease, requests for emergency food in the city
have increased by 28 percent over the past year,
according to Beverly Cheuvront, acting executive

CORNERING
THE MARKET
PIcUten III froat of
HudMn llarbt, tile
latest frOIIt In tile


witII a twist. Hera,
Local 169 of tile union
UNITE, which hu won
contracts at lIVen
Lower East Side gro-
cerl, Is also battling
Local 1164 of the
Intenatlonal Loa.-
shoremu's AIIocIa-
tIH. UNITE reps claim
llUaa.ent broqbt
In the I LA.
director for the New York City Coalition Against
Hunger. And almost half--46 percent-of those
eligible in New York City are not receiving benefits.
Part of the problem is welfare reform: Many
former welfare recipients, now off the rolls and
in low-paying jobs, mistakenly believe they can
no longer get food stamps. But welfare and food
stamps are not connected. According to Carlos
Rodriguez, program director at the Community
Food Resource Center, while the cutoff for wel-
fare benefits for a family of three in New York
City is only $577 a month, the same family
could earn up to $1,533 and still be eligible for
food stamps.
"It's what I call the unintended effect of wel-
fare reform," said Edie Mesick, executive direc-
tor of the Nutrition Consortium of New York
State. "[poor families 1 believe they are not eligi-
ble, and don't have the time to go through the
application process."
Mesick, Cheuvront and Rodriguez all praised
New York State for launching the campaign, but
cautioned that spreading the word is just one piece
of the puzzle.
"We have long been advocating for outreach
programs. On the other hand, there are still a lot of
problems," said Cheuvront. 'The city needs to
make it easier for people to get food stamps."
-Avi Mermelstein
Contracting
Wait Not,
Want Not
P
ayment delays from the Mayor's Office
of Contracts are wearing down many
local not-for-profit organizations, finds
a recent survey of 77 groups by City
Project, a nonprofit budget watchdog.
On average, paychecks come about four months
late for the community-based organizations that
win contracts to perform social services like after-
school tutoring, a Meals on Wheels program, and
job training.
Those payment delays force the CBOs, which
usually have small budgets and no reserves, to
take out bridge loans in order to keep paying staff
and providing services. Under current rules, the
city won't reimburse them for the interest they
must pay.
Despite the problems, 96 percent of CBOs had
begun services on time, and only 11 percent
reduced services because of the funding delays,
the survey reported.
"It's ridiculous that we have to wait so long,"
says Jennifer Flynn, executive director of the New
York City AIDS Housing Network, a coalition of
housing providers for people with AIDS. "The
people that really suffer are the ones whom the
money is intended to serve." Flynn says that
delays of up to 11 months have put her member
organizations in a tight spot.
Yvonne Graham, executive director of the
Queens and Brooklyn health care and immigrant
services center, Caribbean Women's Health Asso-
ciation, says she has high staff turnover because of
the uncertain economic conditions that sometimes
force her to delay payments to her staff. "At least
60 percent of those who left say it is because of
the uncertainty," she says.
The delays are especially frustrating because
more than 80 percent of the contracts are
renewals, pointed out City Project's Lynne
Weikart. "It's absurd that renewals should take
this long."
And it may be difficult for an organization to
even find out at why a contract is being held up.
The comptroller, who finalizes the contracts,
blames the mayor's office, and the mayor's office
in tum blames the comptroller, says Flynn.
But CBOs may soon get a little bit of relief. In
late January, city Comptroller Alan Hevesi pro-
posed a rule change that would direct the city to
pay interest on bridge loans, as long as the con-
tractor in question wasn't to blame for the delays.
That change, or one like it in the City Council,
could make the slowdown more bearable.
-Avi Mermelstein
CITY LIMITS
z ........ --------...... ---------------Briem
C!l!1!::=:::::iiJa.iEllB
a
HUD Scandals
Home
Economics
W
ith the clock running out on the
Clinton Administration, a coalition
of political heavyweights and fed-
eral housing officials announced a
last-minute save in January that
would rescue about 465 brownstones that have
been pillaged, exploited and left for dead through
scams carried out under the federal mortgage
insurance program known as 203(k). Larded with
cash from the flush Federal Housing Administra-
tion insurance fund and reliant upon the expertise
of some of the city's most admired nonprofit hous-
ing groups, the plan looks like salvation for both
low-income tenants and fragile housing stock:
The federal Department of Housing and
Urban Development, after taking title to the build-
ings, will pass them off to nonprofits for a nomi-
nal cost. The nonprofits will manage the occupied
buildings (tenants will pay no more than 30 per-
cent of their income) and sell off the vacant ones
to families, with preference given to upper Man-
hattan residents who make up to $79,000.
HUD will pay back the banks that now hold
the mortgages, pay for all repairs and pay the pow-
MARCH 2001
erhouse nonprofits that will be overseeing the
buildings with management, (ievelopment and
marketing fees. (Abyssinian Development Corpo-
ration will superintend about 185 properties in
Harlem, and East Brooklyn Congregations will
manage the rest in Brooklyn.)
It's quite a victory. Now, there's just one thing
left to do: Make it work.
That won't be easy. The scams have left a
messy legal tangle behind. It could take HUD 18
months or longer to get control of some of the
properties. In the meantime, since the original
nonprofits involved in the scandal still hold the
titles, they are actively trying to unload some of
the debt-ridden brownstones on unwary buyers.
('There's nothing that HUD, you, I or any of these
people can do to stop them," says Abyssinian's
Darren Walker, an architect of the plan.) On top of
that, several of the plan's masterminds at the fed-
eral Department of Housing and Development-
as well as the department's top brass-are now out
of their jobs.
There are practical pitfalls as well. The motley
rn
e
=
collection could be a hard sell: Some are
untouched, some partly fixed and boarded up, and
some have been gutted. And at this point, nobody
knows exactly how many properties are
involved-or who lives in them.
At a raucous meeting in mid-January, top
HUD representatives, Harlem pols and nonprofit
housing experts presented the plan to about a
hundred frustrated and skeptical Harlem tenants
and local activists. The officials, pledging repeat-
edly that no tenant would be evicted, also
promised to quickly address all the buildings'
maintenance problems.
The deal-and those promises-are impres-
sive, says Elizabeth Kane of the Westside SRO
Law Project, which initially uncovered the scam.
But she and other observers worry that even as
politicians promise that no tenant will be ousted,
that pledge will be hard to enforce. 'There's an
enormous amount of work ahead of us to make
sure it's implemented in a way that's as good as its
word," she said.
-Kathleen McGowan
For more news updates, events and job ads
subscribe via fax or email to the
CITY LIMITS WEEKLY
Call 212-479-3349 or email mcgowan@citylimits.org

Night Watchmen
A dogged group of volunteers stands guard for homeless people with AIDS.
PIPEliNE i By Avi Mermelstein
.. -...... ~ ,
"Hollywood" Bob
Kohler joshes with
Barbara Surles
during his nightly
vigil to make sure
AIDS patients get
a safe bed.
:M
B
ob Kohler has been standing in the
, same place for nearly five months,
but that doesn't mean he hasn't been
making progress,
Kohler is the most dedicated member of
DASIS Human Rights Watch, an ad hoc
group of activists formed to ensure that the
city finds places to stay for homeless people
with AIDS. The volunteers have been camp-
ing out on the sidewalk in front of the city's
largest Division of AIDS Services and
Income Support office since September 8.
They wait every day, sometimes until 1 a.m.,
until each homeless client looking for emer-
gency shelter has been matched up with a
decent place to sleep.
"I've been a gay activist for 40 years,"
Kohler says. "After a while you get tired of
yelling at politicians. This way, you feel you
are making a difference."
DASIS is the city agency that provides
benefits-like emergency housing-for
poor people with AIDS and HIV. Unfortu-
nately, its success has been erratic, Though a'
November 1999 court decision requires the
city to honor such emergency requests the
day they're made, beginning last August,
DASIS started turning away dozens of
homeless AIDS patients daily, sending them
to non-existent addresses or to hotels that
didn't accept DASIS clients.
That's when DASIS Watchers took
matters into their own hands, At 5 p.m.
every day-Kohler gets there at 4-volun-
teers arrive at DASIS' main office on 8th
Avenue to ensure clients get housing. As
they trickle out, Kohler and other Watchers
approach and ask, "Did you get housing?"
The volunteers do on-the-spot checks,
using their cell phones to call a hotel and
confirm that a room is waiting. Some-
times, they even accompany the client to
the hotel.
Over 150 people have volunteered with
the group, and about three are there every
night, says Jennifer Flynn, head of the New
York City AIDS Housing Network and
DASIS Watch creator.
Some Watchers have even gone to jail
for DASIS clients. In September, Kohler and
Flynn were among II protesters arrested
after chaining themselves to a pillar inside
the 180 Water Street headquarters of
DASIS' parent agency, the Human
Resources Administration.
"That was when the clients really started
to respect us," Kohler says. 'They said, 'You
would go to jail for meT" With his bright
blue eyes under a full head of white hair and
with 20 years' experience in show business,
Kohler has become something of a celebrity
among gay and lesbian activists, who call
him ''Hollywood Bob." He's affable and
sweet, especially with DASIS' repeat cus-
tomers, but he's also tough: By his count,
he's only missed three nights of the Watch
since it began.
Tonight, several clients linger on the
sidewalk to chat. One, Barbara, walks up to
Kohler and squeezes him like a stuffed doll.
Her red-framed glasses match her curly,
newly dyed locks.
"Do you like my hair, Bob?" she asks.
''No, I hate it;' he kids, stuffing a few
dollars in her coat pocket.
Later, a frantic man rushes up and beats
on the locked glass doors, hoping they'll still
let him in. Though the office remains open
until all are placed, the DASIS building clos-
es at 5 p.m., and tardy clients risk a night on
the street. One strategy the Watchers have
devised is to sneak latecomers in through the
exit-only side door when other clients come
out. It is hard for caseworkers to deny a des-
perate person face-ta-face, Kohler says.
"Wait till someone comes out the
door," Kohler offers, pointing to the green
door to the side of the main entrance.
'Then you can go in." The man follows his
advice and gets inside.
As caseworkers start going home for the
night, only one or two say goodbye. Most
avoid eye contact, ignoring the Watchers and
leaving their question-Has everyone been
placed?-unanswered.
"A lot of the caseworkers want to help,
but their hands are totally tied," Kohler says.
"One said to me, 'I can't talk to you, but I
want to tell you something-I think you
people are doing a wonderful job.' "
And the Watchers claim they have made
a difference. Initially, volunteers would be
waiting on the street until 1 am. Now the
watch routinely ends at 6:30 p.m. with every
client placed. More than that, since the vigil
began, the agency has put doors on the bath-
room stalls and fixed the water fountain
(essential for people on medication). In
addition, caseworkers stay longer and are
more respectful toward the clients, accord-
ing to Flynn.
DASIS Watch actually considered dis-
banding after two weeks in early January
when no clients were left stranded, but then,
in mid January, two people were denied
housing. Flynn and Councilmember Chris-
tine Quinn picked up the tab for a hotel
room over the four-night Martin Luther
King weekend.
So for now, the volunteers will continue
their vigil. And people like Bob Kohler will
stand on the same sidewa1k, comfort the
clientele that linger with packed bags out-
side the building and ask each one, "Did you
get housing?"
CITY LIMITS
Divine Intervention
As they dive into social services, black churches get a hand untying their shoestring budgets.
By Tracie McMillan
G
ladys Oliver never expected she'd
still be teaching today. After
spending 22 years as a reading
instructor in Ozone Park, Queens, and two
more in retirement, Oliver volunteered to
run the after-school program at her church,
Antioch Baptist in Jamaica. ''This area
really needs this," she says. "We have a lot
of foster parents, low-income families and
working parents."
Oliver has her hands full. She and five
other volunteers keep an eye on 14 chil-
dren, oversee grace before snacktirne, help
with homework, and then let the kids
select from a donated library of books and
puzzles. But there's a lot else she doesn't
have, including a decent computer.
Antioch also runs a summer camp, a
seniors program, a youth leadership circle
and two sports teams. The programs call
for a volunteer staff of nearly 30 and over
$20,000 a year-almost all of it drawn
from contributions to the collection plate.
"I'm constantly amazed," says Rev. Dr.
Fred Lucas of homegrown programs like
Antioch's. Lucas directs the Faith Center,
which helps religious groups build hous-
ing. All around him, he sees churches cre-
ating another infrastructure-one for
social services. "They are operating food
pantries, clothing and AIDS programs,
prison ministries, drug rehab programs-
it's across the board. If we were to quanti-
fy the volunteer hours, it would be mil-
lions" of dollars, says Lucas.
Fueled by deeply committed congrega-
tions and a history of providing for their
communities when no one else would,
black churches have long offered vital ser-
vices to their neighborhoods. Powerhouses
like Bridge Street AME and Abyssinian
Baptist have gone even further, to become
major real estate developers.
But as government shrinks its role as a
direct provider of social services, humbler
neighborhood congregagations are increas-
ingly asked to run programs their commu-
nities depend on. They've expanded
beyond bible studies and seniors groups to
provide everything from prison release
counseling to food pantries to day care pro-
grams. President Bush put an official seal
of approval on the phenomenon with the
establishment of a White House Office of
Faith-based and Community Initiatives to
MARCH 2001
help religious groups get federal dollars.
Most black churches, though, are still
stuck in the grassroots, with too few
resources and no way to get more-a sit-
uation a new citywide initiative called the
Black Church Technical Assistance Pro-
ject is looking to remedy. "Historically,
black churches have spearheaded the for-
mation of health and social service pro-
grams in their communities," says Megan
McLaugjllin, executive director of the
Federation of Protestant Welfare Agen-
cies, which is overseeing the project. "The
issue now is that so many of them are
operating on shoestring budgets with no
full-time staff and with no ability to raise
the funds. They need to compete in the
philanthropic world."
The black church project aims to help
mid-sized congregations like Antioch
grow into professionally run institutions-
with solid organizational structures, clear
missions and goals and well-defined pro-
grams tailored to the needs of their com-
munities-that can reliably get money
from foundations. Without those basics,
church programs are seldom able to con-
vince foundations that money spent on
their programs is money well spent.
"They're up against organizations that
are professionalized, that have a paid staff
or a paid fundraiser or consultant to write
a proposal, as opposed to someone the job
just fell on," says Rev. Alfonso Wyatt,
who sits on the steering committee for the
black church project and is vice-president
of the Fund for the City of New York. The
Fund distributed $400,000 in grants last
year, and it has given an additional
$85,000 to faith-based organizations over
the past two years. Rev. Wyatt estimates
that just one in 10 applications to the Fund
actually receives a grant; the losers, dis-
proportionately, come from the ranks of
amateur volunteers.
Roderick Jenkins of the New York
Community Trust, which is helping fund
the black church initiative, agrees that
churches' appeals to foundations like his
often fall far short of their targets. 'Their
proposals are very basic. They talk in non-
descriptive ways about the project. Some-
times they don't submit budgets. They
don't discuss objectives. They haven't
done outreach to figure out ways to better
work with the community. The organiza-
tional papers aren't in order," Jenkins sighs
as he ticks off a familiar list.
C
hurches are well aware they have a
lot to learn. Over 300 have already
expressed interest in participat-
ing-five times as many as the project will
be able to handle. With a planned annual

PIPEliNE i
,
With little more
than change from
the collection
plate, Gladys
Oliver runs an
after-school
program at her
Jamaica church.


leW
budget of $185,000, the program hopes to
assist 60 churches over the next three years
and link them up with one of three con-
sulting groups: FPWA, Community
Resource Exchange, and the Nonprofit
Connection. Each group will work to
assess the needs of churches and how they
correspond to the needs of their communi-
ties, and work with churches to build pro-
grams with strong organizational struc-
tures and accountability.
The goal is to get churches to the point
where they're able to secure funding for
their service programs on their own.
"Churches have already been recognized
as [institutions that] can provide critical
services," says Jenkins. "They have a long
way to go, but in the short term they will
be able to develop the program they
already have a handle on and move it to
the next level."
Their hunt for dollars will get into
controversial territory: The churches will
be coached in how to apply for the gov-
ernment social service contracts that now
go to religious groups, under the "charita-
ble choice" provision of the 1996 welfare
law. Last year, New York City gave $1.9
million in contracts to 17 religious groups
to counsel welfare recipients whose bene-
fits have been suspended. Such contracts
legally obligate churches to follow the
city's directives, even if they don't mesh
with their own religious beliefs. For
instance, counselors are expected to find
evidence that clients aren't following work
rules and suspend them if necessary.
But the church groups will also learn to
be selective in their efforts, deciding what
kinds of projects will meet both their own
needs and those of their neighborhoods.
Right now, the city is glutted with some
kinds of programs and starved for others.
Providing emergency food, for instance, is
both a pastoral calling and easy to get into;
the city and state provide the goods and
even market start-up kits. As welfare and
food stamp enrollment have plummeted,
the number of food pantries and soup
kitchens has exploded: There are now
more than 1,100 serving 600,000 people a
year. Tewanna Sanders of the United Way
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But there is free legal assistance
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NYLPI, 151 West 30th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10001-4007
estimates that 90 percent of the food pro-
grams her organization funds are run by
religious groups.
But new programs are not always
what's needed. Some churches try to start
them when there are already several in the
neighborhood, or provide food so infre-
quently that they're more inconvenient than
helpful. United Way now gives food grants
to small churches only if they operate the
only program in their neighborhood.
And even a niche is not enough. Saint
Simeon's Episcopal Church is located in
Morrisania, which has fewer child care
slots per school-age child than almost
any neighborhood in the city. Funders
would term this an "underserved commu-
nity." Saint Simeon's, though, operates
its after-school program out of its base-
ment, with three part-time, untrained
staff. Watching 15 to 20 children and
helping them with their homework is
hard enough; doing the paperwork for
health department registration and state
snack money is a true struggle.
And without staff, applying for grants
is not even a possibility. All the financial
help they've had so far has come to them
unasked, much of it through McLaugh1in's
federation. "Sometimes there's a grant, but
it's not continuous. There should be a
steady flow of income. And that is where
many of us fall flat on our faces and we
have to start all over again," laments pastor
Maxwell Davis-Jones.
F
oundations will be getting a remedial
education, too, with workshops to fill
them in on the scope and seriousness
of the social services churches provide. But
getting them to feel comfortable about sup-
porting work that is often overtly religious
will be the real challenge-one not every
foundation is willing to accept.
Rev. Wyatt recalls the experience of a
church volunteer who had gained renown
for working with wayward children. "A
funder heard about her, gave her a grant,"
he says. "Then she did a site visit. They
prayed before the program started and the
funder freaked and said 'You can't do that.'
And the woman said, 'This is what we do,
and this is how we do what we do.' "
A foundation's discomfort with sup-
porting religious work can overshadow
everything else. "Often, you get organiza-
tions dressed up, and still, foundations will
not fund thern," says Rev. Lucas. He says
(continued on page 29)
CITY LIMITS
Home in One
Will one-stop housing referrals keep the mentally ill off the streets?
By Nora McCarthy
A
t Oak Hall, the rules are strict but
simple. You must be at least 25
years old, clean and sober, and
able to live cooperatively on a floor with
five other people. But one tenant there
still drinks, and he's not just quietly nurs-
ing his bottle. He pulls out knives, threat-
ens neighbors, gets in fights, breaks furci-
ture and windows. The other residents
hide in their rooms, afraid to come out
even to cook dinner.
"When one person is refusing ser-
vices, it's a disservice to all the tenants
and that person," said Carolyn Walker, a
case manager at Oak Hall, a single room
occupancy residence for mentally ill peo-
ple in Fort Greene.
But finding a new home for someone
who won' t stick with the program is not
easy. Hard-to-place cases often wind up
back living on the street or in shelters,
where they can wait months for an appro-
priate place to live-or never come back
for help at all.
So a pilot program set to begin next
month in Brooklyn holds great promise.
Run by the state Office of Mental Health,
the new "single point of entry" system is a
centralized registry designed to speed
mentally ill homeless people into support-
ive housing, where residents can get psy-
chiatric care right in their own buildings.
A database will match clients with suitable
vacancies. The registry will also track who
does not end up getting a place to live and
why-and hopefully make sure fewer of
the homeless mentally ill remain without a
place to live.
The state believes that centralization
will simplify the job of getting clients
with complicated situations-from health
problems to pyromania-the specialized
help they need in supportive housing. But
the groups providing those rooms say it
will put pressure on them to take on
clients who don't fit-who could disrupt
the delicate balance their programs need
to work and demand help that their staff is
not able to provide.
Until now, it's been up to social work-
ers at shelters, rehab, prison and hospital
psychiatric units to refer clients to appro-
priate supportive housing. Armed with a
potential client's mental and medical his-
tory, the housing facility in tum decides if
the match is a good one.
MARCH 2001
But starting with the Brooklyn pilot
and phasing in citywide by the end of
the year, all applications for housing
will be routed through a database run
by the Center for Urban Community Ser-
vices (CUCS), a major nonprofit provider
of supportive housing,
which will come up with
three placement options.
The social worker must
send that client to those
programs, all three of
which must interview
and decide within two
weeks whether to take
him or her.
Jan Tacoronti, the sys-
tem's project coordinator
for New York State, says
the idea is to streamline
a haphazard and largely
unaccountable process
that too often leaves
homeless people wander-
ing. "Sending out refer-
rals like a shotgun is a
waste of effort," Tac-
oronti says.
But many housing
providers see an impor-
tant selection process at
work amid that apparent
inefficiency, reports
David Bergman of the
Coalition of Voluntary
Mental Health Agencies,
because many social
workers insist on sending
their clients to housing
programs with good track
records. "We know to
send clients to places that
have been respectful to
our clients ... where people
have helped our clients,"
agrees Tena Frank, direc-
tor of homeless services
at the Lenox Hill Neigh-
borhood House. "It's built
on trust and experience." Housing organi-
zations rely on that same trust, too-for
assurance that a social worker isn't with-
holding compromising information about a
candidate's history, for instance.
But such mutual support, say design-
ers of the centralized booking system,
doesn' t insure that tough cases find
homes; in fact, it often allows providers
to pick the best-behaved clients while
turning away the people who are in the
most serious need of help. Project direc-
tors hope to put pressure on homes to take
complicated cases that would normally
get rejected.
"It's accountability in a system that's
not accountable at all," says Suzanne Wag-
ner, the director of Residential Placement
Management at CUCS, where the database
has already been in use for a decade. Right

PIPEliNE i
,
A new tracking
system will help
mentally ill people
find housing -
and may make
sure there are
enough homes to
go around.

p-
now, no one keeps an eye on who actually
ends up in supportive housing after getting
a referral and who stays homeless. "We
know where people get placed, but not
how many places they went first or what
happened to them if they didn' t get
placed," Wagner says. "Some people are
getting hospitalized three or four times a
year, and when you see that application,
you know something's wrong."
In Westchester, where a centralized
referral system has been in use for two
years, supportive housing facilities are
now accepting clients they used to turn
away, says Susan Erway, the county direc-
tor of community support services. "It
insures access to housing for high-need
clients," Erway says, such as those who
@MCCAP
Mental Health Managed Care Consumer
Advocacy and Ombudsprogram
Managed Care Hotline _ ....... n( .. F f: OoM:'itJMlI.s .. ..waG ......
fWJpfn# I'I'U h /fh un
(646) 602-5675
Information about managed care for Medicaid, Medicare and other
insurance including exemptions/exclusions, disenrollments, access to
care, and grievances.
Advice, dispute resolution, representation at Fair Hearings and other
administrative hearings as well as educational materials and training
seminars.
For immediate assistance on managed care issues or to receive a free
copy of our pamphlet, Medicaid Managed Care Health Plans: A Fact
Sheet for the Mental Health Community, please call our Managed Care
Hotline at (646) 602-5675.

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Your Neighborhood Housing Insurance Specialist
start fires. "Now we ask, 'What would you
need to house this person and what can we
give you to do that?'''
City housing groups will likewise
be offered extra help. If all three recom-
mended housing providers reject an appli-
cant, they'll need to meet with cues and
a state representative to figure out what
additional services the state could sup-
ply-such as intensive psychiatric help or
outpatient rehab-to make it possible for
one of them to accept the person after all.
Young adults and the elderly have the
hardest time finding housing, says Walker,
because few programs are tailored to their
needs, like long-term medical support or
substance abuse treatment.
The central
check-in system's
greatest promise is
that it will show the
state exactly where
the holes in the
support net are.
Indeed, the central check-in system's
greatest promise is that it will show the
state where the holes in the sup-
port net are and push officials to develop
programs to fill them. That's worked
before: In 1998, advocates for the home-
less won more than $130 million for new
supportive housing, in part by using infor-
mation from cues's database to demon-
strate that there just weren't enough
places for the homeless mentally ill to
live. "Getting more data will help fill the
gaps," Wagner says. "What kind of beds
do we need? Do we need to develop new
methods of housing?"
In the complex relationship between
supportive housing groups, their clients
and the state, trust is slowly growing.
Although some housing providers worry
that a centralized referral system will leave
them vulnerable to whatever Albany .wants
them to do, they're also hoping it will
speed the homeless mentally ill directly to
the care they need. "Generally, we are cau-
tious," Bergman says. "It's a noble effort,
and if it works, we applaud it."
Nora McCarthy is a Brooklyn-based
freelance writer.
CITY LIMITS
Metropolitan
By 1m. 0 pe ratl-ves
N

York's usually cozy political world in the coming months.
Consider this. In the next election, there are 35 open City Council seats; the As the political season picks up speed and potential candidates begin jock-
offices of mayor, city comptroller, public advocate and four borough presi- eying for position, the doubts are already mounting. "There were great
dents are up for grabs. Some observers expect that as many as 200 candidates grandiose ideas last year about progressives winning seats in City Hall," says
will be fighting for these offices. A cloud of bees angrily buzzing around a one longtime political observer. But so far, he says, he's not impressed by
hive of honey comes to mind. what he's seen.
This was also to be the year of opportunity for progressive candidates, the Because while eager reformers may know the issues and represent their
year when neighborhood activists-issue-driven and devoted to good govem- communities better than anyone else, most of them don't have the first idea
ment-would have a chance to take over City Hall. According to the idealists, how to master that most crucial political skill: winning an election.
this year will bring the twilight of the all-powerful party machines. After all, For that, they tum to the experts. And so did we.
the onset of term limits will be forcing career politicians out of office. And the To assess the chances of a progressive triumph this election year, City Lim-
new campaign finance laws, which promise four public dollars to each dollar its spoke with three Democratic consultants who know how to make the dark
raised by a candidate, should bring new optimism to contenders who were horses win. With more than three decades of political experience between
once hopeless outsiders. them, they are realists above all. Two, Martin Brennan and Kevin Finnegan, are
Sounds great. But what are the real chances for progressive candidates? seasoned political veterans. And though the third, Micah Lasher, has managed
Will access to money and the absence of incumbents alone launch an elec- or participated in field operations in some 20 Democratic races, he can' t even
toral revolution? buy the dea1makers a drink. He's 19 years old.
Three behind-the-scenes political pros give some rare free
advice to the throngs racing for City Hall this fall.
Martin Brennan
At 33, Brooklyn-born Martin Brennan already has an impressive
resume getting things done with a progressive agenda. As the
organizing director of the New York Public Interest Group and the
Straphangers Campaign, he helped defeat a mid-1990s city ini-
tiative to build six giant incinerators. He successfully campaigned
for a $9.6 billion program to rebuild New York's transit system,
and helped implement the MetroCard. He was also the campaign
director of the New York State Tenants and Neighbors Coalition,
where he was instrumental in salvaging the city's rent protection
laws. More recently, he managed Catherine Abate's 1998 failed
bid for state attorney general and served as political director for
Chuck Schumer's successful race for U.S. Senate.
Brennan won't say which campaigns he may become involved
in during the upcoming year. But with the horde of candidates
rushing the doors of City Hall, he admits he's in demand.
For Martin Brennan, this will be the year to remember for pro-
gressive candidates. And unlike some of his colleagues, he
remains cautiously optimistic for them.
"Your fate is in your hands," says Brennan to aspiring players.
"If you have fundraising ability and a network of relationships; if
you have the ability to motivate people to work for you, and as
long as you roughly fit the demographic profile of your area, you
stand a chance." .
There is another advantage for left-leaners, Brennan points
out. Traditionally, party bosses beat down insurgents long before
MARCH 2001
" Progressives
tend to be
involved in
issue advocacy
as opposed to
electoral
organization,"
Brennan
remarks-
but that
doesn't always
win them
elections.
Finnegan
dismisses the
specter of an
evil right wing
in City Hall.
"There is an
overwhelming
consensus,"
he says.
-
constituents have even had a chance to cast a vote. Take Bronx
Democratic County leader Roberto Ramirez. His fearsome repu-
tation was due in part to his ability to dispose of challengers to
handpicked party candidates by successfully invalidating their
nominating petitions in court. Insurgents couldn't even get on the
ballot. His acolytes-and his power-were unstoppable.
Recent laws, however, have made it more difficult to challenge
candidates' eligibility. Four of Ramirez' candidates actually faced
competition in last year's primaries. Every one of them lost.
Still, cautions Brennan, that's just a chink in the armor. Power
is still concentrated in machine pols. For whole careers, they have
lived and worked elections. They know the intricacies of the vot-
ing rolls-where to devote their energy, whom to ignore. They
know the importance of wooing and marshaling the unpaid labor
of political clubs and unions. And they know to tap into the loyal-
ties of community-based organizations that depend on member
item money, the dollars that conncilmembers are allowed to dis-
pense from the public trough.
Brennan also advises would-be insurgents to pick up the
pace. In his view, only the candidates who started fundraising
and vote-getting operations last year truly stand a chance
against the party pick.
And remember, it's not always about the issues. "Progressives
tend to be involved in issue advocacy, as opposed to electoral
organization," Brennan remarks. "Community activism and issue
advocacy don't translate perfectly to electoral success."
Brennan points to the razor-thin defeat suffered by activist Liz
Krueger in her recent campaign to oust II-term Republican State
Senator Roy Goodman. Goodman won by merely 300 votes-all
absentee ballots. "From an insider's perspective, [the Krueger
campaign] didn't run as sophisticated an absentee ballot program
as Goodman's," Brennan says. Years of experience paid off for
Goodman; in what had promised to be a close race months before
the polls opened, the Goodman camp made sure it targeted each
and every voter.
Still, Brennan considers the Krueger candidacy to be a land-
mark in New York City politics. "She had a career in issue advo-
cacy which she presented to the voters," he says. And Krueger
won' t make the same mistake twice, Brennan says; "she's no
longer a political virgin."
Kevin Finnegan
Transplanted San Franciscan Kevin Finnegan began his career in
activist politics when he helped Harvey Milk in 1977 become the
first openly gay elected official in the country.
Finnegan, an attorney, moved to New York in the mid 1980s
and specialized in environmental law, AlDS and civil rights liti-
gation. Four years ago, he decided to cut down on his law prac-
tice and spend more time in public service. Most recently,
Finnegan, 44, served as Hillary Clinton's deputy political director
on her successful bidfor Senate.
Currently, Finnegan is the political and educational director
of the labor union UNiTE, where he organizes lobbying efforts
for labor and clean-government initiatives. Given that
Finnegan's expertise seems to be informing broad coalitions, he
is well positioned to find that common ground on which a pro-
gressive candidate can build a platform. However, like Martin
Brennan, Finnegan is cagey about his plans for this year. "I am
talking to people," he says.
Kevin Finnegan is no red-book waving, fist-in-the air kind of
leftist. Much of what he says is canny and carefully thought out.
This realist acknowledges that the day when progressive lawmak-
ers will wield real power is still far off. ''There is not going to be
a fundamental change in the way the city is run," Finnegan says
over coffee and cigarettes at a downtown cafe. "There is a gener-
al satisfaction about the quality of life. The first order of business
will be to stay the course."
Yes, the schools could be better, rents are outrageous, and the
cops need taming. But, Finnegan says, it was always this way in
New York. He's no fan of Rudolph Giuliani, but he dismisses the
notion that there's an evil ideological right wing roaming the cor-
ridors of City Hall, or, indeed, that there are any major divisions
between local politicians. "Actually there is an overwhelming
consensus," Finnegan says. "It is delusional to think that there is a
counter-ideology."
But ultimately, Finnegan is upbeat about the possibilities for
activists this election year. And riffing on the upcoming elec-
tions, he sometimes sounds positively old-school. "We are at
the dawn of an era when progressive values are going to domi-
nate," he says.
In the long run, the sheer number of candidates will make the
progressive agenda possible, Finnegan predicts. For the first time
in recent memory, because all the candidates will be new, voters
will be required to think before pulling the lever. And the thinking
voter is the salvation of the issue-driven underdog.
"The higher level of participation means that in a majority of
races at least, the voters will be given real choices," Finnegan
CITY LIMITS
)
says. ''This means the voters will be asked to critique and get to
know the candidates."
Like Brennan, Finnegan agrees that the keys to City Hall lie
with professional campaigning. "You've got to be better at poli-
tics," he says. That means reckoning with unpleasant political
realities, like the certainty that the Democratic organization will
do its best to run candidates with whom it can do business-and
progressives won't be first in line. And labor and special interest
groups in Queens and the Bronx, where the party bosses exercise
considerable power, will undoubtedly work for the party picks.
Finnegan thinks this election is likely to change the way the
party machines will fight council and mayoral elections eight
years from now, when term limits once again open up the seats.
Soft money, the bane of insurgent candidates, is banned under cur-
rent election laws. But don't expect that to be the end of the story.
"We have not learned what loopholes the city campaign finance
. laws have," warns Finnegan. "But I am sure there are some good
lawyers working on finding them."
Micah lasher
He may be only 19, but Micah Lasher's got history. His mother,
Stephanie Lasher, was a press secretary during the Lindsay
administration, and his father, Albert, was campaign treasurer
to former Democratic Comptroller Harrison Goldin. It seems to
be in his blood-"but one of my sisters married a Republican,"
he remarks.
One Democratic insider and veteran campaigner calls Lash-
er "the boy genius." Another simply shakes his head, smiles and
says, "incredible," when Lasher's name comes up. In 1997,
when he was all of 15, Lasher was a field coordinator for Deb-
orah Glick's unsuccessful campaign for Manhattan borough
president. Recently, he wrote all the campaign literature for
Lorraine Koppel's failed bid for Republican Guy Velella's
Bronx State Senate seat.
A sociology major at New York University, Lasher has already
committed himself to a campaign. He 'll help manage New York
City Housing Partnership lawyer Brad Hoylman's City Council
bid for the First District, which includes Chinatown and Battery
Park. Lasher will be working out of his dorm room.
Micah Lasher is faced with a paradox: The crowded race for
City Council could wind up hurting good contestants. "How can
the progressive candidates separate themselves from the pack?"
he asks. "How are we different?"
Lasher is trying to figure out how the differences between pro-
gressives and their opponents can be effectively and convincingly
communicated to the average voter-without the issue-driven
candidate coming across as too different.
Most voters out there are not really hankering for change, he
points out. The message can't be shrill-but it's got to be loud
enough to be heard over the cacophony of promises sure to be
hurled at New Yorkers over the next several months.
Another hurdle is that it's increasingly hard to define a pro-
gressive agenda. ''The scale has shifted," Lasher says. ''When you
look at the field of candidates running for City Hall, you can see
that whoever wins, the new City Council will be far more pro-
gressive than the one leaving office."
That may be good news for the reform-minded voter, but it
MARCH 2001
also makes it hard for a candidate to shape his or her message.
There just aren't the right-wing candidates the progressives can
point to and say "I am different." Like men at a black tie event,
everyone is dressed alike.
Lasher hones in on the issue of "getting the message across."
Candidates can only spend $137,000 in the primary, which in a
one-party town like New York is where most races are decided.
Assuming that in most City Council races there will not be much
of a difference between candidates' campaign coffers, spending
money may tum out to be more important than raising it. How will
candidates be able to get the most bang for their buck?
The question is known as "maximizing voter contact" in cam-
paign jargon, and it's a big one. ''There is a big difference in
spending money to pay the rent [on campaign offices] and paying
for direct mail," Lasher says. The key is putting as much of your
cash as possible where it can effectively reach the voters .
Understanding the target audience and shaping direct mail
are critical. Lasher points to lessons learned in Koppeil 's State
Senate campaign in the Bronx last November. Direct mail was
Lasher's domain, and voters were inundated with it. Nearly 22
mailings went out between mid September and early November
to prospective Koppell supporters. "We kept up on Velella's rela-
tionship with the insurance industry," he says. (Veleila came
under a storm of criticism for influencing laws favorable to the
state's insurance companies, his biggest contributors.) But at the
end of the day, the direct mail had no discernible influence. Vel-
leila won by a comfortable margin. Apparently, voters didn't
care about the insurance connection, and the qUality of literature
is no substitute for careful marketing. "Sometimes it's not all
about the volume," Lasher says.
''The trick is to tap into the mindset of the demographic," he says.
"How do I put the message in the language of the community?"
Progressives
must
differentiate
themselves from
the herd, says
Lasher.
"The trick is to
tap into the
mindset of the
demographic."
-
Losing Business
Corporations that get tax breaks to stay in New York
are thanking the city with mergers and layoffs.
Is this any way to build an economy?
By Jonathan Bowles
Illustrations by RJ Matson
O
ver the past dozen years, New York City has handed out more than
$1 billion in tax incentives to companies that have threatened to
leave the city and take their jobs with them. That's the equivalent of
two years of services for the homeless, five years of parks. It would
even pay for much of the NYPD for a year.
City officials say the tax breaks are dollars well spent on the city's well-
being. These incentive deals, they insist, bring work and increased tax rev-
enues to New York. The companies that receive them pledge to retain hun-
dreds or thousands of jobs in the city and, increasingly, to create large
numbers of new ones.
But in the most comprehensive independent assessment to date of these sub-
sidies, the Center for an Urban Future has found evidence that a disturbingly
large proportion of the companies that have profited from city retention deals
have failed to deliver on their rosy employment pledges.
They have been acquired by other companies; put themselves up for sale;
gone belly-up; moved large parts of their business out of the city; or simply
eliminated a large number of jobs. In many cases, companies have made these
moves within months of receiving tax breaks.
The end result, in case after case, has been anything but a job boom. More
than half of these companies have laid off substantial numbers of workers.
And there is strong evidence that many of those firms-from flailing dot-
coms to merging investment banks-may now have fewer employees in the
city than they did before they received tax breaks. As investments, the subsi-
dies sure look like losers.
It is impossible to know how many of the companies that have received
city tax breaks over the years have outright defaulted on their pledges to retain
and create jobs in New York. The city's Economic Development Corporation
(EDC), which fields companies' requests for tax breaks and puts together the
incentive packages, does not make any information about these firms'
employment levels available to the public, or even to the City Council. But
enough of the recipients have announced major cutbacks or made other job-
depleting moves to raise fundamental doubts about the effectiveness of tax
incentives as an employment machine.
Over the past 12 years, nearly 80 companies have received tax breaks of $1
million or more in return for a promise to keep their jobs in the city, create more
jobs and/or keep their headquarters in New York. But after receiving the breaks,
fully 40 of them have fallen off the wagon. Some have announced major layoffs.
Many entered large-scale mergers, which are virtually guaranteed to result in
layoffs, while still others have recently put themselves up for sale-all a short
time after benefiting from retention deals. In the past seven months alone, at least
16 companies that received city incentives have announced significant staff cuts.
There were other developments the city didn't bargain for. At least four
firms announced large-scale mergers or acquisitions within three months of a
tax incentive deal; four others, within a year. Thirteen companies that won city
tax breaks merged with other firms that have also gotten city deals. And four
-
double-dipped, taking money from New York and then moving jobs out of the
city in response to incentives from New Jersey, Connecticut and other states.
The overwhelming majority of the companies on the receiving end of reten-
tion deals are in financial services, banking, insurance and media-all fiercely
competitive industries in which mergers and consolidations have become a
standard order of business. At least 17 financial firms that have benefited from
city retention deals have since either acquired or been purchased by other major
financial companies.
The New York Mercantile Exchange, the New York Board of Trade, the
Nasdaq and the American Stock Exchange have all profited from expensive
retention deals. And the Giuliani administration recently promised up to a bil-
lion dollars in subsidies and tax breaks to the New York Stock Exchange. These
are dicey investments at a time when trading floors at financial exchanges are
being replaced by electronic trading systems.
In the past two years, more than a half-dozen dot-coms and other high-tech
companies have also gotten into the act, just in time for major cutbacks in the
wake of plunging stock prices and declines in venture capital funding. A major-
ity of those companies have since announced large-scale layoffs or merged with
other firms. Meanwhile, nearly every major television or cable network has
received a multimillion-dollar tax incentive package to remain in New York. But
in recent years, this industry has witnessed a wave of mergers, including Walt
Disney with ABC, Viacom with CBS, and America Online with Time Wamer.
Companies that take tax breaks, then merge with other firms, downsize or
move jobs out of New York aren't deadbeats. Most simply make rational busi-
ness decisions that result in a loss of jobs. They choose to benefit shareholders
rather than New York employees.
Yet mayor after mayor has showered hundreds of millions of dollars in
tax breaks on corporations. The city's justification remains the same it has
always been: that without these subsidies, companies would be guaranteed
to leave New York.
Yes, some will. And many more won't. Competition from Jersey and
beyond is indeed real, and tax incentives are sometimes the most obvious
ways to keep companies put. But the days of the 1970s fiscal crisis are long
behind us. Today, businesses are not fleeing New York, but flocking to it. The
city needs to make sure they don't have reasons to leave-by investing in
schools, transportation, telecommunication and other infrastructure that help
them do business better.
At best, the tax deals are a short -term stopgap, a way of offsetting the high
cost of doing business here. If the city's going to use them, it's going to have
to prove results. While the press releases announcing corporate retention
packages get healthy media coverage, there's no accountability once the ink
is dry. City officials never update the public about subsidized companies' hir-
ing records-not one year, not five years, not 10 years after an incentive pack-
age is first announced. EDC has also never commissioned an independent
study to confirm whether the companies it has so generously helped actually
delivered on their promises.
As the accounts below make clear, we need information-and need it just
as urgently as these companies have claimed they needed the city's dollars .
Jonathan Bowles is research director for the Center for an Urban Future.
CITVLlMITS
The Deals and
the Downfalls
Since the city does not release employment infor-
mation about firms that have received retention
deals, there's no way to determine accurately
whether companies have fulfilled their pledges to
retain or create jobs. To fill in the blanks, the Cen-
ter for an Urban Future examined news reports
and company press releases to learn if a recipi-
ent laid off a large number of employees, entered
into a mega-merger, or sold off some of its
assets-all of which cast doubt about its abil ity to
deliver on promises to bring jobs to the city. Forty
raised those red flags. Here are the top 20:
Alexander & Alexander
Subsidy: 3.4 million in tax incentives
Date: November 1996
Pledge: Retain 400 jobs, create 400 more
What happened: Just one month later, the com-
pany was acquired by Chicagcrbased Aon Cor-
poration. Five months after that, Aon said it
would layoff 2,600 people as a result of the
acquisition.
In November 2000, Aon announced it was
cutting another 3,000 jobs nationally, 6 percent
of its workforce.
StarMedia Networks
Subsidy: $2.5 million in tax incentives. Also
received a $1 million state grant.
Date: August 1999
Pledge: Increase its New York City workforce
from 190 to 1 ,300
What happened: In September 2000, this
internet media firm reported it was dismiss-
ing 125 employees, 15 percent of its work-
force. And though the city had provided
incentives to help the firm offset the costs of
moving into a new 100,OOO-square-foot
office in lower Manhattan, StarMedia was
recently forced to sublease 60,000 square
feet of that office space-an acknowledge-
ment that it wouldn't need to house as many
employees as it once planned.
Scient Corporation
Subsidy: $2.8 million in tax incentives
Date: April 2000
Pledge: Retain 213 jobs in New York and cre-
ate another 1,367 over the next 17 years
What happened: In December 2000-less
than nine months after the tax deal was
announced-e-business consultant Scient said
it planned to layoff 460 employees, 25 per-
cent of its work force.
ING Barings; Furman Selz
Subsidy: $5 million in tax incentives for ING
MARCH 2001
Baring, $2.4 million for Furman Selz
Date: April and July 1997
Pledge: ING Barings would retain 841 New
York City jobs and create an additional 870.
Furman Selz promised to keep 580 employees
in the city and bring on 400 more.
What happened: A month later, ING agreed
to buy Furman Selz. The following year, ING
Barings announced it would eliminate 1,200
of its 10,000 jobs worldwide. This past
November, Netherlands-based ING said that
it plans to sell its U.S. investment banking
business, which will likely result in job reduc-
tions in New York.
DLJj CS First Boston
Subsidy: DLJ got a $29.5 million package of
incentives. Credit Suisse First Boston won
$50.5 million in city benefits.
Date: DLJ August 1994; CS First Boston Jan-
uary 1995
Pledge: DLJ promised to keep 1,950 jobs in
New York and create 1,162 new jobs. Credit
Suisse First Boston said it would retain 3,704
iobs in New York City and create 5,550 more.
What happened: Less than three months after
the CS First Boston deal was announced, the
firm said that it would eliminate as many as 900
jobs. Meanwhile, six months after the DU
incentive package was reported, the company
closed its municipal bond unit, which employed
125 people.
Even greater cutbacks were in store. On
August 30, 2000, CS First Boston announced it
was acquiring DU. The president of CS First
Boston has said that the merger will result in a
loss of 2,000 jobs, though Wall Street analysts
predict the number could be closer to 5,000.
The new entity will reportedly keep most of its
European investment bankers, meaning that the
majority of layoffs will be in Manhattan, where
both firms' investment banks are based.
USWeb
Subsidy: $3 million incentive package
Date: October 1999
Pledge: Establish northeastern regional head-
quarters in Manhattan and add 1,357 employ-
ees over 15 years to 586 workers already
employed in the city
What happened: Less than two months after the
tax deal was announced, the internet service
provider merged with the tech consulting f j r ~
Whittman-Hart. Not long after the merger, It
became clear that the new company (now
known as MarchFirst Inc.) would not meet the
-
ambitious job growth projections made by
USWeb and the Giuliani administration.
Between January and the middle of May, the
company laid off 260 people.
In November 2000, the company
announced it would eliminate another 1,000
jobs, or 10 percent of its work force. According
to news reports, at least 20 percent of the com-
pany's New York employees were let go. later
that month, the company's CEO told a meeting
of investors that he might eventually end up seil-
ing the company. last month, the firm terminat-
ed its 15 year lease for 280,000 square feet on
Park Avenue South, where it had planned to
build an office.
Merrill Lynch
Subsidy: $28.5 million in tax incentives
Date: June 1997
Pledge: Keep 9,000 jobs in New York and
add another 2,000
What happened: In October 1998, the firm
reported plans to eliminate 3,400 jobs, more
than 5 percent of its workforce. At the time,
company officials said the job cuts would
affect 700 of its New York City emplorees. The
retention deal failed to inspire Merril lynch to
make the city the site of future expansion. In
1998, the firm began negotiations to build an
office tower on the Jersey City waterfront.
Though it didn't move forward with that plan,
last year it decided to move 1,200 jobs to Jer-
sey City, netting the firm $41 million in tax
incentives from New Jersey. (In 1998, Merrill
lynch received another $20 million in subsi-
dies to build an office building in Hopewell,
New Jersey) .
Dillon Readj Paine Webber
Subsidy: $5.8 million in tax incentives for Dil-
lon Read; $14.47 million for Paine Webber
Date: October 1996 for .Dillon Read; Paine
Webber in May 1996
Pledge: Paine Webber committed to retaining
2,781 jobs and creating 474 more. Dillon
Read promised to keep 620 jobs in the city
and create 664 positions.
What happened: less than a year after the
Dillon Read tax deal, the company was
acquired by Swiss Bank, resulting in 1,500
layoffs at the new company, SBC Warburg
Dillon Read. In 1997, it moved its North
American headquarters from New York City
to Stamford, Connecticut, after receiving a
generous incentive package from state offi-
cials there. In March 2000, Connecticut
offered SBC Warburg Dillon Read a $46 m i ~
lion, interest-free loan to create 555 jobs in
Stamford. In July 2000, Swiss Bank (now
-
known as UBS) announced that it was acquir-
ing Paine Webber. In January 200 I ,
PaineWebber said it was close to finalizing
a deal to rent a 1.1 million-square-foot office
building in Jersey City. Though the firm says
it does not intend to move personnel there
from Manhattan, the city's incentive pack-
age did not compel Paine Webber to under-
take its expansion in the city.
Kidder PeabodYj Paine Webber
Subsidy: $31 .2 million incentive package
Date: 1993
Pledge: Brokerage firm Kidder Peabody
agreed to retain 3,000 jobs in the city
What happened: Kidder Peabody, most of
whose employees were located in New York,
was acquired by Paine Webber in October
1994. Even before the merger, Kidder
Peabody slashed more than a thousand jobs.
After the firms combined, the cuts continued.
Paine Webber eliminated roughly 150 jobs in
September 1995 and slashed another 500 a
few months later.
Zift Davis
Subsidy: $4.3 million in incentives
Date: November 1997
Pledge: Keep 738 iobs in the city and add
another 1,332 over the following 22 years
What happened: The following October, the
company said it rlanned to eliminate 350
jobs, 10 percent 0 its U.S. workforce.
Over the next year and a half, Ziff Davis sold
off much of its publishing empire, including the
magazines PC Week, PC Magazine, Interactive
Week and Smart Business, as well as its ZDTY
coble television network and its Comdex trade
show business. lost July, Son Francisco-based
Internet company CNET announced that it was
buying Ziff Davis and the publ ishing company's
ZDNet Internet subsidiary, a deal likely to lead
to more layoffs.
Tullett & Tokyo Forexj Cantor
Fitzgerald
Subsidy: $2.25 million in tax breaks for Tullett
& Tokyo; $1 .4 million in incentives for Cantor
Fitzgerald
CITVLlMITS
Date: 1995
Pledge: Tullett & Tokyo promised to keep 555
jobs in New York and add another 166 over
16 years. Cantor Fitzgerald agreed to keep
958 jobs in the city and add 473 more.
What happened: In June 1999, Tullett &
Tokyo announced that it was selling its
futures business to a Chicago-based compa-
ny-a move that most likely led to job cuts in
New York. In September 2000, TuIIett was
reportedly in negotiations to be acquired by
securities dealer Cantor Fitzgerald. Though
that deal has yet to go through, in November
the company (currently known as Tullett &
Tokyo liberty) reportedly laid off more than
four dozen New York-based employees.
Chase Manhattan Bank
SubSidy: $234 million in tax incentives
Date: 1988
Pledge: Construct an office building at
Metrotech in downtown Brooklyn and keep
5,000 jobs there
What happened: In the years following the
deal, Chase cut thousands of city jobs as a
result of mergers with Manufacturers Hanover
Trust (in 1991) and Chemical Bank (1996) .
Then, in October 1999, the company
announced it was moving 3,500 jobs from
New York City to Florida and Texas. In June
2000, Chase said it would move 2,500
employees from its New York City offices to
two new towers in Jersey City. And in Septem-
ber 2000, Chase agreed to another
megamerger, this time with J.P. Morgan. The
merger is expected to result in the elimination
of 5,000 jobs, many of them in New York.
CiticorplThe Travelers
Subsidy: $90 million tax incentive package
for Citicorp; $22.1 million to Travelers
Date: Citcorp 1989; Travelers 1994
Pledge: Citibank built an office tower in long
Island City. Travelers promised to retain 8,970
jobs in the city and create 2,100 new jobs
over the next 15 years.
What happened: In April 1998, Travelers
' ,oined Citicorp in one of the business world's
argest mergers. A few months later, executives
of the new entity, now called Citigroup, con-
firmed that they would eliminate 10,400 jobs,
or about 6 percent of the combined firm's work
force. While about 65 percent of the cuts were
expected to occur overseas, more than 1,000
layoffs were planned in New York City
because there was considerable overlap
between the bond traders, investment bankers,
and derivative experts at Citic 0 r pan d
T r a vel e r s' Salomon Smith Barney sub-
MARCH 2001
sidiary. In January 2 000 , Cit i -
g r 0 u p agreed to buy the
investment banking operations
of london-based Schroder
Pic. As a result of th e
deal, Citigroup's
Salomon Smith Barney
unit decided to relo-
cate its global
fixed-income sales
and research divi-
siol'] from New York
to london. And
because there was
significant overlap
between the two
firms, the acquisi-
tion was expected
to result in hun-
dreds of layoffs I
among Schroder's
1,000 U.S.
employees, most of
whom were based
in New York.
CBS; Viacom
Subsidy: $59.5 mil-
lion in tax breaks and ".
subsidized electricity for
CBS; $15 million tax
incentive deal for Viacom
Date: CBS 1993 & 1999;
Viacom
., '.
Pledge: CBS promised to stay . - _
in Manhattan through 2008. Via-
com vowed to keep 4,450 jobs in --=
the city and add another 2,500 jobs -='
over the next 15 years. --=
What happened: In November 1995, CBS
was bought by Westinghouse (which retained
the CBS name). Four years later, Viacom
announced that it was buying CBS. News
reports indicated that the merger would result
in hundreds of layoffs at the two companies'
New York headquarters.
In June 2000, the CBS Internet Group let go
of 24 of the approximately 100 employees in
its New York-based office. In September, MTVi,
the online division of Viacom's MTV Networks,
said it was cutting about a quarter of its staff,
or 105 workers, from its offices in New York
and San Francisco.
ABC
Subsidy: $26 million in tax incentives
Date: June 1994
Pledge: Retain 3,700 jobs and create 1 85
new positions
What happened: In February 1996, ABC
was bought by Walt Disney Co. In February
1997, ABC notified the state labor Depart-
ment that it planned to layoff 60 city employ-
ees as a result of the merger. later the same
year, the company said it was eliminating 200
jobs to cut costs, of which 98 would come from
its New York City offices.
In early 1999, ABC decided to relocate 240
employees from New York to the Burbank, Cali-
fornia, offices of Disney. At least 200 were senior
employees in areas from business and legal
affairs to marketing and daytime programming.
In January 200 I , ABC decided to layoff 15 net-
work news reporters . .
Visit www.nyduture.org for the full report, includ-
ing recommendations for policy changes.
-p
TheNew
~ e
ovement
By Annia Ciezadlo
progressive interests in town-ACORN, the Central Labor Coun-
cil, the Working Families Party, health care workers Local 1199,
and the hard-bargaining janitors union Local 32B-J. They are
putting together a campaign that is savvy, intricate and quite pos-
sibly doomed. In order to get a law passed this year, the fledgling
Living Wage Coalition will have to pull off something close to a
political miracle. And that's exactly what they are preparing to do.
--
I
n this city, there are home health care aides bathing sick peo-
ple for $6.55 an hour. There are people making $7.82 an hour
to feed and play with children. And then there's Bertie Car-
away, still living from paycheck to paycheck on $7.49 an
hour after 26 years of cleaning house, running errands, doing
laundry and preparing meals for people too sick to take care of
themselves. "Sometimes I get very angry. I think 'Oh my God,
I've been doing this all these years, and look at my wages,'" she
admits. ''But I keep working, because I care about my clients."
Helpless victims of hardhearted bosses? Just more casualties
of corporate greed?
Hardly. These workers and more than loo,()()() others all work
for human service nonprofits, and the money in their paychecks
comes from the city of New York. Their employers hold more than
$3 billion in city contracts that pay them to care for many of the
city's poorest, most powerless residents-mentally retarded chil-
dren, the homebound elderly, teens in foster care group homes,
parents with AIDS.
The fundamental mission of these employers-the city's
biggest charities and social service nonprofits-is to help the most
unfortunate, to extend a hand to the needy. But they are caught in
the grip of a cruel dilemma. Their mandate may be to help the
poor. But with tight contracts and huge payroll costs, they can't
even keep their own employees out of poverty.
It's an inequity that a band of labor and community activist
groups is determined to stamp out. Smack in the middle of a elec-
tion season guaranteed to be the most chaotic in recent history, a
coalition of mutually suspicious activist and labor groups have
' banded together to make living wage the litmus test of the 2001
municipal elections.
They've crafted a groundbreaking bill that goes far beyond the
moderate measures that many cities have instituted. This living
wage ordinance would force any business that gets contracts, sub-
sidies or tax breaks from the city government to pay their workers
at least $10 an hour-a proposal that would cover everyone from
the janitors at Columbia University to child care workers in Bed-
Stuy to the the hot dog salesmen at Yankee Stadium. But it doesn't
stop there. The bill would also require the city to pay contractors
enough to offer their workers a decent salary, a "pass-through"
increase in contracts that could hike the city budget by hundreds
of millions of dollars.
Already, the bill has the backing of some of the most powerful
B
efore this year's Living Wage Coalition can make
progress, it first has considerable damage to undo. To
this day, nonprofits resent the 1995 living wage cam-
paign, which forced them to take a public stand against
their own workers.
The 1995 push was the brainchild of the Industrial Areas Foun-
dation (lAP), a national network of church-based grassroots
groups led in New York by the Rev. Johnny Ray Youngblood. By
all accounts, the Reverend was never one to ask for favors where
a little public humiliation would do. Youngblood pressured
unions, religious leaders and community organizations and politi-
cians to declare whether they were for the bill or against it. "Rev-
erend Youngblood ruffled a lot of feathers," recalls former City
Councilman Sal Albanese, the first bill's sponsor.
In what became a Sunday ritual, IAF arranged for pastors at
politically influential churches to conduct public grillings of elect-
ed officials. Even potential allies found themselves the subjects of
surprise interrogation. Albanese remembers seeing Councilmem-
ber Priscilla Wooten get the treatment from the pastor at St. Paul's
Church in East New York. "I don't think she knew that it was
going to be the topic," he recalls. "I remember the crowd-it was
a huge, huge crowd-booing and hissing."
Through the relentless application of pressure both cruel and
kind, IAF built strong support for the bill. By the time Albanese
introduced it in February 1995, he had 29 councilmembers back-
ing it. "We even had a Republican on board, Al Stabile from
Queens," recalls Albanese.
A whole lot of other players-including every daily newspa-
per, major business groups and, of course, the mayor-declared it
economic suicide. ''Why don't we just dust off The Communist
Manifesto?" sneered Deputy Mayor Rudy Washington.
But what guaranteed the legislation's defeat was a vocal anti-
'living wage campaign by the 2oo-plus nonprofits of the Human
Services Council, including heavy hitters like Catholic Charities,
United Jewish Appeal, and Federation of Protestant Welfare
Agencies. Among them, these giants held hundreds of millions of
dollars in city contracts.
CITVLlMITS
They clean
offices, care
our kids a eel1
the sick and elderly
going, all on the
government dime.
Now New York's
lowest-paid public
workers want a
raise-and a
hard-driving labor
coalition intends to
raise election year
hell to get i
Dora Diaz
Former home
attendant (now on
public assistance)
$7 an hour
The bill, as Albanese introduced it, would have guaranteed $12
an hour to everyone working for the city. In a devastating state-
ment to the City Council, executives from these big nonprofits tes-
tified that paying the higher wages would be a hardship for its
members, especially smaller human service nonprofits. Layoffs,
closings and worse would follow.
To this day, they say that was no false alarm. 'There would
have been a court battle, no question," says Suri Deitch, who as
lobbyist for the Human Services Council wrote the statement
opposing the bill. "Because it was unenforceable. It was like the
MARCH 2001
ultimate unfunded mandate." Deitch says it would have forced
groups to layoff administrative staff, along with anyone who was
"not completely essential."
Even so, a number of the players on the Human Services
Council were deeply conflicted, and debated among themselves
what course the group should take. ''In principle, most of us were
in favor of the living wage legislation," says Monsignor Kevin
Sullivan, Chief Operating Officer of Catholic Charities.
"Look, these people are paid abysmally low wages," concurs
Deitch. "You have mothers with families making $18,000. You
-
Bertie
Caraway
Housekeeper
$7.49
an hour
-
have people under the poverty level in these jobs. You have line
workers who are very dedicated to their work; in certain fields,
they're often former clients."
The Giuliani administration would have vetoed the living
wage law regardless. But active lobbying against the living wage
by religious nonprofits provided perfect cover, far better than the
hardhearted objections of business groups. Then-mayoral advisor
Richard Schwartz, certainly no friend to grassroots nonprofits,
declared that the bill would "translate into massive service reduc-
tions that hurt precisely the kinds of people the bill's proponents
claim they are trying to help."
To this day, the opposition by the nonprofits still smarts.
''These were powerful groups, and it wasn't a laid-back effort,"
says Albanese. ''They were really out to defeat it."
A
nd that's where the city's living wage efforts have
remained-stuck in the standoff of 1995. Unions think
nonprofits are hypocrites for claiming to serve the poor
while paying their front-line workers so little. And non-
profits think the unions are crazy for thinking they can squeeze
any more money out of their painfully tight budgets.
But this time, swears ACORN's Bertha Lewis, the campaign
won't get blindsided. She's been stumping for the proposal for
almost a year already, determined to get buy-in from all comers.
She's met with black church leaders to secure grassroots support.
She's met with union leaders to talk tactics. Last fall, she took the
living wage on a test drive and got a promise from mall develop-
er Bruce Ratner, who receives subsidies from the city, that if the
proposed law passes he will require his retail tenants to hike their
workers' pay.
Perhaps the most important strategic victory so far has been
convincing David Jones, head of the Community Service Society,
to help recruit nonprofits to fight for the living wage. Yet as much
as it has to gain from bringing politically influential nonprofits
into their orbit, the Living Wage Coalition also has a lot to fear
from them. Lewis and the Central Labor Council's Ed Ott are
working hard to remake history-to make sure their living wage
proposal does not meet the fate of the one that came before it. That
means a lot of delicate negotiations, a lot of sweet-talking, and a
whole lot of meetings.
On one bitter January morning, ACORN's Bertha Lewis and
the Central Labor Council's Ed Ott make the living wage pitch to
a rabbi, a nun, an Episcopalian priest and the various union lead-
ers of the Labor-Religion Coalition.
Ott is neatly suited and tied. Lewis wears a saffron dashiki.
Both are visibly nervous. People in this room picket or preach for
the labor cause. Some also work for or serve on boards of major
human service organizations. And Lewis and Ott are in serious
need of their help-to write the hundreds of letters, and sponsor
the dozens of meetings that this bill will need to pass.
In order to get this bill through Council, in a city that is home
to some of the most powerful businesses in the universe, the Liv-
ing Wage Coalition will need an army of converts. ''This spring,
when we go after all the politicians, I want the religious leaders to
be there, I want the labor part to be there, and I want to have it
wrapped up with a bow on it," Lewis tells the religious group.
"When people begin to tear this apart, we need to have our sails at
the ready, because we know what's coming at us."
So this time around, the living wage bill will offer the non-
profit power brokers something they've always wanted-a way
out of the compensation conundrum.
With New York-sized chutzpah, the coalition is calling for the
city to foot the bill for wage hikes for underpaid human service
workers. A provision in the bill would increase the dollar value of
nonprofit contracts to cover the additional cost. With that, the
coalition hopes to recruit the nonprofits as loyal allies, who will
stand up and collectively demand more money from the city for
their own workers. After all, it's in their own best interest to have
less turnover and more qualified staff, and best of all to pay them
more than poverty wages. "Nonprofits get caught on a moral hom,
believing that they're dedicated to helping the poor," says Pene-
lope Pi-Sunyer, who helped found the budget watchdog group
City Project. "But they themselves are not paying the people who
work for them. Many of them are poor."
But it won' t be so easy to get nonprofits to sign on to what
amounts to a multimillion dollar budget request. Most of these
groups lobby only for their own interests. And even more vital
than getting more money is making sure they hdld on to the valu-
able contracts they already have-with contracts doled out at the
city's discretion, nonprofits don't like to complain in public about
CITY LIMITS
the agencies that hold their pursestrings.
Now the living wage coalition is offering nonprofits a chance
at redemption-with only an astronomical risk attached. A living
wage law will take a major change in business as usual. And from
everyone involved, a tremendous leap of faith.
S
ix years ago, the idea of a living wage bill was a joke.
"I was told by my colleagues that we would never even
get a hearing on it," says former City Councilmember
Albanese.
Back then, such sentiments were understandable. At the time,
brave little Baltimore was the only city with a living wage law.
But since then, a remarkable wave has rippled across the country.
Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, St. Louis and near-
ly 50 other cities now have laws that require city contractors pay
$7, $9, even $12 an hour.
''They've really become the norm," says Paul Sonn of the
Brennan Center for Justice, who has drafted the proposed legisla-
tion for the Living Wage Coalition. "New York is conspicuous in
not having one."
Technically, New York does have a minimum wage for city
workers, but not much of one. Albanese's bill, as it collapsed,
spawned another that requires city contractors to pay the prevail-
ing wage to janitors, security guards, food service workers and
temporary clerical staff.
It covers only an estimated 1,500 workers in all, but for them,
the passage of that law in 1996 was no defeat. Many are now mak-
ing twice as much as they were before. "It was a difficult decision,
whether to water it down, or to try for everybody-and lose,"
recalls Mike Gecan, the chief organizer for IAF. "And we made
the decision to go for what was doable."
The proposal Sonn has written is considerably more ambi-
tious. It would create one of the most encompassing living wage
laws in the country, requiring every nonprofit or large business
with a city contract to pay $10 an hour with health benefits,
$11.50 without. New York would join just a handful of other cities
that pay nonprofits extra to help them cover the higher wages.
And in a measure that is sure to be the proposal's lightning rod,
the living wage mandate would apply not just to city contractors
but to any company that gets a sizeable tax break or other subsidy
from the city-and to all of their on-site subcontractors and busi-
ness partners. If that company is a landlord, then janitors, cafete-
ria workers and building services workers all would have to pay
their workers a Jefferson an hour.
Extending the living wage mandate to companies that receive
subsidies to keep jobs in the city makes perfect sense, says Sonn.
"Given how scarce these taxpayer dollars are, it makes good
sense to hold them accountable and make sure they really deliv-
er quality living wage jobs," he says. "It's just the fiscally pru-
dent thing to do."
Such a demand would be nothing short of revolutionary. Other
cities have imposed such terms, but none near New York's weight
class, and none with so far a reach. New York's law would cover
the cafeteria line attendant at Lincoln Center's employee cafeteria,
who, after 11 years on the job, makes $8.80 an hour. It would
cover the grill cook at the Metropolitan Opera, a single mother
who, on her $7.75 an hour salary, lives in a homeless shelter. Even
the janitors who sweep slips off the floor of the New York Stock
Exchange would be covered.
MARCH 2001
As of January no one, not even the economists working with
the coalition, had figured out how much this is going to cost city
businesses, but it's safe to say that it will be in the hundreds of
millions.
Businesses will be sure to take to the barricades as soon as
anything resembling this proposal comes before the Council. With
campaign season looming, politicians will want to woo corporate
campaign contributors, not force them to pay millions extra in
labor costs. The subsidy provision is simply "not going to hap-
pen," says one political insider, predicting that it will get "bounced
rather hard and rather fast."
So it's a safe bet that the law Sonn drafted will change sub-
stantially in the tortuous negotiations ahead. Even just getting city
Rising Tide
Last time New York considered a living wage
law, in 1995, it had only Baltimore to look to
for inspiration. Now, 53 cities and counties
require employers that receive municipal
money to pay a minimum wage of anywhere
from $6.75 to $12 an hour. But getting a
legal mandate is only half the battle. While
some cities have handed their poorest work-
ers life.altering pay raises along with tight
enforcement, others have responded to living
wage laws with vicious court challenges or
just withering apathy.
Cleveland, effective January 2001
With an independent committee overseeing
implementation, Oeveland is well positioned
to make sure its ordinance, which calls for
$8 an hour, actually results in pay hikes for
workers. The new law has some other good-
ies, including a requirement that 40 percent
of new hires live in the city. But plans for
mandatory health coverage were scuttled by
legal threats from the Chamber of Com-
merce.
San francisco, effective October 2000
Cowed into negotiations by the threat of a
public referendum at election time, San Fran-
cisco's Board of Supervisors passed one of
the most comprehensive laws in the nation.
In addition to getting pay rates that will even-
tually reach $10 an hour, San Franciscans
covered by the law are guaranteed health
insurance.
Sl louis, effective Aupt 2000
When a landslide city referendum required
major contractors and companies receiving
economic development subsidies to pony
up $9 an hour, the mayor's office launched
a fulkln attack. Citing a state law that bars
cities from passing their own minimum wage
laws, City Hall has immobilized the
nance with court battles.
MIamJ.Dade Coum"
effective NMIIber 1999
In the heart of right-to-work territory,
Dade boasts the only living wage in the deep
South, $8.56 for workers with health benefits,
$9.81 without The county's new living Wage
Commission is overseeing implementation.
DetroIt, effective December 1998
A referendum requiring Detroit to pay its
contractors' workers enough to keep a
Iy of four above the federal poverty line and
for those companies to give preference to
Detroit residents in hiring, won 90
percent of the vote in 1998. But the
nance has since hung in limbo, caught
between a city that refuses to provide
enforcement and a state legislature seeking
to nUllify it altogether.
Chicago, effective 1998
America's city ranks near the
bottom of the living wage pay scale at
$7.60 an hour. The law applies only to full-
time workers, making it easy for companies
to circumvent.
San Jose, effective NMmber 1998
Silicon-heated San Jose recently revisited its
1998 ordinance and boosted contractors'
minimum wages to $11.15, making it the
second-highest living wage in the country.
That's not all; the law also includes a "labor
peace" provision allowing the city to require
labor-friendly commitments from companies
it suspects have had troubled relations with
their workers.
-Tracie McMillan
Child care
worker
$7.82
an hour
-
contractors to pay a minimum wage will not be popular. It will
cost a lot, and how much really depends on who you talk to and
how badly they do or don't want a living wage law. In 1995, the
City Council estimated contractors would increase their bids by
about $15 million to cover their new costs. The mayor's office
claimed the tab would run up to $750 million.
And that was without extra money for nonprofits. Now that it's
asking for that, too, the Living Wage Coalition knows it's going to
have to prove that the city can pay for it.
The money is going to have to come from somewhere-or, in
this case, many somewheres. One possibility is the vast Tempo-
rary Assistance to Needy Families surplus, currently at $1.5 bil-
lion, which State Assemblymember Roger Green-raided last year
to give $40 million in bonuses to underpaid day care workers. And
since some major sources of human service money, like Medicaid,
consist of a mix of city, state and federal funds, the coalition will
be making the case that New York City will be able to distribute
some of the cost upstairs to Albany and even Washington.
They are also counting on unions to flex their muscle in
Albany-particularly hospital union Local 1199 and the statewide
Civil Service Employees Association, both of which last year
forced the state to make unprecedented budget commitments for
their members. "If the unions were to get their act together, and
see that their interest is in this, they could get something through
the legislature," says one Albany government consultant.
10 truth, however, the coalition is starting out mostly with faith
that political will will make the money flow. This year, that won't
be easy; the city's Independent Budget Office recently reported
that the current budget surplus will dwindle over the next three
years. And the living wage campaign must get in line behind the
city's powerful municipal unions, which are negotiating big rais-
es right now.
The coalition is also going to have to chart a course through
the thicket of bidding laws that regulates the contract process. Any
pay change that might give nonprofits an unfair competitive
advantage won't fly. At the same time, they have to make sure that
for-profit companies don't have an edge just because they are less
expensive to employ as vendors.
It brings up a serious question: Could the requirement to pay
extra to nonprofits discourage the city from awarding contracts to
nonprofits? So far, nobody seems to know.
But despite all the drawbacks, coalition leaders say they aren't
going to back off from their demand that the city pay nonprofits
for their extra expenses. And realistically, they can't. Without that
help from the city, say executives of direct-service nonprofits, a
living wage would be the living end for them. "Oh gosh," gasps
Stuart Kaplan, CEO of Selihelp, which sends several thousand
health care aides into the homes of Holocaust survivors and other
elderly patients. "Going from $7.49 an hour to $10 or more means
that we wouldn' t be able to operate."
And without the backing of the nonprofits, the bill will be dead
on arrival.
V
ery soon, Lewis will have to convince key political
contenders this year that supporting the living wage
won't make them the next John Lindsay, sending the
city into financial ruin on a liberal pipe dream. She
and Ott will be aggressively marketing the bill as a populist vote-
getter, not a political poison pill.
Veteran political observers say that even getting the bill in and
out of the City Council is going to require surgical skill. If the bill
-is rushed into the council too soon, members will pass it for polit-
ical points, knowing that a Giuliani veto is a foregone conclusion.
But if it languishes too long, it will die without finding a champi-
on, and a precious chance will be lost. "We will never have anoth-
er time in this history of this city in which four democrats are run-
ning for mayor," says Lewis. "If not now, when?"
She has her allies. Councilmember Christine Quinn has
already shown some interest, speaking at a Working Families
Party forum last year about how to win a living wage. But only
a handful of potential backers really matter right now-most of
all Council Speaker and mayoral candidate Peter Vallone. Val-
lone will not comment about the proposal. But he'll certainly
have to think about it. Because if Vallone decides not to back the
bill, any candidate-for mayor, council speaker or public advo-
cate-can run on the living wage as the champion of working
CITY LIMITS
New Yorkers, and steal what is likely to be one of Vallone's lead-
ing campaign themes.
Until they know what the price tag of a living wage will be,
most pols will be terrified to touch the bill. "Look, everybody in
the City Council's running for something," says another political
observer. "They're going to say: 'I can just see the editorials in the
Post, blasting me for being a toady of organized labor, and turn-
ing the taxpayer's pockets inside out to get Dabor'sj support.'"
Being tarred as a spendthrift liberal who can't be trusted with
public dollars is a very real danger. In other cities, business groups
have produced wildly inflated estimates of what living wages
would cost and alleged that pay hikes would result in layoffs and
mass firings.
But if the coalition can get the right candidates to make the
living wage their pet issue this fall, that may be what it takes to
give the cause legitimacy and popularity that no one can afford to
ignore. That's what happened in San Francisco, where Mayor
Willie Brown and Supervisor Tom Ammiano played
ping-pong with living wage proposals for two
years, spanning a lengthy mayoral race between the
two of them.
Under pressure from Ammiano, Brown hiked
wages for child care and home care workers and air-
port security guards, even before the bill was passed.
In the end, Brown brought 21,000 city contract
workers up to $9 an hour, courtesy of a healthy bud-
get surplus, and agreed to pay $11.7 million extra to
help nonprofit contractors pay their workers the liv-
ing wage, which will go up to $10 this year. He also
won reelection.
I
n places where political support has been
weaker, getting a living wage law to really
work has been a challenge. In Detroit, a ballot
proposal for an $8.35 minimum provoked a
fierce anti-living wage campaign in 1998. As in New
York, opponents seized on the plight of small, bud-
get-strapped nonprofits. 'There were literally head-
lines in the local papers saying that 100,000 families
were not going to get turkeys because of the living
wage bill," remembers David Reynolds, a professor
of labor studies at Wayne State University.
The ballot measure passed in a landslide anyway. According to
research by Reynolds and other academics, the results for non-
profits have been mixed. Most weathered the change just fine. But
about a third had significant new expenses. Reynolds recom-
mended a remedy much like the New York proposal: that the city
cover the additional cost for those nonprofits that couldn't afford
the wage hikes. He calculated that it would amount to less than a
third of one percent of the city budget. The Detroit City Council
is currently considering such a proposal, but it has stalled, perhaps
indefinitely.
Getting "pass-through" money for nonprofits in New York will
be difficult, but precedents suggest that the right kind of pressure
can make it happen. In a development that Deitch calls "revolu-
tionary," New York's Administration for Children's Services is for
the first time telling organizations that provide preventive services
to families exactly how much to pay their staff-rates substantial-
ly higher than before-and putting enough money in their con-
MARCH 2001
tracts to do it The reason? A high-profile lawsuit whose settle-
ment specifically demanded higher salaries and lower turnover for
caseworkers. "It takes a crisis, or a tragedy----<:hildren dying,"
sighs Edith Holzer of the Council of Family and Child Caring
Agencies, the trade group for the organizations that won the con-
tracts. "Everybody knows that's the best way to get the people
who make budgets to pay attention."
Coalition members are hoping to accomplish that by direct
action this time. But their efforts rest on a fragile alliance. By
ambitiously including both companies with city contracts and
those receiving city subsidies, Lewis is getting both sides to pull
for each other. Nonprofits get a wage hike at the city's expense,
and the unions' muscle in helping them get it. And unions get
broad backing for their campaigns, already well underway around
the city, to get better pay for workers at companies that benefit
from city subsidies.
But the two factions could just as easily pull apart. Already,
frets Lewis, some nonprofits are worried that "this is, like, too
'labor.'" And there are also some signs that unions are getting rest-
less: In late January, the union that represents janitors, SEIU Local
32B-J, got City Councilmember Guillermo Linares to introduce
its own wage bill requiring city-subsidized businesses to pay
workers in their buildings the prevailing wage. It was a not-so-
subtle reminder that as far as 32B-J is concerned, its agenda
comes first.
Keeping nonprofits from getting restless will be even more of
a challenge, but ACORN insists it can be done. Sure, social ser-
vices have been trying to get that money for years, says national
ACORN coordinator Jen Kern. "But they haven't had a huge cam-
paign, with major unions, religious leaders standing behind a liv-
ing wage banner, with public sentiment building behind them.
That's a whole different ballgame-we hope."
Additional reporting by Joshua Zuckerman.
Lynne Miller
Parent
advocate for a
foster care
agency
$9.58
an hour
-
---_ .... ---' . . ' ~ . -
REV IEW
-
Now and
Then
By Roger Sanjek
"From Ellis Island to JFK: New York's Two
Great Waves of Immigration," by Nancy Foner,
Yale University Press, 336 pages, $29.95.
M
ove aside, Glazer and Moynihan! With From Ellis
Island to JFK, we have a welcome replacement for
Beyond the Melting Pot, the classic (if now dated)
overview of New York City's ethnic landscape, Author Nancy
Foner accomplishes this via a readable and informative com-
parison of the "old immigration" of 1880 to 1920, which was
cut short by anti-immigrant legislation, and the "new immigra-
tion" that followed from liberalization of the laws in 1965.
Foner is a professor of anthropology at SUNY-Purchase
who has studied Jamaican immigrants and the mainly immi-
grant workers in a New York City nursing home. Her new
book, however, draws primarily on a thorough reading of the
bulk of immigration research conducted by social scientists
during the past three decades, and on a careful distillation of
historical work on the city's immigrants of 100 years ago.
The analysis covers issues of numbers, settlement and hous-
ing, work, changing roles of women, ethnicity and race,
transnational connections, and education. Along the way, the
author smashes many old and new myths.
In the earlier immigration wave, nearly 1.5 million
Europeans settled in the city. Jews and Italians were the
biggest groups. The post-1965 surge has by now numbered
more than 2.5 million, including many Asians, Latin
Americans and West Indians. Then, nearly all immigrants
were poor, poorly educated, and unskilled or with few skills.
Now, new arrivals are often better educated. In 1990, some 60
percent of the city's immigrants held a high school degree.
One in eight held a bachelor's degree or better.
The ethnically concentrated and poor-quality housing
most immigrants confronted 100 years ago has not vanished
entirely. But although a few largely homogeneous "ethnic vil-
lages" persist, today's immigrants usually do not live in iso-
lated communities of their compatriots. Foner explains that
the racially segregated housing market
means that West Indians are clumped
together more than any other new
group. Even Brighton Beach's
Russians or Flushing's Chinese or
Koreans do not form residential
enclaves like the Little Italys or
Lower East Side "Jewtown" of
yore. Indeed, some of the most
heavily immigrant neighbor-
hoods, like Elmhurst, are also
the city's most diverse.
A hundred years ago, Jews,
Italians and Slavs were all
legally "white," but popular-
ly they were seen as inferi-
or sub-races by the "old
Americans." Today's
U.S.-born whites are much
more homogenized. Together .with the
small influx of white immigrants, whites now com-
prise just a third of the city's population, and the city is now
home to substantial numbers of U.S.-born African-Americans
and Puerto Ricans. Foner deftly addresses these current racial
complexities, including a synthesis of studies of widespread
employer preferences for immigrants over U.S.-born "minori-
ties" and the vocabularies of ethnicity and race used by cen-
sus-takers, scholars and ordinary New Yorkers. Her assess-
ments of the current situation for black West Indians, diverse
Latinos and East Asians are well handled, and her prognosti-
cations of racial alignments and identities in coming decades
are sound and provocative.
The book explodes the myth that transnational ties are
anything new-Italian "birds of passage" 100 years ago went
back and forth as much, or more, than any current immigrant
nationality-yet it also catalogs the technological changes
that make such ties easier to maintain today. Foner painstak-
ingly dissects the myth of Jewish upward mobility through
education. Few Jews even made it to high school before
World War I, and widespread college education was primari-
ly a third-generation experience. It was blue-collar work and
family businesses-sound familiar?-that allowed most first-
generation Jewish immigrants to survive, and brought social
advances to a few. Today, education is far more important for
success in the labor market, and Foner carefully explores the
impact on new immigrants of the persistent underfunding of
public schools.
As Foner points out, she does not include chapters on
religion, politics or labor organizing; neither does she inves-
tigate crime, youth cultures or ethnic associations and ritu-
als. All of these are topics where similar old-versus-new
comparisons would be illuminating-say, of Italians in the
Catholic church then and Latin Americans now, or past and
present efforts to mobilize voters. There is room for work on
these topics by Nancy Foner and others, and we should look
forward to it. Still, for a smart and fact-filled overview of
the city's two great immigrant streams and the New Yorkers
they produced, there is no better place to start than From
Ellis Island to JFK.
Roger Sanjek is a professor of anthropology at Queens College.
CITY LIMITS
New Kids in School
---_ .... """'-" ....... -
P
ublic education has long been the institution that
integrates immigrants into American society. But as a
new report from the Urban Institute shows, schools are
poorly equipped and increasingly unprepared to deal with the
growing influx of immigrant children, and teenagers in par-
ticular.
The share of U.S. students who are either foreign-born or
the children of immigrants has almost tripled since 1970,
from 6.7 percent to 20 percent of all students. Immigrant
youth also comprise a larger share of students in secondary
school (5.7 percent) than in primary school (3.5 percent).
Immigrant youth are also now more likely to be poor. In
1970, 12 percent of immigrant children lived in poverty, com-
pared with 15 percent of al1 children. By 1995, immigrant
child poverty nearly tripled to 33 percent, compared with 8
percent of all children.
The study, which surveyed eight schools in California and
Maryland, found that while 76 percent of children
i n ki ndergarten through fifth grade who speak limited
English receive English as a Second Language or
bilingual instruction, only 48 percent of those in high
school do-virtually guaranteeing that many teens will fall
behind in both English and academics.
The study concludes that we need to reconceive public
education with an eye to helping the students who need it the
most. It suggests concentrating state and federal dollars in
low-performing, high-poverty areas and restructuring exist-
ing resources to support intensive, one-on-one learning for
immigrants through longer classes, teacher training and other
focused efforts.
"Overlooked and Underserved: Immigrant Students in
U.S. Secondary Schools, " Urban Institute, free on web site,
202-261-5278, www.urbaninstitute.org.
Housing Works
C
ombating homelessness, drug addiction and mental ill-
ness takes Herculean efforts and prodigious resources,
but in a new report, the Corporation for Supportive
Housing makes a persuasive pitch that its model of treat-
ment-with a network of integrated services, and with AMMO
medical, social, and psychological help available in the
buildings where clients live-provides effective care at a
significant savings.
Among 253 residents of two supportive housing programs
in San Francisco, researchers found that emergency room vis-
its dropped by 58 percent for those who stayed in supportive
housing for at least a year. Inpatient hospital stays fell by 57
percent in the first year, and an additional 20 percent in the
second. And after a year, not a single resident needed to check
into mental health programs outside of hospitals.
A not incidental result: hundreds of thousands of dol1ars
saved each year on emergency room and hospital care.
"Supportive Housing and Its Impact on the Public Health
Crisis of Homelessness," free on web site, $5 hard copy,
Corporation for Supportive Housing, 212-986-2966,
www.csh.org/pubs.
Does Not Compute
T
he "digital divide" is something closer to a computer
chasm, according to a new report from the University
of Massachusetts. Surveying five urban communi-
ties-including Harlem and Brooklyn-it finds that lower-
income households and people of color are far less likely to
own computers than their wealthier and white neighbors.
Sixty-four percent of black, 55 percent of Hispanic and 42
percent of white homes surveyed did not own a computer.
Fifty-eight percent of Brooklynites and 53 percent of Harlem
households said they knew not much or nothing at all about
the Internet. Familiarity with technology was closely linked
to earning power: 44 percent of African-American house-
holds with incomes under $40,000 reported that they knew
nothing about the Internet, compared with 15 percent of those
that made more than that.
But there was one common understanding: The Internet is
not plugged into the places they live. Just 3 percent reported
going online to obtain information about their communities.
"Bridging the Digital Divide," FleetBoston Financial
Foundation, free, diane JemJulman@fleet.com, 617434-3620.
State
Percentage of Earnings Spent on Child Care by Low-Earning Families, by State
Of Inflation
Not only do New Yorkers
pay more in rent; New
York 'rents pay more. On
average, New York State
families fork over 20 percent
of their income for child care-
well above the 15.9 percent
national average and second
only to Massachusetts.
MARCH 2001
20
18.0
16.0
UI
14.0
CI
c
12.0
'c
...
10.0 ftI
W
-
8.0
0
GI
6.0
CI
ftI
..
4.0 c
GI
f:! 2.0
GI
Q.
0.0
MS TX MN US FL WI AL CA NJ WA MI NY MA
-
... -----' .. -".-
CITYVIEW
Lynne Weikart
is executive
director; and
Glenn
Pasanen
(above)
associate
director; of
City Project.
-
Missing
Foundation
By Lynne A. Weikart and Glenn Pasanen
O
ne highlight in Mayor Rudy Giuliani's State of the
City message in January was a substantial new com-
mitment to affordable housing-$L2 billion over four
years, half in city funds, to create or preserve more than
10,100 units. Although it focused, on a narrow set of housing
programs and will be contingent on a number of ambitious
reforms, the initiative is the mayor's first serious attempt to
reverse his own sharp cuts in housing funds.
The mayor did not say, however, how he intends to fund
the construction boom. We c.an only hope that he will do
something he has refused to do throughout his years as
mayor: finally spend revenues from the Battery Park City
Authority (BPCA) to develop affordable housing.
A few days before the speech, the New York
Times confirmed the charge we at City Project
made a few months earlier: that the mayor has fla-
grantly violated a 1989 agreement between the
city and the state-run authority requiring the
city to spend the BPCA's surplus on housing
for low- and moderate-income New Yorkers.
The deal completed a $1 billion commit-
ment by the authority for affordable housing,
$400 m.illion in bonds and $600 from its
cash surplus. But just $143 million in bond
financing has gone to affordable housing.
The authority has sent $277 million cash
to the city so far, but none of it has been
dedicated to housing. Instead, the
mayor simply put the money into the
city's general fund, increasing the
city's already huge budget surpluses.
mayor needs to finally acknowledge the
1989 agreement exists, and to make it a centerpiece of any
new housing plan. But that's not enough. The authority
predicts that it will send $3 billion in surplus to the city over
the next 30 years. The city also needs to come up with a
blueprint to make sure that it maximizes the amount of
money it gets from Battery Park City, and spends it all
for affordable housing.
The 1989 agreement was essentially a way for the BPCA
to pay the city back for huge public subsidies to the develop-
ment project. City Project estimates that those subsidies
amounted to at least $600 m.illion over the past 10 years.
As originally conceived by Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and
Mayor John Lindsay in 1969, Battery Park City was to con-
tain a mix of low-, middle- and high-income housing. But it
wasn' t until the first World Financial Center corporate towers
and lUXUry buildings neared completion in the late 1980s that
an actual plan to fund affordable housing was put in place.
The $400 million in bonds was supposed to pay for 24,000
units of lower-income housing elsewhere in the city. But they
have built just 893 apartments in the Bronx and 664 public
housing units in Harlem.
Now, after several years of expansion, Battery Park City is
fast approaching full build-out, and authority surpluses are
rising steadily. (Its president and CEO, Timothy Carey, calls
the authority "a cash cow.") In November 2000, for instance,
the authority announced it would send the city $108 million
in its next payment. Yet not only has none of that cash been
used for housing; city commitments to build and rehabilitate
housing have declined dramatically, from $506 million in
1992 to $116 million in 1998, according to the Independent
Budget Office.
The mayor's arrogance in refusing to spend the surplus
stems in large part from the cozy, largely unaccountable rela-
tionship between the authority and the city. BPCA is exempt
from city property taxes; owners instead pay an equivalent
levy directly to the authority. The authority currently takes in
over $150 million a year from its property owners. From
those revenues, BPCA services its debts and funds its own
operations and its own Parks Conservancy. Anything left
over, it sends to the city. In 1999, BPCA paid the city $57.1
million, or 39 percent of its revenues.
But there's reason to believe it could be paying more.
BPCA is controlled by the governor, who appoints the chair
and two other members, and its chief operating officer has
tremendous independence in defining budget priorities.
Although approved by the mayor and city comptroller, the
bond issues don't go through the city's budget process. One
consequence is that there is no authority incentive to save
money. This is significant, since every additional dollar spent
on authority priorities is arguably a dollar denied to afford-
able housing. Thus any decisions about the use of surplus
authority revenues for affordable housing must be accompa-
nied by a commitment to closely monitor the authority's bud-
get and spending decisions.
Many questions remain about how to most effectively
spend the Battery Park City money. For example, those rev-
enues could be used to pay debt on new city housing bond
issues. Or the city could commit to spending the money as it
comes in; for instance, the authority's $108 million payment
for this year includes a one-shot $41 million from the sale of
an authority-financed building in Battery Park City, a solid
lump sum that could be dedicated to building or rehabbing
housing. Yet another option is restoring and expanding the
authority's own power to issue bonds and using authority rev-
enues to payoff the debt, which could help the city borrow
significant money for housing without hitting its debt cap.
This is a good time for both celebration and vigilance. Mayor
Giuliani has had the courage to re-open the door to affordable
housing. But securing and dedicating long-term revenue sources
is crucial-and delivering what's due from Battery Park City is
a vital first step that cannot wait any longer .
CITY LIMITS
Reach
20,000
readers
in the
nonprofit sector.
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Call Kim Nauer at
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Divine
(continued from page 10)
funders report concerns that church programs will
proselytize when they should be providing ser-
vices, or that they themselves, as granbnakers, do
not want to favor one religion over another.
For their part, many churches are not inclined
to change the ways they serve God and commu-
nity just to bring in worldly dollars. "The main
thing you hear from church leaders," says
George Penick of the National Office on
Philanthropy and the Black Church, a collabora-
tive effort between foundations that inspired the
Black Church Technical Assistance Project, "is
that they don' t want foundations interfering with
the mission of the church. They don' t want an
organization that's got a lot of money and prob-
ably run by white people to come in and tell
them how to run their business."
But as they adjust to stepping in where gov-
ernment no longer goes, churches are increas-
ingly willing to do whatever it takes to fill the
void. Gladys Oliver is just trying to get a donat-
ed computer working and coordinate arts pro-
jects with an assortment of fading markers, all
while hoping that help in getting a grant will
come soon. "We really need textbooks," says
Oliver, her brow furrowed. "Do you know who
to talk to about that?"
AJPJPJ1JI CA1rJI (Q)NS JF(Q)JR. 1rIHtJE
CQ)JPJEN (())CJIJE1rY JINS1rJI1rlU1rJE
C())MMlUNJI1rY JFJEJ1J1CQ) 1l
The Open Society Institute Community Fellowship Program is currently seeking applicants from diverse back-
grounds and communities who wish to employ their skills in creating innovative public interest projects. The
goal of the Fellowship program is to provide individuals an opportunity to apply their abilities and vision in
community-led projects that empower and improve the quality of public life. Selection is based on the appli-
cant's competence and commitment to the field/community; the need for the proposed project; the responsive-
ness of the project to the community involved; and the capacity of the individual to implement the project.
The Program will award up to ten fellowships in 2001.
Information Workshops on the application process will be held on the following dates:
Tuesday, February 27,2001
Wednesday, March 7, 2001
4:00-6:30pm
4:00-6:30pm
Limited seating is a..vailable. Please call 212.548.0152 or email sharris@sorosny.org to register for a workshop or
to receive an application package. All application materials must be received by the Community Fellowship
Program no later than 5pm Friday, March 16th, 2001. Visit our website at www.soros.org.
MARCH 2001
-
36&*6Y
s
TENANTICOMMUNnY ORGANIZER. The RM Avenue Committee, a Brooklyn.base
community organization, is seeking a Tenant/Community Organizer to combat
displacement. Responsibilities: help tenants to understand their legal rights,
work the Displacement-Free Zone community organizing campaign to protect
tenants who are being forced out by high rents. Qualifications: Well organized
person with passion for social justice. English/Spanish a plus. Salary based
on experience. Good benefits. Send resume and cover letter to Organizer
Search, 5th Avenue Committee, 141 5th Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11217. Or fax:
7188574322. FAC is an equal opportunity employer . .
DEVD.OPMENT ASSOCIATE The Hispanic Federation (www.hispanicfederation.
org) is an umbrella organization for 70 social service agencies in New York,
Connecticut, and New Jersey. Responsibilities include grantwriting, special
events, and individual solicitation program. Qualifications: 2 years of related
experience, BA, strong writing skills, and computer literacy. Send resume and
cover letter with salary requirements to Enrique Ball , Hispanic Federation, 130
William Street, 9th Roor, New York, NY 10038.
Social service agency is looking for bilingual COUNSELORS to work with
grant women. Candidates must be fluent in English and Chinese
(Mandarin/Cantonese). Social work experience required, MSW preferable.
Please fax resume to: 212-587-5731, attention: Ms. Gau.
MANAGER. Rnancial services sought for national, nonprofit, community
opment financial institution. Provide day-to-day oversight of financial products,
including loans. Develop product guidelines, poliCies, procedures. Assist
lenders, advise on financial structures, and monitor portfolios. Bachelor' s
degree, 5 years credit experience, portfoliO management and underwriting,
nonprofit experience preferred. Ability to train, supervise, work with others
important. Excellent writer/communicator. Low to mid 70s; excellent benefits.
Send resume, cover letter to Katje Ulah King, Nonprofit Rnance Fund, 70 West
36 Street, 11th Roor, New York, NY 10018. Fax: 212-2688653. Email:
katje.king@nffny.org.
VICE PRESIDENT OF PROPERTY MANAGEMENT. Bx. CDC seeks professional to
oversee 30 buildings with 1250 units and a staff of 30. Expertise in facility
management, DHCR, regulations, leasing, construction and purchasing
required. Experience in tax credit certification and HPD guidelines required.
Responsibilities include bid preparation, budget and variance reports.
Requires a minimum of 3 years property management and extensive
sory expo Excellent verbal and written skills as well as computer proficiency
required. Bachelor's degree required. Salary: Mid 40s to 50s. Send resume
to: President/CEO, MHHC, 2003-05 Walton Avenue, Bronx, NY 10453 or fax:
718-583-6557. No calls accepted.
PARALEGAL CASDlANDLERS. The Legal Aid Society's Civil Division has the
lowing openings: two positions in its Bronx office to provide public benefits rep-
resentation and one position to provide housing and public benefits at the
Bronx Courthouse. In its Manhattan office there are teo positions to provide
city-wide Health law representation through a hotline and community outreach;
and one position to provide immigration representation, including outreach to
CBOs in the five boroughs. The Staten Island Office has a temporary position
until June 1, 2001 for a paralegal casehandler to provide public benefits rep-
resentation, including community education and outreach. EOE. Excellent be!1-
eflts, $29+K. Send resume to: Helaine Bamett, Attorney-irr-Charge, Legal Aid
Society Civil Division, 90 Church Street, New York, NY 10007. Women, people
of color, gays and lesbians and people with disabilities are especially encour-
aged to apply.
POlICY ANALYST. Growing national legal/policy office, to address child care
benefits for parents moving from welfare to employment. Prepare analyses,
reports, and testimony, drawing upon reports and original research done by
others. Experience and professional training in policy analysis, as well as
lent analytic, writing, and public speaking skills, required. Salary commensu-
rate with experience, excellent benefits. Persons of color, formerly on welfare
or poor, encouraged. EOE. Send cover letter, resume, reference contact info,
and short writing sample to Henry Freedman, Director, Welfare Law Center, by
email (freedman@Welfarelaw.org), fax (212-633-6371), or to 275 7th Ave.,
Suite 1205, NYNY 10001.
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR. The National Housing Institute, a 25-year-old progressive
organization and publisher of Shelterforce magazine, seeks an ED to oversee
all operations including fundraising; finanCial , staff, and research manage-
ment; and board, editorial, policy and program development. Nonprofit
ence and knowledge about housing, community development and/or publish-
ing preferred. Imagination, compassion, humor, writing, and entrepreneurial
leadership skills are vital. We're seeking a values-driven person with energy
-
and commitment to promote NHI and its mission. 5()'70k, benefits, EOE. Fax
resume to John Atlas, 973-678-8437 or e-mail yvonne@nhLorg. See
www.nhLorg for more information.
FULlnME DEVD.OPMENT COORDINATOR: Make the Road by Walking, a com-
munity-based organization in Bushwick, Brooklyn is seeking a
opment coordinator to coordinate all aspects of fund raising for a nO!1-profit
organization with a budget of approximately $900,000. Previous development
experience preferred. Salary $30,000/yr or higher based on experience. Full
benefits. People of color and women encouraged to apply. Contact Ben Sachs
by fax at (718) 418-9635, or e-mail ben@maketheroad.org.
Health Force, the South Bronx's leading peer health education and plan-
ning organization, is seeking a COORDINATOR for a groundbreaking com-
munity asthma prevention project. This unique position requires imple-
menting a wide-ranging community asthma intervention plan, which has
been formed by some 20 community groups and agencies, with Health
Force as the lead agency. Qualifications: The Asthma Coordinator must
have a bachelor' s degree and at least two years experience in communi-
ty health and/or organization. Send resume and cover letter to: Juanita
Lopez, Director, Health Force, 552 Southern Boulevard, Bronx, NY
10455, Tel. (718) 585-8585/Fax (718) 585-5041.
DEVD.OPMENT DIRECTOR. Gay Men of African Descent (GMAD), a nonprOfit,
community-based organization providing education, social support, advoca-
cy, and health and well ness services targeting Black gay men in NYC seeks
a Development Director to assist the organization in continuing to diversify
its funding sources. Reporting to the Executive Director, the position will
require fundraising research, proposal writing, management of a major donor
program, and planning and execution of special events. BA degree required
plus a minimum of three years of comprehensive fundraising experience with
a successful track record in institutional fundraising, individual and major
donor campaigns, and special events. Excellent writing and speaking skills,
strong computer knowledge required. Salary commensurate with experience.
Excellent benefits. Send or fax resume, cover letter (including salary require-
ments), writing sample to: Kevin McGruder, Executive Director, GMAD, 248
West 14th Street, NYC 10011, fax (212) 414-9351. GMAD is an Equal
Opportunity Employer.
COMMUNnY ORGANIZER. St. Nicholas Neighborhood Preservation Corporation
seeks a Community Organizer to work with OUTRAGE, a coalition of residents
and organizations in East Williamsburg and Greenpoint, to organize an effec-
tive campaign to reduce the volume of garbage processed in our community.
He/she will help to maintain and strengthen the existing coalition, work with
coalition members to develop and implement political and practical strategies
to achieve its goals, and facilitate linkages with other groups working to change
the City's garbage policies. Requires BA/BS or equivalent, excellent
cations and organizing skills, and ability to understand complex technical mate-
rial and explain it to community residents. Knowledge of
WiliiamsburgjGreenpoint community, waste disposal and environmental jus-
tice issues a plus. Salary commensurate with experience and excellent bene-
fits package. Fax resume to Alison Cordero at 718-486-5982 or e-mail to
acordero@stnicksnpc.com.
DEPUTY DIRECTOR. Share overall responsibility for management of dynamic
community-based organization. Help shape organizing campaigns on issues
including educational equity, tenants' rights and environmental justice. Areas
of responsibility will include: fund raiSing, organizational development, cam-
paign and staff supervision. Must have experience in grassroots organizations
and be committed to our mission of building community leadership. Ability to
produce quality written materials and experience in staff supervision required.
Spanish language a plus. Send resume and cover letter: Hiring Committee,
Mothers on the Move, 928 Intervale Avenue, Bronx NY 10459. Fax: (718) 842-
2665. Email : helen@mothersonthemove.org
A Better Bronx for Youth Consortium is seeking a YOUTH DEVD.OPMENT COOR
DlNATOR experienced in the development and implementation of youth pro-
gramming. Must be able to provide technical support and training to local nO!1-
profit agenCies, and supervise consultants. BBFY is an EOE, salary comme!1-
surate with experience. Fax cover letter + resume to BBFY at (718) 665-2464.
ASSISTANT/ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR OF OEVnOPM:'.NT. St. Aloysius School is a
Jesuit school in Harlem serving 300 students from Pre-Kindergarten to 8th
grade. St. Aloysius offers a solid academic curriculum, preparing its stu-
dents to enter the most competitive high schools in NYC. With a successful
fundraising and donor stewardship program, close to $1.2 million was raised
during the FY1999-2000. Our development office is seeking a detail-
CITY LIMITS
oriented professional with excellent communication skills to assist the
Director in all aspects of fundraising, including direct mail, prospect
research, database management, event planning, proposal writing, and
donor stewardship. Development or marketing experience, with strong writ-
ing skills, is strongly desired. Database management experience, especially
The Raiser' s Edge, is preferred. Candidates: Send resumes and cover letters
to Monique A. Sulle.
CASE MANAGER (Job # S5-5). Non profit organization seeks experienced
individual to provide case management for low income families & people
threatened with eviction. Resp. for screening, intake, assessment and dis-
pOSition of applications. Provides direct services mainly thru case advo-
cacy. Provides consultation to staff in other agencies. Participates in
development & implementation of agency policy analysis & advocacy
strategies regarding public policy & legal issues affecting clients. BA in
related field plus two yrs exp in case advocacy, case mgmt or benefits
counseling with low-income clients. Knowledge of housing resources &
housing court process a plus. Salary $30K, excl benf. Send res/cov Itr. to:
Human Resources S5-5, Community Service Society of NY, 105 E. 22nd
St, NY, NY 10010 or e-mail to cssemployment@cssny.org EOE.
This position provides on-going ADMINISTRAllVE SUPPORr to the Department
staff based upon knowledge of program policies, procedures and activities.
Performs various support functions such as compiling payroll/attendance
records, drafting, editing and word processing correspondence; preparing pur-
chase requisitions and data of client information into database. Minimum 2
years experience. High school diploma or equivalent required. Salary mid 20s.
EOE. Send resume and cover letter to: American Red Cross, 150 Amsterdam
Avenue, New York, NY 10023. Attn: RF.
Experienced ADMINISTRATORISOCIAL WORKER to oversee new program serv-
ing disabled and mentally ill homeless individuals with housing and benefits
assistance. Will supervise one caseworker and work with legal counsel to
secure benefits and housing for disabled homeless shelter residents. Will
also conduct assessments of program clients and make field visits to shel-
ters. Qualifications: MSW; administrative and supervisory experience; expe-
rience in area of homelessness/related field preferred. Competitive
salary/benefits. EOE. Women/minority candidates strongly urged to apply.
Fax resume, salary history, short writing sample to: Patrick Markee, Coalition
for the Homeless, 212-964-1303.
PROGRAM DIRECTOR FOR OUTREACH. Goddard Riverside's Project Reachout
(PRO) is a nationally recognized continuum of services for homeless people
with mental illness/MICA located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. PRO
provides intensive, long term, individualized case management to each of its
clients with the goals of stabilization and permanent housing placement. The
Program Director is responsible for program administration and development,
clinical oversight and supervision of Team Leaders, contract compliance, per-
sonal issues, and ensuring effective relations with the community and other
agencies. Works closely with the Medical Director to coordinate clinical care.
Requirements: CSW or related master's, proven record of management and
supervision, and comfort with team approach. Salary commensurate with
experience, excellent benefits. Cover letter and resume to Mona Bergenfeld,
Project Reachout/GRCC, 593 Columbus Avenue, New York, NY 10024.
PART TIME PSYCHIA11IISTIMEDICAI. DIRECTOR. Work between 15 and 20 hours
per week to provide assessment and long term treatment of homeless people
with SPMI/MICA; oversight of on-site psychiatric and medical services, liaison
with hospital-based physicians and other agencies. Work closely with the
Program Director to coordinate clinical care. Candidate must have excellent
psychopharmacology experience, strong clinical and interpersonal skills, and
share our philosophy of individualized, intensive treatment in the community.
Experience in public psychiatry a plus. NYS license and BE/BC required.
Competitive salary. Send CV with cover letter to: Mona Bergenfield, Project
Reachout/GRCC, 593 Columbus Avenue, New York, NY 10024.
PER DIEM NURSE (LPN OR RNI Work 8-16 hours per week on Manhattan' s
Upper West Side. Provide coverage for program nurses. Be part of a dynamic
team serving homeless and former1y homeless people with mental illness.
Responsibilities include preparing and dispensing medications, administering
injectable medications, picking up doctors' orders, coordinating access to
pharmacy services, ordering and stocking medical supplies. Hour1y rate corn-
mensurate with experience. Send resume to Mona Bergenfeld, Director,
Project Reachout/Goddard Riverside Community Center, 593 Columbus Ave,
NY, NY 10024 or fax to (212)721-7389.
VOCATIONAL COUNSELOR/JOB DEVELOPER. Be part of a growing, successful job
MARCH 2001
training and placement program with a nationally known agency. Vocational
training and job placement for former1y homeless mentally ill on Upper West
Side. Job development, individual/group counseling, job coaching, entitle-
ments assistance, assist with program management. Clinical experience, higtr
Iy professional presentation, facility with computers preferred. Salary mid 20s,
exc. benefits. Send letter and resume to: Patricia Dawes, TOP
Opportunities/GRCC, 577 Columbus Ave, NY, NY 10024.
BUILDING CASE MANAGER. Work on the Upper West Side of Manhattan as part
of a dynamic on-site social service team in permanent housing. Provide case
management to a diverse mix of tenants including former1y homeless people,
people with mental illness, people with addictions, elder1y, people on welfare,
the working poor, and others. Coordinate psych & medical care, entitlements,
assessment & treatment planning, linkage to various programs, clubhouses,
employment & sobriety. Relevant experience, good writing skills a plus. Salary
mid 20s, excellent benefits. Please send letter and resume to Caren Ezratty,
The Senate/Goddard Riverside Community Center, 206 West 92nd, NY, NY
10025 or fax to (212) 721-5406.
PROGRAM DIRECTOR. The Program Director is responsible for programadmin-
istration and development, clinical oversight and supervision of Team
Leaders, contract compliance, personnel issues, and ensuring effective rela-
tions with the community and other agencies. Work closely with the Medical
Director to coordinate clinical care. Requirements: CSW or related Masters,
proven record of management, supervision and team approach. Salary corn-
mensurate with experience, excellent benefits. Cover letter and resumeto
Mona Bergenfield, Project ReachoutjGRCC, 593 Columbus Avenue, New
York, NY 10024.
CHIEF FINANCIAL 0FFlCER. The Osbome AsSOCiation, a non-profit criminal jus-
tice organization based in NYC seeks a Chief Rnancial Officer/Director of
Administration. The position reports to the Executive Director and has overall
responsibility for managing finanCial, accounting, facilities, business affairs,
and administration; supervision and training of fiscal staff and management of
the financial accounting system and Fundware software. The successful can-
didate will supervise preparation of budgets and budget negotiations and max-
imize revenue in compliance with contractual terms, manage cash flow and
working capital, negotiate credit lines with the bank, liaise with Investment
Manager and Treasurer of the Board of Directors and prepare periodic financial
reports for the Board of Directors. Requirements include an MBA (CPA pre-
ferred) and significant experience with govemment grants. Background in non-
profits a plus. Contact Human Resources, Phone 212-B73-6633, Fax 212-979-
7652, email, Istidd@osbomeny.org.
Weston United Community Renewal is a non-profit community-based mental
health agency in Har1em servicing the mentally ill with transitional housing and
employment. We currently have a full-time day position as a CASE MANAGER.
Responsibilities include admission/ discharge process, advocacy, ADL skills,
groups and participation in team meetings. Knowledge of MICA/homeless pop-
ulation a plus. BA degree & 2 years of experience. Salary $26,500. Women and
minorities are encouraged to apply. Fax resume & cover letter to: 212-31&0789.
The American Red Cross is looking for per diem EMERGENCY COMMUNICATlONS
REPRESENTATIVES. This position is responsible for providing emergency assis-
tance, communications and reporti ng services to clients/ customers. Assess
and document the various communication components for InTouch, Disaster
Services, Military/Social Services and Clearinghouse database. Must have
strong telephone and customer service skills and experience. Ability to handle
and prioritize multiple tasks. Must be computer literate. Must possess a high
school diploma or GED. Salary: $70.00 per shift. Send resume and cover let-
ter to American Red Cross, 150 Amsterdam Ave. , NY, NY 10023. Attn: RF
Community Healthcare Network seeks VICE PRESIDENT OF EXTERNAL AFFAIRS
to oversee fundraising and communications programs of a dynamic healthcare
and social service agency. CHN, a multi-site network of primary care facilities
in low-income NYC communities, receives over $8 million annually in con-
tributed income in addition to capital funds and is a new affiliate of New York-
Presbyterian Healthcare System. Qualified applicant must have a bachelor's
degree (master' s preferred); minimum of 7 years experience in fundraising for
programs, annual and capital campaigns. Position requires strong communi-
cation skills, previous supervisory, grant writing, management and major gift
solicitation experience. Healthcare experience preferred. We offer competitive
salaries and benefits. Please send resume with cover letter indicating salary
history to: Catherine Abate, President & CEO, Community Healthcare Network,
184 Rfth Avenue, 2nd Aoor, NY, NY 10010, Fax: (212) 807{)250. EOE
M/F/D/V/AA. No telephone calls please.
(continued on page 32)
(continued from page 31)
Citizen Action of New York seeks second NYC COMMUNITY ORGANIZER for its
Coalition for After-School Funding campaign. This campaign is mobilizing par-
ents, teachers, students, after-school providers, community leaders, faith-
based groups, and advocates to fight for increased funding for after-school pro-
grams. Responsibilities include: Organizing, leadership development, coalition
building, public speaking. Qualifications: Excellent verbal and writing skills,
strong analytic, strategic and planning skills, ability to travel, work
evenings/weekends, knowledge of NYC/NYS politics helpful. Spanish a plus.
Salary competitive, full health benefits. Citizen A'ction of NY is an equal oppor-
tunity employer. Women and people of color strongly encouraged to apply. Send
resume/cover letter to: Ceylane Meyers, CANY, 94 Central Avenue, Albany, NY
12206 or fax: 518 465-2890 or email cmeyers@citizenactionny! .org.
ADMINISTRA11VEIMEMBERSHIP ASSISTANT for liberal West Side congregation
committed to diversity, tolerance and social justice. Duties include: newsletter
production, website maintenance, filing, staffing committees. BA/Nonprofit
experience preferred. Must have excellent writing and computer skills. Send
resume and cover letter with salary requirements to: Minister, 160 CPW, NY,
NY, 10023 or fax to: (212) 595-0134.
The Cooper Square Committee, a CBO, is seeking a PARr nME (FLEXIBLE
HOURS) DEVROPMENT ASSISTANT to do the following: 1) Research foundations
and companies, write funding proposals. 2) Develop a private donor base and
do direct mail correspondence. 3) Periodically organize fundraising events.
Requirements: College degree, one year fundraising experience; strong writing
and speaking skills, well organized, able to handle multiple tasks and dead-
lines, have good typing speed, familiarity with the non-profit sector, housing
issues and the Lower East Side helpful. Salary: Negotiable. Please mail, e-mail
or fax your resume, a 3-5 page writing sample, and three references. Also seek-
ing a FUll. nME HOUSING ORGANIZER. Responsibilities: Provide individual hous-
ing counseling to tenants and w a l k ~ n clients facing eviction proceedings and
housing problems. Identify distressed buildings, door-knock, organize tenant
associations. Conduct building inspections in at least 36 buildings per year.
Develop tenant leaders, hold workshops on tenant rights, work with communi-
ty leaders and in coalition with other organizations to preserve and strengthen
tenants' rights. Skill requirements: BA preferred, HS graduates with three
years related experience considered; housing/community organizing experi-
ence required. Good interpersonal skills, able to work independently and take
initiative, bilingual (English/Spanish helpful but not required); familiarity with
Lower East Side helpful. Salary: Competitive, full benefits Please mail, e-mail
or fax resume and a brief writing sample to: Attn: Steve Herrick, Executive
Director, The Cooper Square Committee, 61 East 4th St., New York, N.Y.
10003, Fax #: (212) 473-2837, E-mail: Coopersqre@msn.com
Creative, talented PARr-nME TEACHERSITUTORS and CASE MANAGER ($20 per
hour) for Bronx-based after-school program serving recent immigrant teens.
Program operates Monday-Friday 2:30-5:30 p.m. during school year. Send
cover letter/resume to: Avance Program, National Puerto Rican Forum, 31 East
32nd street, 4th Roor, New York, NY 10016. Hourly salary for teachers is high-
ly competitive, commensurate with experience/qualifications. Martial Artists,
fine artists, actors, writers, filmmakers welcome!
ADMINISTRAnVE ASSISTANT. STRIVE, an E. Harlem-based nonprofit job readi-
ness training & placement program seeks Administrative Assistant for The
STRIVE Academy. The individual must be articulate, organized & detail ori-
ented, willing to travel. Must have excellent written & communication skills,
HS diploma/GED (BA pref.), min. three yrs clerical expo Type 65 wpm, Word,
Excel & Access a must. Mail resume w/ cover letter & salary requirements
(resume w/o salary requirements will not be considered) to: Timothy
Moriarty, Director of Operations, STRIVE, 1820 Lexington Avenue, New York,
NY, 10029-2010. Fax: 212-360-5634. E-mail: tmoriarty@strivecentral.com
(please send resume as attachment only).
COMMUNITY RElATION5ICOAUT1ON BUILDING INTERNSHIPS. Placement: The
Commission on Intergroup Relations and Community Concems and the New
York Center for Coalition Building at The Jewish Community Relations Council
of New York. 711 Third Avenue, between 43rd and 44th St, New York City. Job
description: Interns will assist in development and implementation within
community-based coalitions. They will engage in community outreach, net-
working, communicating with community leaders and membership organiza-
tions. Duties include identifying issues, organizing informative meetings and
events, grant research and writing, and program planning. Focus will be placed
on issues related to immigration policy, health care policy, research and analy-
sis, marketing and grass roots advocacy. Requirements: Candidates should be
computer fluent, with strong research, analytical, writing and communication
--
skills. Must be organize<J and able to prioritize. Must have the ability to work
within diverse economiC, cultural , and immigrant communities. Equal opportu-
nity, nonsectarian. Contact: Casey Miller at (212) 983-4800 x120, or
strawb73@hotmail.com
Asian Americans for Equality, citywide community development organization,
seeks qualified candidates for the following positions: DIRECTOR Of HOUSING
AND LEGAL SERVICES - supervise housing staff, provide day-tcrday manage-
ment, represent clients and program development. Req - J.D. degree, three
plus years experience. PROGRAM MANAGER - manage citizenship & entitle-
ments programs, supervise staff; coordinate delivery of services. HOUSING
PARALEGAL - handle individual housing cases, tenant advocacy, outreach &
education. FAIR HOUSING SPECIAUST - investigate housing discrimination
cases, client counseling & advocacy, recruit & coordinate housing testers. Req.
for all positions: BA or BS degree, two years plus related experience, bilingual
in Spanish or some Asian language preferred. Please send cover
letter/resume to Sue Rheem, Managing Director, Asian Americans for Equality,
180 Eldridge Street, New York, NY, 10002. Fax: 212-979-8811.
PROGRAM COORDINATOR. The Hispanic Federation (HF) seeks a Program
Coordinator to administer a portfolio of capacity-building programs and orga-
nizational development services to Hispanic nonprofit agencies. Respons-
ibilities: The Program Coordinator will coordinate programs designed to
enhance, develop, or strengthen the service capacity and organizational
infrastructure of Hispanic community-based organizations. The Program
Coordinator will work closely with the HPs Assistant Vice President of
Member Services and technical services staff. Qualifications: A minimum
requirement of a bachelor's degree plus two to four years of related experi-
ence. Excellent communications skills, both written and verbal; attention to
detail; ability to manage multiple projects; and knowledge of nonprofit sector.
Bilingual ability (Spanish/English) is a plus. Salary commensurate with expe-
rience. Contact: Send resume and cover letter to Erik Paulino, Hispanic
Federation, 130 William Street, 9th Roor, New York, NY 10038. (212) 233-
8955 or erik@hispanicfederation.org. Fax: (212) 233-8996.
DIRECTOR Of RESEARCH AND EVALUATlON. The Center seeks to connect its
efforts with academic and other resources that will contribute to the success
of community-driven school improvement activities. The Director of Research
and Evaluation will also work closely with the Executive Director to build and
maintain relationships with grassroots groups and national organizations
engaged in school improvement organizing, to develop new program initiatives
and coordinate projects, and to implement an ongoing fundraising strategy. In
addition, the ideal candidate will have: a strong social justice orientation and
commitment to social change; an advanced degree in policy, education
research, or social work; knowledge of education issues affecting low income
students and children of color; excellent written and verbal skills; proposal writ-
ing and contract management experience a plus; strong interest in applying
research and analysis to real world situations in low income communities;
experience relating to individuals and groups representing a range of CUltural,
racial, and economic backgrounds, conversational ability in a language other
than English a plus; an outcome focused work style, initiative, multi-tasking
capacity, strong computer skills, and good social skills. Please submit resume
and two writing samples (2-4 pages each plus title pages, excerpts encour-
aged) to Research Position, National Center for Schools and Communities,
Fordham University, 33 West 60th Street, 8th floor, New York NY 10023. The
NCSC is a 100 percent grant-funded project jointly sponsored by the Fordham
University Graduate Schools of Education and Social Service at the Lincoln
Center (Manhattan) campus.
YOUTH LEADERSHIP PROGRAM COORDINATOR. Progressive Queens settlement
house seeks enthusiastic coordinator for leadership program for young men
ages 12-18. FaCilitate/teach life skills classes, outreach, recruitment and pro-
gram development. BA req'd (masters pref'd) !Oxperience working with young
men and groupwork skills. $30K/yr, Medical benefits/pension. M-F 2PM-
10PM. Resume to Helena Ku at FHCH, 108-25 62nd Drive, Forest Hills, NY
11375 or Email hku@fhch.org.
PROGRAM DIRECTOR. The Homeless Services Department of The Salvation
Army of Greater New York is seeking a qualified professional as Program
Director for a city wide work experience program designed for public assistance
recipients. Responsibilities include supervision of three staff and interns, over-
seeing intake and assessment, work preparedness workshops, job develop-
ment and placement, statistics, job fairs and budget management. Successful
candidates will have a BA, master's preferred, supervisory experience and
proven success in the employment field. Salary is $36,000, with full benefits.
Fax resume and cover letter to Patricia DeLouisa, Assistant Director, Homeless
Service Department, 212-337-7279. Telephone calls will not be accepted.
CITY LIMITS
Media Jumpstart, a collectively managed nonprofit New York City. organiza-
tion, is looking for a PART TIME CONSULTANT to work with progressive New
York City nonprofit organizations on improving their use of technology. The ini-
tial job may lead to a full time position with benefits. We are looking for some-
one who has experience working with nonprofit organizations (particularly in
communities of color), shares a commitment to collective decision-making,
and has technical background that ideally includes experience with small
office networks (hardware and software installation, troubleshooting, and sup-
port), database development, and/or website development. Candidates must
be people-oriented and have strong writing skills. Women and people of color
are strongly encouraged to apply. Job responsibilities will vary depending on
experience, but may include: meeting with nonprofit organizations to leam
about their mission and technology needs in order to develop and write appro-
priate technology assessments and plans; planning and developing custom
databases and training people to both use and manage the databases
cally Access or FileMaker Pro); helping organizations strategically use the
Internet, design web sites, implement other online organizing tools, and train-
ing people to manage them. We are looking for an innovative and
vated person who: combines solid technical knowledge with demonstrated
experience with working with nonprofit organizations; communicates in plain
language about computer and internet-based technologies (training
ence a plus); possesses excellent oral communication and interpersonal
skills, including the ability to work well with diverse groups (including grass-
roots groups, advocates, funders). Media Jumpstart is a nonprofit organiza-
tion committed to working closely with New York City's nonprofit community to
strengthen the impact of their work through effective use of technology. Our
staff members are organizers and activists with a history of working on tech-
nology projects for non profits. We are dedicated to providing technology
resources and information that is appropriate and relevant to organizations of
all sizes, particularly those with limited resources. Media Jumpstart is affili-
ated with Community Resource Exchange, a nonprofit organization that pro-
vides management assistance to the diversity of nonprofit groups serving the
poor and disenfranchised. More info: www.mediajumpstart.org. Start date: As
soon as possible. The position will remain open until filled. We will review
applications on a rolling basis. Compensation: Negotiable based on
ence. To apply: Please send a cover letter and resume along with a short writ-
ing sample via email in text format. Send application materials to:
ajumpstart.org. Anti.<Jiscrimination statement: Media Jumpstart does not dis-
criminate on the basis of age; ancestry, color or race; cultural or ethnic back-
ground; economic status; ideological, philosophical, or political belief or
iation; marital or parental status; national or regional origin; physical disabili-
ty; religion, or religious or denominational affiliation; sex; or sexual orienta-
tion. Media Jumpstart will proactively engage in projects and coalitions that
discourage discrimination on any above-stated basis.
Weston United Community Renewal is a non-profit community-based agency in
Harlem servicing the mentally ill with transitional housing and employment. BI-
LINGUAL JOB DEVELOPER position available. Responsibilities include job place-
ment for consumers through contact with employers and businesses for poten-
tial job sites, skills training, resume writing, interviewing and presentation
skills. Knowledge of MICA/homeless population & clubhouses a plus. BA or
equivalent experience. Read and write Spanish. Salary 30K. Also seeking a
dynamic BUSINESS & MARKETlNG MANAGER to oversee our three small busi-
ness ventures (Art Gallery, Bookstore & Garden) and marketing program.
Responsibilities include providing direction and support for daily operations,
fiscal management, and special events. Marketing responsibilities include writ-
ing press releases, press packets and mailings. BA in business, four years of
retail & supervisory experience with a successful track record. Salary 40K.
Excellent benefits. Bilingual a plus. Good computer and writing skills. EOE. Fax
resume & cover letter to 212-31&0789.
SENIOR ANALYST (2) . The Office of Policy and Planning - NYC Department of
Health has two Senior Analyst positions open. Senior Analysts act as liaisons
to Department's programs, collect and analyze data, develop new program
proposals for City budget cycle, and assist in preparing state and city mandat-
ed reports. Requires: Master's in Public Health or Epidemiology, or BA with sci-
ence background plus at least one year of healtlHelated experience. Excel and
word processing a must. Database experience preferred. Proven writing skills
and ability to synthesize information from different sources. Excellent salary
and benefits. Send cover letter and resume. Office of Policy and Planning, New
York City Department of Health, 125 Worth Street, Room 624 CN 45, New
York, NY 10013, fax: (212)788-5353, eautio@health.nyc.gov
Seeking an ASSISTANT DIRECTOR OF REHABILITATION SERVICES. at Goodwill
Industries of Greater NY & Northern NJ. Position is located at our Harrison,
New Jersey faCility. Responsibilities include supervision of vocational ser-
MARCH 2001
vices for individuals with disabilities including; job coaching and placement.
Master's degree in Rehabiliation Counsel ing (CRC) or related area strongly
desired. Must have supervisory experience and knowledge of vocational
programs for individuals with disabilities. Experience working with DVR and
knowledge of DOL workshop standards strongly desired. Excellent oral and
written communication skills and computer literacy necessary. Salary mid-
30s + depending upon education and experience. Goodwill is a dynamic,
multi-faceted nonprofit organization dedicated to servicing individuals with
disabilities and other disabling conditions throughout northern New Jersey
and the New York metro area. We offer competitive salary and benefits.
Please fax resume with salary requirements to E. Bilal at (973) 481-2781
or e-mail to ebilal@goodwillny.org or mail to E. Bilal, 400 Supor Blvd.,
Harrison, NJ 07029.
Hudson Guild, a not-for-profit social service agency located in the
Chelsea section of Manhattan is seeking qualified ambitious and dedi-
cated candidates for a great opportunity to learn and provide essential
direct support to Chelsea area residents. The following positions are
available: INDIVIDUAL GIFTS COORDINATOR, EXTERNAL RELATIONS;
Responsibilities: Maintain annual fund/donor program; interface with
trustees to obtain updated & expanded lists; run direct mail solicitation
program; coordinate major gifts tracking and updating database system.
Write related materials for newsletters, annual reports and generate giv-
ing reports for external and internal use. Qualifications: Excellent writing
& verbal skills with 3-5 years experience fund raising. Proficient in MS
Word, Excel, Access; knowledge of Donor Perfect database system a +.
Position: Full-time, salary low to mid 30K. TEACHER, EARLY HEAD START:
Responsibilities: Lead plan groups for children for birth to 3 years of
age. Qualifications: New York State certified or certifiable teacher with
prior experience with age group and/or bilingual (English-
Spanish/English-Chinese) helpful. Position: Full-time. FAMILY ASSISTANT,
CHILDREN'S CENTER. Responsibilities: Conducting daily activities; recruit-
ing; monitoring; evaluating and training for family day care homes and
providers to meet NYC DOH, NYS CACFP, ACD/FOC and Children's
Center regulations. Implement age-appropriate activities and materials.
Qualifications: B.A. degree, with two years experience in chi! care or in
social services or teaching field. Knowledge of child development is a
must. Ability to relate to families both in family day care services, staff
and community; bilingual Spanish necessary. Position: Full-time. ADMIN-
ISTRATIVE ASSISTANT, CHILDREN'S CENTER. Responsibilities: Answer
phones; distribute mail; create fliers and update monthly calendar; main-
tain office inventory and other supplies. Handle petty cash vouchers and
maintain records. Prepare statistical and financial reports and update
database. Qualifications: B.A. or A.A. degree, good organizational skills
and communication skills. Proficient in MS Word, Excel, Publisher and
Access a + ; bilingual English/Chinese preferred; office experience nec-
essary. Position: Full-time. PARTTIME EDUCATION SPECIALIST, CENTER
FOR YOUTH DEVELOPMENT & EMPLOYMENT. Responsibilities: Assist in the
development and implementation of homework, SAT, GED, and Regents
preparation. Chaperone various field trips and monitor other after-school
activities. Qualifications: Working towards college degree in secondary
education or college graduate. Experience working with adolescent and
bilingual Spanish a +. Position: Part-time, $10/hr, 19 hrs/wk. We are an
Equal Opportunity Employer. If you meet the above qualifications then
please send us your resume with cover letter in confidence specifying
position(s) desired. Mail resume to: Human Resource Department,
Hudson Guild, 441 W. 26th Street, New York, NY 10001. Fax resume to:
Human Resource Department (212)268-9983. No phone calls please.
WRITER. Boys & Girls Harbor, a nonprofit educational, social service and
cultural community-based organization, is seeking an experienced writer to
join our Development Office. The successful candidate will research, write
and edit press releases, event journals, brochures, reports, newsletter
articles, government grant proposals and executive correspondence.
Bachelor'S degree, computer literate and multi-task oriented. Salary low
30s plus benefits. Please send cover letter, resume and writing sample to
Director of Special Projects, 1 East 104th Street, Room 544, New York,
NY, 10029. Fax 212-427-2311.
SOCIAL WORKERISUBSTANCE ABUSE COUNSELOR. Growing non-profit social ser-
vice agency serving homeless people has positions available for MSWs and
CASAC to work with homeless individuals and families. Must have experience
with homeless ness, HIV and mental health. Experienced workers encouraged
to apply. Field work required. Strong supervision and training. Excellent bene-
fits. Send resumes to: Care for the Homeless, 12 West 21st Street, 8th Roor,
New York, NY 10010-6902. EOE - Minorities encouraged to apply.
(continued on page 34)
(continued from page 33)
Community Counseling & Mediation is seeking a dynamic PARTTlME ACTM
TlESlRECREAT10NAl THERAPIST to facilitate creative after-school and Saturday
groups for new school-based mental health program in Brooklyn for seriously
emotionally disturbed children. Contact Kim Ahearn at (718) 802-0666 or fax
resume to (718) 858-9493.
Bronx org. working w/people w/disabilities seeks: ORGANIZER/ACTIVIST w/
ties to the disabled community. Must have excellent communication skills,
be organized and be computer literate. Must possess knowledge of laws
protecting people w/disabilities. Fulltime $28,000. People w/ disabilities
are encouraged to apply. PROJECT COORDINATOR for benefits program serv-
ing SSIjSSDI recipients in the Bronx and Queens. Responsible for start-up,
coordination of activities between two agencies, and developing strategies
for outreach and service delivery. BA preferred, equivalent work and/or life
experience w/disability will be considered. Full-time $29-33,000 depending
upon experience. Specify position in cover letter and include resume to:
Asst Director, BILS, 3525 Decatur Ave, Bronx, NY 10467 or fax: 718-515-
2844 or e-mail: Istein@bils.org
ASSISTANT REGIStRAR. NYC cultural institution seeks welklrganized problem
solver with excellent judgment and strong customer service orientation, need-
ed to assist Manager of Student Services in daily operations of Continuing
Registration Office. Previous office experience highly desirable. Must be a col-
lege graduate, detail oriented, strong computer skills. Competitive salary and
generous benefits, including four weeks vacation. Send resume and salary
requirements to: H.R. Representative-AR, The New York Botanical Garden,
200th Street and Kazimiroff Blvd., Bronx, N.Y. 10458-5126
FULLTlME PARENT ORGANIZER. QCIA, a parent and community organization is
seeking a full-time parent organizer to work with members and staff to plan and
coordinate meetings, workshops, and campaigns. Requirements: Bilingual
(English/Spanish), skilled in oral and written translation, experienced in grass-
roots organizing. Salary commensurate with experience up to 30K, full bene-
fits. Send/fax cover letter and resume to: Yvette Grissom, Queensbridge
Community In Action, 10-25 41st Avenue, Long Island City, NY 11101. Fax
(718) 784-3055 or e-mail: y...grissom@hotrnail.com
OCCUPANCY MANAGER needed for Asset Management Division of CBO.
Manager will have responsibility for occupancy, certification-leases, secu-
rity deposits, voucher processing submission to HUD, REAC reports,
vacancy reports and special claims. Applicant must be Certified Assisted
Housing Manager, and have knowledge and familiarity with federally sub-
sidized property management. Excellent communication and interpersonal
skills required. Knowledge of computerized accounting systems and soft-
ware application necessary. Qualified candidate should forward cover let-
ter and resume to Ms. J. Anglin, c/o BSRC, 1368 Fulton Street, Brooklyn,
NY 11216 or fax: 718-857-5984.
CASE WORKER. Working in cooperation with the NYC Department of
Juvenile Justice (DJJ), Brooklyn CDC seeks Case Worker to serve as a liai-
son with DJJ and CDC for the Reduce Children' s Violence initiative. Case
Worker will be responsible for initiating the referral intake process, con-
ducting needs assessment, and working with clients and families to
develop appropriate service plans. In addition, Case Worker will be
responsible for processing the enrollment of clients for participation in
one or more of CDC's youth initiatives; will establish linkages for
clients/families to services as needed; will conduct follow-up visits with
families, schools and service providers; maintain records monitoring and
documenting progress. Position requires strong attention to detail.
Bachelor's level degree in social work and/or two to three years experi-
ence in community youth/education programming. Ability to work with
diverse members of community necessary. Send cover letter and resume
to BSRC, c/o Judith Anglin, 1368 Fulton Street, Brooklyn, NY 11216 or
fax (718) 857-5984. Position is full-time.
Brooklyn CDC seeks PARTTlME OUTREACH WORKERS for Childhood Asthma
Prevention and Education initiative. Outreach Workers needed to spearhead
outreach efforts; attend health fairs; completing community assessments;
interacting with outside agencies; distributing information; keen ability to assist
in the development of education program management plans in achieving the
objectives of the program. Qualifications; Minimum two/three years work expe-
rience. Must be a self-starter with ability to work with team; interpersonal skills
necessary. Forward resumes to J. Anglin, c/o BSRC, fax (718) 857-5984 or
mail to 1368 Fulton Street, 5th Roor, Brooklyn, NY 11216.
ASSISTANT PROGRAM DIRECTOR. NJ's largest citizen watchdog coalition seeks
candidate to supervise community outreach & education effort, e.g. energy &
telecommunications deregulation & housing initiatives. Responsible for issue
organizing. Extensive community organizing and management expo a must, util-
ity & housing knowledge a +. Great starting salary & excellent benefits. Car &
license req'd. Fax resume w/ cover letter to NJCA (732) 214-8385.
PROGRAM ASSISTANT for national nonprofit community development financial
institution. Assist with accounting and finance data tracking/analysis, commu-
nicate between national program offices, support office management, and pro-
vide general administrative support, Must be proficient with ExceljWord, orga-
nized, comfortable with numerical data, flexible and have sense of humor. BA
required. Experience in nonprofit management, accounting or economics a
plus. Salary mid-20s. Excellent benefits. Send resume/cover letter to: Deborah
Majid, Nonprofit Finance Fund, 70 West 36 Street, 11th Roor, NY, NY 10018.
Email: deborah.majid@nffusa.org Fax: 212-268-8653.
Nontraditional Employment for Women (NEW). Innovative, nationally recognized
job training program for women seeks two experienced professionals. DEVEL
OPMENT OFFICER. Responsibilities: developing fundraising plan; writing grant
proposals, reports, annual appeal letters and other fund raising materials; etc.
Qualifications; B.A. required, M.A. preferred; self-starter; minimum of three
years professional experience in marketing, journalism or nonprofit develop-
ment; excellent oral and written communication skills, organizational and
research skills; and PC proficiency. $40-48K DOE and full health/vacation ben-
efits. JOB DEVELOPER. Responsibilities: developing high paying blue collar jobs
in maintenance, transportation, telecommunications. Qualifications; excellent
writing and communication skills; familiarity with women's employment issues;
minimum one year job development experience; computer/internet saavy. $38-
$40K DOE and full health/vacation benefits. Fax resume/cover letter (212)
255-8021 Attn: Bonnie Potter, Deputy Director.
Bushwick Family Residence seeks a skilled FAtILlnES MANAGER to oversee
maintenance of 87-family unit; supervisory experience necessary, knowledge
of preventive maintenance, inventory management; must be excellent team
player and strong communicator. Send resume and cover letter to: B. Bums,
1675 Broadway, Brooklyn, NY 11207. Fax: (718) 574-2713.
The Planning Center of the Municipal Art Society has an opening for a PlAN
NERIGEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEM SPECIALIST. The Municipal Art
Society of New York is a non-profit membership organization committed to
promoting excellence in the planning and design of the city' s built environ-
ment. This position will involve two primary responsibilities: 1) the develop-
ment, populating and maintenance of a GIS system that will be used for
analysis and mapping by MAS staff working on issues of preservation,
waterfront, zoning, and community-based planning 2) assisting the Director
of the Planning Center with advocacy, education and technical assistance
initiatives in support of community-based planning. The position requires a
highly motivated and independent individual with strong verbal, written and
analytical skills and with the ability to work collaboratively. GIS and planning
experience required. Master's degree in planning or planning related field
with extensive coursework in GIS preferred. Send resume to Eva Hanhardt,
Director, Planning Center, Municipal Art Society, 457 Madison Ave. N.Y.,
N.Y. 10022, tel. 212-935-3960 or fax 212-753-1816.
TlWNERIPROGRAM COORDINATOR (pm. Brooklyn Workforce Innovations seeks
qualified, motivated individual for Trainer/Coordinator position with Red Hook
on the Road Commercial Driver Training Program, coordinating training and
placement activities for low income women. Experience in training/job devel-
opment with adults, excellent communication, computer skills (Windows, Word,
Excel, Access & Internet). Bilingual (English/Spanish) and/or commercial dri-
ving experience a plus. Salary based on experience. Please fax or send cover
letter, resume, and salary requirements to: TRAINER/ PROGRAM COORDINA-
TOR SEARCH c/o Brooklyn Workforce Innovations, 141 Fifth Avenue Brooklyn,
NY 11217. Fax (718) 857-4322.
FAMILY PATHMAKING SPECWJST (case manager, tenant empowerment) for
supportive housing program in SW Yonkers. Master's degree preferred. Three
years related experience. To apply, send resume and letter to: B. Wood, VP for
PathMaker Services, Greyston Foundation, Fax (914) 375-1514.
Planned Parenthood of New York City, Inc, a leader in reproductive health
care, education and advocacy for over 81 years, is currently recruiting for
an EVENT COORDINATOR! COMMUNICATIONS ASSISTANT for the Othmer
Institute, a project of PPNYC. This position has been funded for one year.
CITY LIMITS
Reporting to the Associate Vice President, Communications, will coordi-
nate the development and facilitation of Othmer Institute meetings and
conferences and assist in their set-up. Assist in the development of agen-
das, schedules, outreach mailing lists and marketing strategies as well as
generate attendee awareness and interests in the events. In addition, will
coordinate through graphic design, editing and proofreading the creation
and production of all written and promotional items. Provide administra-
tive, logistical and research support that contributes to the efficient and
effective projection of the Othmer Institute's goals and in support of the
Public Affairs department and PPNYC as requested. Requires BA and
three years related experience in organizing public and political forums
and events. Excellent interpersonal and communication skills, including
strong writing, editing and proofreading skills. True team-player who thrives
in a fluid environment while juggling multiple tasks. Proficiency with MS
Office preferred. Interested candidates should send their resume with
cover letter and salary requirement to: Assistant Director, Human
Resources via fax at (212) 274-7218 or by email to resume@ppnyc.org.
Include title in subject line when emailing. No phone calls, pleasel For
more information on our programs and services, please visit us at
www.ppnyc.org or www.othmerinstitute.org.
BI-UNGUAL SOCIAL WORKER. Duties include but are not limited to: facilitate
part of pre-vocational training and conduct on-going preventive workshops and
support groups; meet with all terminated (and pre-terminated) trainees; refer
and follow-up to myriad services; track type of referrals made; meet with
trainees as needed and interface with all units; prepare weekly/monthly
reports as needed. Experience: working with public assistance recipients;
knowledge of NYC's social service delivery system; experience working with
the Human Resources Administration; experience in facilitating groups and
workshops; excellent communication, platform and organizational skills.
Education: BA/BSW degree with experience; graduate degree preferred (MSW
or MA). Salary: $30-35K upon experience. Contact: (by fax only) R. Niaz 212-
4144125. No calls please.
Highbridge Community Life Center, a not-for-profit community-based organiza-
tion in the Bronx, is seeking applicants for the following positions: FT LEAD
ORGANIZER who will coordinate the daily activities of the NIH program, which
include: tenant organizing, community organizing, project reports, gathering
and organizing data, proposals, outcome objectives and supervision of three
staff organizers. BA required. Salary $30s PI" YOUTH WORKERS FOR AFTER
SCHOOL PROGRAM serving young people, ages 9 to 18. Responsibilities
include tutoring, homework assistance, recreation and craft activities. Program
runs Mon. thru Fri. from 3pm to 6pm. $10 to $15 an hour. Fax resume to Sr.
Ellenrita 71SB81-4137.
Open Society Institute 2001 COMMUNITY FB.LOWSHIPS PROGRAM. The Open
Society Institute (OSI) is now accepting applications for the 2001 Community
Fellowships Program. OSI established the fellowship program to encourage
and support community leaders creating innovative public interest projects
that address critical social issues in New York City. Each year, the program
selects up to 10 individuals to receive an 18month stipend to support the
development of their project. The fellowship identifies and supports a diverse
group of organizers, activists and social entrepreneurs who engage their inge-
nuity to remove social barriers throughout the city. Through the fellowship net-
work, Fellows become a part of a growing community of service leaders
exchanging ideas and resources to bring social change to the forefront of New
York City communities. To receive an application, or additional information, con-
tact Sheila Harris at sharris@sorosny.org or call 212.548.0152. Please visit
our webpage at http://www.soros.orgjfellow/community.html. APPliCATIONS
DUE: MARCH 16, 2001
COMMUNITY ORGANIZERS. TICO, the Training Institute for Careers in Organizing,
seeks people eager to fight for social justice. Organize issues of housing, jobs,
environmental justice and public education. Paid, 12-week apprenticeship train-
ing program in community organizing. Apply now at www.ticol.org or fax cover
letter and resume immediately to (718) 733-6922, or call (718) 584-2954.
AMERICORP VISTA VOlUNTEERS. Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizen' s Council,
Inc., has two positions open for second year Americorp VISTA volunteers. If
you, or someone you know has completed a VISTA service before, and would
like to serve again, please contact Ingrid Nelson, at 718-418-8232.
Leading mental health agency seeks experienced, committed, consumer-cen-
tered vocational rehabilitation professionals for award-winning, cuttil1gdge
employment program serving adults with mental illnesses in the Bronx. JOB
DEVElOPERlMARKE11NG MANAGER Develop/implement plan to market support-
ed employment program/clients to the business community. Maintain strategic
MARCH 2001
relationships with diverse group of employers, develop jobs for adults with men-
tal illnesses. Qualifications: self-starter, solid experience in sales and marketing.
Must be able to develop jobs through cold calling. Must be creative team player,
have excellent interpersonal skills, in-depth knowledge of NYC labor market and
business community culture. Salary: micl-thirties. JOB COIICH Responsibilities
include job readiness assessment, skills assessment, job analysis, and job
coaching. Min. qualifications: HS/GED, prevo experience in vocational rehab. ser-
vices for SPMI adults, strong team player, excellent communications skills. BHin-
gual (English/Spanish) a +. Salary $24,000. Send/fax resume and cover letter
to M. Burton, Fast Track to Employment/Mental Health Association of New York
City, 369 East 148th Street, Bronx, New York 10455 Fax: 718-292.8248
Advocates for Children seeks a PARTTlME SOCIAL WORKER. For more infor-
mation on AFC see www.advocatesforchildren.org. The social worker will
assist attorneys with individual special education cases to locate appropri-
ate educational placements and services. Applicant must be experienced in
working with children with disabilities and their parents. Strong advocacy
abilities, great organizational skills necessary. MSW required, bilingual abil-
ity a plus. Salary: $18,0Q0.20,000 for an 18-hour work week. EOE. Send
cover letter and resume to: Jill Chaifetz, Executive Director, AFC,151 West
30th St. 5th Floor, NY, NY 10001.
FIT MANAGED CARE ASSOCIATE and PIT CREDENTlAUNG C O O R D I ~ . Not-for-
profit behavioral health care agency seeking a Managed Care Associate to
assist the Director of Managed Care. Successful candidate must be a self-
starter with strong interpersonal and organization skills. Grant writing and data
analysis skills needed. Experience in a health care setting and the managed
care field a plus. A Masters degree with two-ot-three years work experience.
Salary will commensurate with work experience. Also, seeking a part-time
Credentialing Coordinator to work 20 hours per week. Good organizational and
writing skills. Knowledge of managed care organizations a plus. Proficiency in
Excel and WordPerfect needed. $12 per hour. Please fax cover letter and
resume to Heather Nahas at (212) 691-5635.
COMPOST INSlRUCTOR. Bronx outreach program seeks enthusiastic instructor
to conduct outreach encouraging residents, institutions, and businesses to
recycle organic materials through composting. Will assist in planning, teaching,
and promoting composting classes. Bachelor's degree in biology, agriculture,
horticulture, env sci, education or other related field. Exc communication skills,
strong computer skills, and valid driver's license required. Bilingual skills pre-
ferred. Schedule includes some weekends and evenings. Competitive salary,
excellent benefits, including four wks vacation. Send resume and salary
requirements to: Recruiter-CI, The New York Botanical Garden, 200th Street
and Kazimiroff Blvd., Bronx, New York 10458-5126.Fax: (718) 2206504.
Email: jchoy-hughes@nybg.org,. AA/EOE/M/DjV.
FUUTlME HOUSING SPECIALIST needed to work with homeless families living
in East Harlem transitional residence to find permanent, affordable housing,
collaborate with neighborhood realtor to locate such housing, assist families
in applying for and receiving public housing benefits, liaison with section 8 and
other public housing subsidy representatives, assisting social services staff to
prepare homeless families for independent living, and conducting housing
readiness workshops. Residence staff is interdisciplinary, warm, nurturing,
and works closely as a team. Ability to work collaboratively is essential. Also,
similar part-time position is available as well. Mail or fax cover letter and
resume, to 206 East 124 Street, New York, NY, 10035, Fax (212) 996-6001
no emails or calls, please.
TIACIIER. Bachelor's degree with 3 years' teaching experience. Instructs
adults in basic education, GED classes, and college preparation. Conducts
placement testing and performs evaluations. Located on the Lower East Side,
competitive salary with an excellent benefits package. Fax resume to 212-228-
1178 or go to www.edalliance.org
FAMILY LITERACY INSlRUCTOR. Bachelor' s degree or several years' relevant
experience. Bilingual Chinese/English and knowledge of Chinese culture pre-
ferred. Implement activities to strengthen learning of English and enhance lit-
eracy for families in the early childhood programs. Located on the Lower East
Side, competitive salary with an excellent benefits package. Fax resume to
212-228-1178 or go to www.edalliance.org
lEAD TEACHER. Bachelor's degree, experience with ages 3-5. Develops and
supervises the child care program, including educational, developmental; and
health needs. Maintains safe and appropriate classroom, supervises classroom
staff. Located on the Lower East Side, competitive salary with an excellent ben-
efits package. Fax resume to 212-228-1178 or go to www.edalliance.org
(continued on page 36)
-
(continued from page 35)
PROGRAM COORDINATOR. MSW with at least one year supervisory experi-
ence in mental health and substance abuse to oversee residential pro-
gram for MICA clients. Oversees medication, charts, petty cash, admis-
sion/discharge, and crisis intervention. Supervises residential aides,
facilitates staff meetings and case conferences, represents agency in
community activities. Located on the Lower East Side, competitive salary
with an excellent benefits package. Fax resume to 212-228-1178 or go to
www.edalliance.org.
VOCA11ONAI.. REHABILITATION COUNSELOR, PIT. Bachelor's or master' s degree
with 2-3 years' experience. Provide individual and group vocational, education-
al, and employment counseling to day treatment and outpatient clients.
Located on the Lower East Side, competitive salary with an excellent benefits
package. Fax resume to 212-228-1178 or go to www.edalliance.org.
CASE MANAGER. Bachelor's and/or related experience. Bilingual Chinese or
Spanish a plus. Offers clinical and concrete support to families in Earty Head
Start. May include home visits. Located on the Lower East Side, competitive
salary with an excellent benefits package. Fax resume to 212-228-1178 or go
to www.edalliance.org.
HOUSE MANAGER. Women's residence seeks indiv. to manage facility in the
evenings and on weekends. BA & 3 yrs exp serving adult population. Strong
supervisory and communication skills req'd. Resume to: Quanda deLande,
Program Director, Henry Street Settlement, 282 East 3rd St., New York, NY
10009, Fax 212-533-4882.
Committed to the development of affordable housing
GEORGE C. DELLAPA, ATTORNEY AT LAW
15 Maiden Lane, Suite 1800
New York, NY 10038
212-732-2700 FAX: 212-732-2n3
Low-income housing tax credit syndication. Public and private
financing. HDFCs and not-for-profit corporations. Condos and co-ops.
J-51 Tax abatement/exemptions. Lending for historic properties.
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Social services, St. Christopher-Ottilie servies for Children & Families has.
positions for new ACS-supported group home for GLBTQ youth. SOCIAL SER-
VICE SUPERVISOR (MSW), PROGRAM MANAGER, CASE MGR., DIRECTOR CARE
WORKERS (HS) . Valid NYS Driv. Lic. Bilingual a plus. Fax letter/resume to Nina
718-526-8255. EOE.
CAREER COUNSELOR/JOB DEVELOPER. Queens displaced homemaker program
seeks experienced bilingual (Spanish) counselor. Computer literate; able to use
comp-based/assisted job search & planning programs; develop resumes & cover
letters; job readiness training; job development & placement. $26,000, excellent
benefit package. Fax/email resumes, etc CEC: 718-73%974, qwnet@banet.net
DIRECTOR OF DEVELOPMENT. Girls Incorporated of New York City seeks an expe-
rienced "self-starter" development professional who will also assist the
Executive Director in building the organization' s development infrastructure.
The successful candidate will have demonstrated fund raising experience and
project management capabilities, and will be adept at managing the expect&
tions and requirements of the organization's stakeholders. Bachelor's degree
and minimum four years development experience. The position is available
beginning March 1, 2001; salary is commensurate with experience. Send
resume to: Rev. Emma Jordan-Simpson, Executive Director, Girls Incorporated
of New York City, 5 West 73rd Street, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10023, Fax: 212-
712-0017. No calls please.
PROGRAM COORDINATOR - TELECOMMUNICATIONS. Administer exciting new
LaGuardia Community College 3O-month USDOL planning grant to prepare
Hispanics for entry-level telecommunications jobs. Lead business, labor,
community consortium in analysis of local labor needs & design of pilot train-
SPECIALIZING IN REAL ESTATE
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Applications 501 (c) (3) Federal Tax Exemptions All forms
of government-aSSisted housing, including LISC/Enterprise,
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KOURAKOS & KOURAKOS
Attorneys at Law
Eastchester, N. Y.
Phone: (914) 395-0871
Isabel Ochoa
liP Associates
Bronx, N.Y.
(718) 585-3187
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(212) 969-6506
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Funding Research, Grsntwriting. Marketing
Consulting Services in Adoption & Foster Care
Trainings for adoption & foster care professionals,
facilitators, educators, administrators
Workshops for birth and adoptive parents; mediation
within & between families
Youth development/conflict resolution for adopted &
foster care teens
Leanne Jaffe (718) 399-0739 leannejff@aol.com
CITY LIMITS
ing. Bachelor's required, related masters: preferred; 3-5 yrs. expo in related
program administration & planning required. Excellent organization, team
leadership & communication skills. Prefer expo with business & community,
research, training design. Salary: $55,000-$62,000. Send resume & cover
letter ASAP indicating job title to: D. Foreman, LaGuardia CC, Rm. C236(CL),
3110 Thomson Ave., LlC, NY 11101; or fax: D. Foreman (718) 482-5136.
PROGRAM OPERATIONS COORDINATOR. Manage fiscal/personnel operations,
instructional & support services for Family Institute, a large nOrH:redit train-
ing/research team at LaGuardia Community College. Prepare & monitor
spreadsheet budgets; oversee personnel submissions, supplies & equipment;
coordinate class schedules, prepare fiscal reports. Bachelor's required; relat-
ed master's preferred; 3-5 yrs. admin. expo in education or community with
diverse populations. Computer literate; proficiency in spreadsheets & account-
ing principles; excellent organization, supervisory & communication skills.
Salary: $40,000-$45,000. Send resume & cover letter ASAP indicating job title
to: D. Foreman, LaGuardia CC, Rm. C236(CL), 31-10 Thomson Ave., LlC, NY
11101; or fax: D. Foreman (718) 482-5136.
EXECU11VE ASSISTANT. Assist VP & Assoc. Dean of Continuing Education at
LaGuardia Community College; oversee key administrative projects, e.g. write
reports, explore new programs & community linkages, develop admin. systems,
assist with professional development, marketing. Bachelor' s required; related
master's preferred; four yrs. expo in education, human services, business or
related field required. Related expo with diverse populations, excellent organiza-
tion & communication skills. Salary: $42,000-$52,000. Send resume & cover
letter ASAP indicating job title to: D. Foreman, laGuardia CC, Rm. C236(CL), 31-
10 Thomson Ave., LlC, NY 11101; or fax: D. Foreman (718) 482-5136.
CONSULTANT SERVICES
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ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR, ADULT CAREER COUNSELING & RESOURCE CENTiR.
Within LaGuardia Community College's continuing education division, over-
see day-to-day ACCRC program operations (educational/vocational assess-
ment, career counseling, case management, job placement & computer-
ized career resources). Assist in program design; supervise staff; evaluate
services; oversee data collection; write reports & proposals; liaison with
funders. Master's in counseling or related field required; five yrs.counsel-
ing & administration in adult or higher ed, human services or related field;
expo with external agencies, diverse populations, career/adult develop-
ment, job placement. Organization, team leadership, communication skills.
Salary: $55,000-$65,000 depending on expo Send resume & cover letter
ASAP indicating job title to: D. Foreman, LaGuardia CC, Rm. C236(CL), 31-
10 Thomson Ave., LlC, NY 11101; or fax: D. Foreman (718) 482-5136.
ASSET MANAGER. Pratt Area Community Council (PACC) is a CBO working
in Ft. Greene, Clinton Hill, and Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. The Asset
Manager will research, analyze and coordinate all compliance require-
ments for our development projects. The Asset Manager will prepare
reports to government agencies and project partners, coordinate finan-
cial reporting and tenant income certifications, and manage related
information flow among PACC departments. The ideal candidate is a self-
starter with two years of housing or related experience and excellent
organizational, problem-solving and writing skills. Knowledge of LlHTC
preferred. Salary commensurate with experience. Fax/send letter,
resume, and salary requirements to: Controller, PACC, 201 Dekalb
Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11205 or fax: 718-222-3292.
(continued on page 38)
NesoH Associates
management solutions for non-profits
Providing a full range of management support services for
non-profit organiZiltions
management development & strategic planning
board and staff development & training
program design, implementation & evaluation
proposal and report writing
Box 130 75A Lake Road Congers, NY 109200 tellfax (914) 268-6315
DEBRA BECHTEL Attorney
Concentrating in Real Estate & Non-profit Law
Title and loan closings 0 All city housing programs
Mutual housing associations 0 Cooperative conversions
Advice to low income co-op boards of directors
313 Hicks Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201,
(718) 780-7994 (718) 624-6850
SOURY COMMUNICATIONS
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local and national media experts crisis communications govemment
and public affairs corporate sponsorships media
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(continued from page 37)
SOCIAl. WORKER. Growing faith-based NPO serving at-risk teen girts seeks FIT
CSW with supervisory experience. Work in juvenile detention facilities to pre-
vent recruitment into the sex industry. Experience with youth, Spanish speak-
ing a plus. Salary low $40s, commensurate with experience. Send res to:
GEMS, 2350 5th Ave, New York, NY 10037.
The Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB) is a large, multi-service serving the
Bronx for over 25 years. The agency provides a broad range of individual and
group services including-but not limited to-walk-in information, referral
assistance and counseling, services to special need populations, such as
immigrants, children, adolescents, seniors, homeless families and singles,
individuals infected with and families affected by HIV/AIDS. CAB provides
excellent benefits and offers opportunities for advancement. The following
openings are available. The Family Enrichment Program has an opening for a
SOCIAL WORKER to provide case management services to families. The
tion requires a MSW, excellent communication, time management, writing and
organizational skills. Responsibilities include providing individual as well as
family counseling, conducting home visits and facilitating groups. The individ-
ual must be available to work some evenings and some weekends. The salary
is in the high $30s. Those interested should fax/forward resume to: M. Morris
at 718-293-9767 or to M. Morris, CABGirts Club, 1130 Grand Concourse,
Bronx, NY 10456. The Living Room is a drop-in center for homeless single
adults. This facility has openings for CASE MANAGER. The position requires a
bachelor's degree and the ability to work some evenings, weekends and/or
holidays. Experience with substance abuse, homeless and the mentally ill pre-
ferred. Bilingual Spanish/English is helpful. Salary is up to low $30's. niose
interested should fax/forward a cover letter and resume to M. Mason at 718-
893-3680 or to M. Mason, CA8-The Living Room, 890 Garrison Avenue, Bronx,
NY 10472. PROGRAM ASSISTANT. The position requires a high school diploma
or GED, strong computer skills and excellent organizational skills. Candidates
must be able to work some holidays. Send cover letter and resume to D.
Johnson at 718-893-3680 or to D. Johnson, CA8-The Living Room, 890
Garrison Avenue, Bronx, NY 10472. The Positive Living Programs provide a
multitude of services to those infected and affected by HIV/AIDS. The program
has openings for SUBSTANCE ABUSE COUNSO.OR. (CASAC) to work in its harm
reduction program. The position requires a CASAC license and strong group
and individual counseling skills. Outreach experience and bilingual
Spanish/English is helpful. The salary is up to $35,000. Candidates should
fax/forward a cover letter and resume to R. Larson at 718-293-9767 or to R.
Larson, CABGirts Club, 1130 Grand Concourse, Bronx NY 10456. PROGRAM
SPECIALIST for Harm Reduction Program to counsel HIV+/AIDS clients. The
position requires a high school diploma or GED and experience with outreach
and substance use.treatment. Salary is up to $23,000. Candidates should
fax/forward a cover letter and resume to R. Larson at 718-293-9767 or to R.
Larson, CABGirts Club, 1130 Grand Concourse, Bronx, NY 10456. FOlLOW-UP
WORKER to work as part of a case management team with HIV+ clients. The
position requires a high school diploma or GED and extensive work with
tlements, housing issues and medical issues. Salary is up to $21,5000.
Candidates should fax/forward a cover letter and resume to: M Nass at 718-
293-9767 or to M. Nass, CABGirts Club, 1130 Grand Concourse, Bronx, NY
10456. The Homeless Intervention Program has an opening for a CASE MAN-
AGER to work with formerty homeless families and assist with housing, entitle-
ments, child care, employment, budgeting and job readiness. The position
requires a bachelor' s degree and good writing skills. Knowledge of publiC
tlements a plus. Bilingual Spanish is helpful. Fax your resume and cover letter
to M. Caraballo at or mail to M. Caraballo, CAB-Jackson Avenue
Family ReSidences, 691 East 138th Street, Bronx, NY 10454.
The E. Roberts Moore Senior Center has an opening for a PROGRAM ASSISTANT
to work with seniors. Responsibilities include organizing daily activities and
monthly special events as well as assisting with the operation of the senior cen-
ter. The position requires a high school diploma or GED and experience with
community work or teaching. Basic computer skills are a must. Bilingual
Spanish is helpful. Forward cover letter and resume to M. Rivera or I. Rolon at
718-933-7701 or mail to: M. Rivera/I. Rolon, CAB-Morris Senior Center, 80 East
181 Street, Bronx, NY 10453. The Homeless Outreach Team (HOn has open-
ings for the following positions: TEMPORARY CASE MANAGERS to work either the
day shift (9am to 5pm) or evening shift (4pm to 12am), Monday through Friday.
The position requires a bachelor's degree and a valid driver's license. Salary is
$13 to $16 per hour. Send cover letter and resume to N. Concepcion at 718-
716-8599 or mail to N. ConcePcion, CAB-HOT, 1800 Grand Concourse, Bronx,
NY 10456. TEMPORARY 0U11EACH WORKERS to work 4pm to 12am
including some weekends and holidays or to work part-time 8am to 4pm
Saturdays and Sundays only. The positions require a high school diploma or
GED and valid driver's license. Salary is $10-$13 per hour. PER DIEM 0U11EACH
-
WORKERS to cover shifts when program is short of staff. The position requires
a high school diploma or GED and a valid driver' s license. Per diem workers will
be on call. Salary is $10-$13 per hour. Jackson Avenue Family Residence has
an opening for a CASE MANAGER. The Case Manager will assist homeless fam-
ilies tQward finding permanent housing. A bachelor'S degree is required as are
good writing skills. Fax your resume and cover letter to Andrea Herman at 718-
993-1249. The After School programs at CAB' s Avenue St. John, Girts Club P.S.
130, Jackson Avenue Family Residence and Nelson Avenue Family Residence
are seeking SUBSTITUTE COUNSD..ORS. The positions require two years of
lege, prior experience working with children, and the ability to write well.
Substitute counselors will work on an as-needed basis from Monday through
Friday between 2:30-6:00pm. Fax credentials to Joselyn Esteves-vargas at 718-
590-5866. Resumes and cover letters, specifying the position, can also be
mailed to CAB, 2054 Morris Avenue, Bronx, NY 10453.
PROJECT DIRECTOR, Industrial Park and Business Improvements District (IP-
BID). Brooklyn non-profit seeks FIT IP-BID Director. Duties include: program
development, interfacing with the businesses and government agencies,
marketing and promoting IP-BID; monitoring conditions w/in part, providing
support services to businesses. Excellent communications skills a must;
personable, knowledgeable of city government helpful. BA, salary open. Fax
resume to: Sherry Roberts, 718-385-7505.
FISCAl. MANAGER. Brooklyn non-profit seeks FIT manager to oversee fiscal
operations. Responsible for general ledger, budgeting, cash flow, reporting,
vouchers to funding sources, and audits. BS in accounting and multiple go ....
emment contracts. CPA/ MBA preferred but not mandatory. Salary open. Fax
resume to Sherry Roberts, 718-385-7505.
ADMINISTRA11VE ASSISTANT. Ensure smooth functioning of office infrastructure
(i.e. maintain computers, phones, fax, email and other equipment/space.)
Complete charge of office routine. Liason with our fiscal agent for all our
accounting purposes and maintaining petty cash. Complete charge of arrang-
ing logistics during meetings and conferences or for the travel requirements.
Assist with updating and maintaining an expense allocation statement and
assist the Executive Director. Fax resume and cover letter to: 212-94S-7966.
TRAINING MANAGER. Train diverse population; provide participants with hand-
outs and homework assignments; conduct evaluations of participants; main-
tain records of daily attendance; incorporate feedback from management and
other training partners as appropriate. Salary: pro-rated at $40K per annum.
One full time and two per diem trainers needed. All trainers must be bHingual ,
English/Spanish. Per diem trainers are required to work some Saturdays.
Education: BA required/MA preferred. Earty childhood education a plus. Please
email resumes only! Attention arosser@cwe.org
housing agency providing rehabilitation services and advocacy to
adults with psychiatric disabilities seeks qualified candidates for the following
positions: PROGRAM DIRECTOR for progressive residential program for adults
with psychiatric disabilities. Intake, supervision, stafftraining, and maintaining
compliance with OHM regs. On call 24 hrs. Successful candidate must have
strong clinical, organizational, and interpersonal skills, ability to work
departmental teams, flexibility to respond to changing tasks and ability to think
outside of the box. Salary in the low 40s DOE. MSW preferred. SUBSTANCE
ABUSE COUNSELOR to work in transitional and permanent housing program for
MICA consumers. Ability to work as part of a team, expo with
mental health consumers, flexibility, excellent assessment skills and CASAC
required. Excellent benefits package offered. Interested candidates should for-
ward their resume with cover letter and salary history indicating position to:
Community Access, HR Dept., 666 Broadway, 3rd Roor, NY, NY 10012; Fax:
212-780-1412. EOE. M/F/ DjV.
PROJECT ASSOCIAlI. FuHime $40,000, benefits. Work with team, project man-
agement, fund development, grant writing, donor appeals for seven NYC non-
profit harm reduction/needle exchange agencies. Innovative effort to strength-
en agency revenue base. Email lapagnoni@mindspring.com resume, three ref-
erences, writing sample.
The Haitian Women's Program is a Brooklyn based nonprofit organization ded-
icated to providing direct social services, health education, and outreach to
immigrant communities to men, women and children infected/ and affected
with HIV/AIDS. We are currently looking to fill our ACCOUNTANT position that
will prepare program fiscal reports, budget modifications and prepare monthly
reimbursement reports. He/she will monitor program expenses, bank recon-
ciliation and review payroll. That person will also be responsible for maintain-
ing accounting files and the input and updating of the accounting charts, uti-
lizing accounting software systems. This person should have a bachelor's
CITY LIMITS
degree in accounting and minimum of two years' experierence working in the
not-for-profit sector. He/she should have knowledge and skills in computer
software, such as Excel , Lotus, and FundEZ. Organizational and communica-
tion skills a must. Salary starting from $40,000, with great benefits. Position
available immediately. Mail, fax or e-mail: Cover letter and resume to Gabrielle
Kersaint, Executive Director, Haitian Women' s Program 464466 Bergen
Street Brooklyn, NY 11217 E-mail: haitianwomensprogram@erols.com
Hope Community, Inc. , a dynamic, community-based housing organization
located on a historic block in East Harlem, has an exciting, challenging posi-
tion in its Property Management Division. PROPERTY MANAGER. Responsible
for the oversight of a Property Management Team consisting of Customer
Service Representative, a Zone Superintendent and subordinate maintenance
staff. Full accountability for building administration, resident services, mainte-
nance supervision, fiscal management and department management.
Requirements: Associate' s degree, three years' experience and RAM, CHM,
CPM certification and a valid NYS driver' s license. For consideration, send
resume and cover letter to Hope Community, PM1, 174 East 104th Street,
New York, NY 10029.
THERAPEUTlC ACT1VIT1ES TEAM LEADER. This position is responsible for the
development, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of therapeutic activi-
ties at the Times Square Program, a permanent supportive housing residence
providing on-site support services to formerly homeless & low-income individ-
uals including those with special needs such as mental illness, HIV / AIDS, and
other disabling conditions. The position includes assessing the interests and
needs of the tenant population, developing activities that reflect those inter-
ests and needs, and promoting the utilization of therapeutic services by target
populations. Reqs: Master's degree in social work preferred. Counseling, fine
arts or related field will be considered along with two years of relevant post
masters experience (one year can be substituted for two years of relevant post-
masters experience). Bilingual Spanish/ English preferred. Strong writing and
verbal communication skills, and computer literacy required. Salary $40K +
comp benefits. Send resume with cover letter ASAP to: Greg Rice, CUCS-The
Times Square, 255 West 43rd Street, New York, NY 10036. CUCS is commit-
ted to workforce diversity. EEO.
Media Jumpstart, a nonprofit worker-collective (www.mediajumpstart.org),
seeks individual to help progressive nonprofits improve their use of technology.
Experience working with non profits (particularly communities of color) and tech-
nical background (small office networks, database, and/ or website develop-
ment). $32,000 (4 day week). info@mediajumpstart.org.
Supportive Housing Network of New York, a dynamiC statewide coalition repre-
senting 160 non-profit agencies that develop and manage over 18,000 units of
supportive housing for low income and formerly homeless individuals and farn-
ilies, seeks two positions. Require creative individuals committed to housing
and homelessness issues. Competent in MS Office, database management
and Internet. Salary depends upon experience. Generous benefits. DEPUTY
DIRECTOR. To oversee operations of 8-person office including finance, develop-
ment and government contracts. Develop network communications, member
services and training programs. Qualifications: Supervisory and budgeting expe-
rience a must. Excellent communications skills. Master' s level required DEVEL-
OPMENT ASSOCIATE. To research and write foundation proposals. Manage spe-
cial events and develop plan for individual giving. Qualifications: Highly orga-
nized self-starter with keen marketing and sales instincts and excellent writing
skills. Master's level preferred. Send resume & cover ASAP: Search Committee,
Supportive Housing Network, 475 Riverside Dr., Suite 250, New York, NY
10115. Fax: 212-87(}'3334. Email: mfriar@dti.net.
LONG ISlAND ORGANIZER. NYS Tenants & Neighbors seeks staff per-
son to organize rent-regulated and Section 8 tenants on Long Island. Must be
self-starter w/ strong skills and ability to work independently. Car required.
Salary commensurate with experience. Full benefits. Send or fax resume and-
cover letter to: Joe Heaphy, Tenants & Neighbors, 105 Washington Street, NYC
10006. Fax: 212-619-7476.
PART TIME MUSIC THERAPISTIMUSIC THERAPY STUDENT. The Other Place is a
creative psychosocial rehab. program serving homeless & formerly homeless
mentally ilion the Upper West Side. Lead weekly music therapy group, already
formed & cohesive. Commitment of at least one year required. Send resume
to Kim Carlucci Galway, MA, ROT, Program Director, The Other Place/ Goddard
Riverside Community Center, 264 West 87th Street, New York, NY 10024 or
fax to: 212-875-1647
Leading mental health agency seeks experienced, committed JOB DEVELOP-
ER/MARKE11NG MANAGER for Wall Street-based, award-winning, cuttingdge
employment program serving adults with mental illnesses. Develop/ imple-
ment plan to market supported-employment program/ clients to the business
community. Maintain strategic relationships with diverse group of employers,
develop jobs for adults who receive mental health services. Qualifications:
self-starter, solid track record in sales and marketing, able to develop jobs
through cold calling. Must be creative team player, have excellent interperson-
al skills and in-depth knowledge of NYC labor market and business communi-
ty culture. Salary: mid-thirties. Send/ fax resume and cover letter to P. O' Quinn,
Fast Track to Employment/Mental Health Association of NYC, Inc., 120 Wall
Street, 16th Rr, New York, NY 10005. Fax: 212-809-0985
NYS Tenants & Neighbors has office space available for sublet at 105
Washington Street, Manhattan. Just south of World Trade Center with easy
access to most trains. 1700 sq. feet at a reasonable rate. For more informa-
tion contact Joe Heaphy at (212) 608-4320 x311.
Women' s non profit seeks space to rent immediately. Approx. 1000 sq. ft. in
Manhattan (no location preference). Enough for 7-9 people. Can afford to pay
$25OO/month but are willing to negiotate. Will sublet inside larger office.
Please contact Laura at 212-697-7741
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Survey of Compensation and Benefits Among
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