Grants Newsletter February 2011

February 2011 Newsletter

Most of the grants described in our newsletter are made possible through the generosity of past donors who established permanent, charitable funds with us during their lifetimes or through their wills. To learn more about how to set up a fund, please contact our general counsel, Jane Wilton, at 212.686.2563.

table of contents 1 Jobs? They’re Out There. Really.

2 A n Interview with

Program Directors Pat Jenny and Len McNally

4 L aunching Careers in Caring

5H elping Patients Stay Healthier

6G rowth Spurt in Primary Care

5R edeploying Veterans in Nursing Homes

7 Helping City Arts Groups Survive in Tough Times 8 Other Grants

grants

Jobs?

They’re out there.

O

Really.

ld age and disease aren’t ruled by economic cycles—so even as service, manufacturing, and construction jobs disappeared in the recession—more than 20,000 health care jobs were created in the City during the past two years. For those already working in the sector, jobs are changing as hospitals, health centers, and nursing homes adapt to health care reform, new technologies, a tough economy, and an aging population.

“Now is a crucial time to train, retrain, and redeploy the City’s health care workforce to provide care that keeps people healthier and out of the emergency A nurse’s aide spends time with an Isabella Geriatric Center resident. This Washington Heights nursing home is a member of the Southern New York Association, and will receive more welltrained employees through the New York Alliance for Careers in Health Care. Photo by Mike Fitelson.

Len McNally, program director, health and people with special needs, and Pat Jenny, program director, community development and the environment.

room” says Patricia Jenny, program director for community development and the environment at The Trust.

The Trust has launched the New York Alliance for Careers in Health Care (NYACH), a project that, for the first time, starts with employers analyzing their labor force needs, instead of starting with training programs that usually look for employers willing to work with them. NYACH will work first with trade associations of hospitals, community health centers, and nursing homes.

These groups will then bring together their members to focus on articulating their workforce requirements to training organizations and schools.

While the Alliance is groundbreaking in scope, it is also the logical next step in work that started ten years ago. In 2001, City funders concerned about the lack of workforce development infrastructure formed the New York City Workforce Development Fund, housed at The Trust, to do joint grantmaking. Three years later, it started the Workforce Innovation Fund with the City’s Department of Small Business Services to create partnerships of training providers and employers in specific sectors.

In addition to The Trust grants below, money for the project is being provided by the New York City Workforce Development Fund and the National Fund for Workforce Solutions.

• Community Health Care Association of New York State, $150,000 (page 6) • Eugenio Maria de Hostos Community College, $196,000 (page 4) • Greater New York Hospital Foundation, $100,000 (page 6) • Southern New York Association, $110,000 (page 5) • Workforce Development Corporation, $150,000 (page 3)

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An Interview with Trust Program Directors Pat Jenny and Len McNally NYCT: Why the New York Alliance for Careers in Health Care (NYACH), and why now?

Pat Jenny: There is an urgent need to find where the jobs are for disadvantaged people after a recession that has hit low-skilled workers the hardest.

The Trust has invested millions of dollars in safety-net grants to help poor New Yorkers through difficult times, but we also wanted to focus on a longer-term solution to poverty. We knew that meant helping people find good jobs; the health care industry provides a wealth of opportunities. It’s the one industry that is massive, fairly recession-proof, has many steps on a variety of career ladders, including some that have minimal requirements— and probably most important—workers with the right skills are in demand.

Len McNally: With health care reform, shortages of

primary care doctors and nurses, changing medical technologies, and the need to cut costs, providing better health care to New Yorkers rests heavily on a workforce that can rise to these challenges.

There is an urgent need to find where the jobs are for disadvantaged people after a recession that has hit low-skilled workers the hardest.

—Pat Jenny, Trust Program Director

NYCT: What is the impact of health care reform on health workers?

LM: The federal government is moving toward more primary and preventive care and away from expensive, unnecessary hospital care. We are often providing costly and inappropriate care in emergency rooms to the 1.5 million uninsured New Yorkers. It’s not coordinated, it’s not comprehensive, and it’s not continuous.

There is $19 billion in federal money set aside for the expansion of community health centers to provide primary care to millions of poor and uninsured. We will see a doubling of the centers’ capacity around the country in the next 5 to10 years, and that’s thousands of new jobs.

NYCT: Where was the idea for NYACH conceived?

PJ: Last January, I was at a meeting of human resource professionals in health care organized by the Obama administration, and was inspired by the Baltimore Alliance for Careers in Health Care. I came back on the train thinking, ‘This would be a good idea for New York.’ As an institution, The Trust is a leader in health care grantmaking in the City, and we are also a leader on workforce issues—so let’s put them together. Len agreed.

We spent the next ten months interviewing employers, health care providers, and workforce development experts.

NYCT: What sets this project apart?

PJ: We knew that we needed to start with employers, and help them communicate what they need in tomorrow’s workforce. Getting employers involved and invested from the beginning was challenging, but we were in a good position to work with them through their trade associations.

LM: We were also thinking big—our goal is to change

how the entire City’s health care workforce is trained. We needed to make sure that we were addressing the different labor needs of the three major health providers—hospitals, community health centers, and nursing homes.

NYCT: What was The Trust’s involvement in developing a sector approach to workforce development?

PJ: The City and training providers were behind the curve on providing employment services in the late ’90s.

Private funders, including The Trust, got together in 2001 to deal with the fact that a city of eight million people didn’t have a good system of programs for someone trying to find a job.

By 2004, the City was ready to work with us. Together we created a sector initiative in biotechnology and health care, eventually starting One Stop Centers in transportation, health care, and manufacturing that have already trained and placed hundreds of workers.

NYCT: How will the grants you made in December 2010 change the City’s workforce programs?

PJ: This entire project will be shepherded by a new NYACH coordinator at the City’s nonprofit Workforce Development Corporation. He or she will make sure that everyone involved in the Alliance is communicating and moving the project forward. We will support the coordinator’s salary for two years; after that, we expect the City or other private funders to support the position. We also expect that the positions we are funding at health care trade associations will be made permanent and paid for by the associations.

LM: The coordinator is important because we found in

our interviews with 50 health care executives that there has been stunningly poor communication between trainers and employers. The coordinator will make sure that changes.

NYCT: What are your hopes for this project?

LM: We hope it makes health care better. For instance, community health centers are perpetually in need of doctors. Could nurse practitioners and physician’s assistants give some of the care doctors provide? If the answer is ‘possibly,’ then we will work with the educators

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3

These women are training to be certified nurse’s aides at Hostos Community College in the Bronx.

to create a curriculum that gives them the skills they need. That doesn’t exist now.

boys at school, and then I would do my homework while they did theirs.”

I also hope that when schools recruit students they can tell them, ‘we have a placement service that can guarantee every single one of you a job in primary care if you graduate from this program.’

After she passes the first certification test, she will enroll in the next—certifying nurse’s aides to take blood and administer electrocardiogram tests, a requirement for most hospitals. “I will do that for about six months and then continue my training to be a licensed practical nurse or registered nurse.”

Launching Careers in Caring “I like old people,” says Dionne Layne Morales, a 42-yearold mother who babysits and tutors children in her Bronx home. While training to be a certified nurse’s aide at a local retirement home, she met two women who were 101 and 102. “It was an honor to take care of those ladies, to bath them and comb their hair. It was an honor.”

Ms. Morales studied at Hostos Community College, which she chose because the 8-week program offered classes that worked with her busy schedule and had a payment plan. “I could go to class and then pick up the

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A Trust grant of $110,000 to Hostos will help expand its certification classes and help make them an option for people on public assistance who have little work experience. While Ms. Morales was able to pay for and complete the course on her own, others need help getting a foothold on their careers. Our grant will fund the recruitment and tutoring of 152 high school graduates or GED recipients who need remedial education to pass the certificate programs.

BronxWorks, a long-time community service provider, will help Hostos find the best candidates for the program.

“We’re trying to get people with very limited skills into something that could be a basic building block while they think about their next steps,” says Carlos Molina, dean for special projects at Hostos. All of the students recruited will qualify for financial aid; their textbooks, classes, and MetroCards will be paid for through grants from The Trust and other funders.

Ms. Morales continued: “My teacher in the program was great because she was a working registered nurse, and she taught us a lot of extra things about biology and physiology, so that if we want to advance past being an aide, we will be really, really prepared.”

Redeploying Veterans in Nursing Homes For veterans returning from their final tour of duty, homecoming isn’t always as sweet as they imagined on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. Finding a job, tough for anyone in this economy, is especially hard for veterans who have only a high school degree and may not have experience suited to civilian jobs. Vets with experience as field medics need additional training and certification. With a $110,000 grant to the Southern New York Association, a trade group of 66 nursing homes, the Association will begin a program to recruit and provide job training for returning vets.

Effie Batis, director of operations for the Association, takes pride in not only building a strong workforce to fill thousands of nursing home jobs, but also in helping people in challenging circumstances fill these positions. “We started working seven years ago with women living in shelters who had fled domestic abuse.

With our help, these women persevered, taking nursing classes by day while living in a homeless shelter at night,” says Ms. Batis. “After the success of that program, our passion became to help others change their lives, become self-sufficient, and enter the health care field.”

Not all residents at Isabella Geriatric Center are old or there for the long-haul. This certified nurse’s aide is helping a young man hurt in an accident get ready to go home. Photo by Ed Cunicelli.

She continued: “We feel that people who have worked in the military are used to giving 100 percent, which is what it takes to succeed in this field. However, there are challenges for returning veterans—there might have been things that held them back from going to college on their own, learning disabilities or a dislike of traditional school environments—and so you need to address these.”

The program is designed to help vets with a range of skill levels and match them with jobs. Veterans with disabilities that impair mobility may pursue certification as lab technicians or enter the growing field of health care information technology. “It often helps to expose people to the work environment before they are in training,” says Batis. “If working with the elderly is something the returning vets enjoy, it will motivate them to succeed in what are very rigorous and demanding educational programs. Part of our success is finding where people are economically, educationally, and emotionally and steering them on a path where they will succeed.”

Helping Patients Stay Healthier When people can’t afford to see a doctor, they often end up doing nothing until their problems becomes urgent.

Expensive emergency visits—that could have been avoided with preventive and primary care—are creating financial strains on hospitals and nursing homes, especially those

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Staff at St. Barnabas Hospital makes sure that this patient knows how to take her medications correctly and how to stay as healthy as possible when she goes home.

that care for the poor. The Greater New York Hospital Association (GNYHA), a trade group for voluntary and public hospitals and nursing homes, is helping its members with changes brought about by federal and state health reform. Federal reform in particular will increase funding for primary care and cut reimbursement for preventable hospital readmissions. “There will be less money available for us to do what we need to do, so we need to help people stay healthier,” says Tim Johnson, executive director of the GNYHA Foundation.

help shape a curriculum that prepares students for these jobs. Mr. Johnson continues: “I think that patients are willing to take on more responsibility for managing chronic conditions, but they need the education, and health care professionals could be better educated and trained to provide this help to patients.”

“It’s not enough to just care for patients while they’re in the hospital. Health care workers today must be more proactive and provide more follow-up care to patients— calling them to make sure they’ve taken their medicines, or have seen the recommended specialist—so they don’t end up back in the emergency room,” continued Mr. Johnson.

Community health centers provide millions of New Yorkers with affordable primary, dental, and mental health care. According to Maggie Brennan, chief operating officer of the Community Health Care Association of New York State, “Community health centers are bipartisan favorites because they provide high quality and cost-effective care to people who are fairly sick and underserved—it’s a good model that now has an additional $19 billion in federal dollars set aside to help expand existing centers and to set up new ones.”

With a Trust grant of $100,000, the GNYHA Foundation is forming the Center for Health Workforce Advancement to help its members recruit, train, and retain a strong workforce.

Through the Center and the New York Alliance for Careers in Health Care, the GNYHA Foundation will work with Trust-grantee Hostos Community College to

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Preparing for a Growth Spurt in Primary Care

A $150,000 grant to the Association, which supports 32 City community health centers, will help it staff the doubling of capacity of community health care providers over the next 5 to 10 years.

The grant will support two new health care workforce experts. “This funding could not have come at a better time,” continued Ms. Brennan. “We had been talking workforce development for five years, but now we can hire staff to take it on full time.”

The new team will develop an internship program and work more closely with the State’s Medical Society and medical schools in the City to create pipelines of doctors and nurses who want to be a part of community health care, which pays less than private practice or hospitals. It will also work with local colleges to bring their degree programs in line with the new health center job requirements, with a focus on jobs needed to bring health centers up to “medical-home” standards—meaning more patient navigators to manage each patient’s care.

Helping City Arts Groups Survive in Tough Times Even for the City’s most die-hard cultural consumer, there are too many must-see performances, exhibits, and genre-defying offerings to experience in one lifetime. It’s a great problem to have—as an audience member. But the City’s arts organizations need much more than applause to stay afloat. Struggling arts groups need help with marketing, management, and finances from agencies that understand their predicament and can offer useful assistance.

A $100,000 grant from The Trust to the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council provides artists, like the one below, with free studio space on Governors Island and elsewhere. Photo by LMCC.

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The City’s arts organizations need much more than applause to stay afloat.

Other Grants

Struggling arts groups need help with marketing, management, and finances from agencies that understand their predicament and can offer useful assistance.

Children, Youth, and Families

Council of Family and Child Caring Agencies, $56,000 to help eight agencies new to providing child-abuse prevention services meet City requirements for improved services in communities that need it most.

Hetrick-Martin Institute, $77,000 to expand a popular academic enrichment program for gay youth that includes tutoring; Regents, SAT, and GED preparation classes; college and financial aid counseling; creative writing and art workshops; and paid internships.

Inwood House, $275,000 to make child welfare agencies more responsive to the needs of young mothers.

Arts service groups—such as borough arts councils— provide this help, but are being pushed to capacity as demand for their services intensifies. The following grants will help them meet this demand: • Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York, $40,000 to build the management and financial capacity of City nonprofit theaters.

• Bronx Council on the Arts, $40,000 to provide business training for Bronx artists and arts groups.

• Council on the Arts and Humanities for Staten Island, $100,000 to improve arts education by training and placing teaching artists in schools.

• Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, $100,000 to provide artists with studios in vacant spaces on Governors Island and elsewhere.

• Queens Council on the Arts, $50,000 to teach Queens arts and dance groups how to market themselves.

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Hunter College of CUNY School of Social Work, $133,000 to strengthen the ability of social workers to help clients with financial problems.

John Jay College of Criminal Justice of CUNY, Criminal Justice Research and Evaluation Center, $30,000 to conduct a national study of the economic and public-safety benefits achieved through juvenile justice systems that place youth in community programs rather than prison-like state facilities.

YWCA of the City of New York, $30,000 to bring a curriculum to four day-care centers that helps teachers support toddlers’ cognitive, physical, and language development, and provides professional coaching, a national support team, and activities that involve parents.

Youth Development

JobsFirstNYC, $65,000 to help place more teens in jobs by developing relationships between employers and City youth employment organizations on the Lower East Side.

East River Development Alliance’s Shanna Castillo (right) presents client Florence Stallings with a certificate of achievement for her participation in the Alliance’s job training workshops.

The Point Community Development Corporation, $40,000 to enhance after-school programs for Hunts Point middle and high school students. Activities will include short courses on creating electronic instruments, designing skateboarding parks, and writing poetry.

Rockaway Waterfront Alliance, $40,000 to lead a community planning process for the Rockaway Peninsula to redevelop derelict and under-used sites.

Community Development

The following Neighborhood Revitilization grants support housing and financial services in poor communities. Each grant is for $40,000.

New York Public Interest Research Group, $50,000 to prevent disinvestment in the City’s transit system and to advocate for expansion of new select bus service.

Workforce Development

Legal Momentum, $100,000, to increase the number of girls in the City’s nontraditional vocational high schools that train them for well-paying jobs in construction, maintenance, and other vocations.

Environment

Commonweal, $65,000 to increase awareness about the connection between toxic chemicals and the spike in developmental disabilities in early childhood.

Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance, $45,000 to advocate for a waterfront land-use plan for the City that balances environmental preservation, industrial uses, tourism, and recreation.

New Partners for Community Revitalization, $45,000 for a coordinator to accelerate brownfield redevelopment in the City.

Tides Foundation, $100,000 to limit the growth of tar sands oil production in Canada.

BROOKLYN

Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, to provide financial literacy workshops, job training and placement, and benefits counseling to residents, including formerly incarcerated youth.

Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation, for job training and placement for young adults.

Flatbush Development Corporation, to help people using feeding programs get food stamps and other benefits, and provide some families with ongoing counseling.

THE BRONX

University Neighborhood Housing Program, Northwest Bronx, to refer low-income homeowners to housing and financial services. It will also expand a foreclosure prevention database and provide free taxpreparation services and financial literacy workshops.

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MANHATTAN

STATEN ISLAND

Community League of the Heights, Washington Heights, to enroll residents in home health care aide/ computer literacy training programs. The League will also help those living in financially distressed buildings get repairs, fight landlord harassment, and move toward financial solvency.

Northfield Community Local Development Corporation of Staten Island, to help homeowners at risk of foreclosure through targeted mailings and individual counseling.

Cooper Square Community Development Committee and Businessmen’s Association, Lower East Side, to educate the community about a cooperative housing plan that will provide affordable home-ownership opportunities.

EIS Housing Resource Center, Midtown, to prevent seniors and others from being evicted by providing legal representation in housing court, helping to reduce clutter, and providing emergency cash for rent.

Harlem Congregations for Community Improvement, to help young people get jobs through career counseling, job referrals and placement, and paid internships.

Northern Manhattan Improvement Corporation, Washington Heights, to advertise its services in the community, and help residents find jobs, and get food stamps and other benefits.

QUEENS

East River Development Alliance, Long Island City, to help families get food stamps and other benefits, tax assistance, and employment counseling, and to help public housing residents with rent arrears and other housing matters.

Ocean Bay Community Development Corporation, Far Rockaway, to help residents with their taxes, and help them prepare for and find jobs.

Queens Community House, Jackson Heights, to integrate financial literacy instruction into ESL classes, provide families with financial counseling, and help them get food stamps and other benefits. It will also help tenants get emergency funds to avoid eviction and involve local residents in advocacy for healthy, affordable housing.

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Arts and Culture

Career Transition for Dancers, $25,000 to help retiring dancers plan for second careers.

Coalition of Theatres of Color, $25,000 for a joint marketing campaign for black and Latino theaters.

New York City Learning Network Fund, $200,000 for a joint grantmaking program started by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to promote adolescents’ learning through digital media.

Roulette Intermedium, $50,000 to promote an experimental music venue moving from Manhattan to Brooklyn.

Staten Island Museum, $50,000 for a partnership between a museum and a community organization, Art Lab, to create a visual arts program for youth that includes hands-on production and learning how art is curated.

Historic Preservation

Historic House Trust of New York City, $100,000 to develop a series of programs at 23 historic houses focusing on each house’s unique role in the City’s history.

Human Justice

Association of the Bar of the City of New York Fund, $35,000 to expand pro bono legal assistance to veterans filing disability claims.

Health

Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, $135,000 to begin a study to improve the treatment of bone cancer in children.

God’s Love We Deliver, $100,000 to feed cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy or radiation.

Special education students at P.S. M94 participate in Everyday Arts in Special Education, an arts partnership between New York City Special Education District 75 and Manhattan New Music Project. Photo by Kyle Dean Reinford.

Institute for Family Health, $110,000 to determine if electronic medical records improve the care of people with heart disease.

League Treatment Center, $43,000 to help autistic children overcome speech defects.

Maimonides Medical Center, $75,000 to determine if electronic medical records improve the care of patients with mental illness.

People with Special Needs

Aging in New York Fund, $72,000 to study how the City’s case management system for frail homebound elders evaluates need and makes decisions about the number of hours of housekeeping services provided.

Alpha Workshops, $45,000 to train people with AIDS for jobs in the design industry, and to help nonprofit agencies with renovations.

Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, $200,000 to start the country’s second ophthalmic oncology fellowship.

Center for Independence of the Disabled in New York, $43,000 to help Spanish-speaking youth with mental retardation living in Queens make the transition to adult services.

Montefiore Medical Center, $180,000 to integrate medical and mental health care for poor, chronically ill patients in the Bronx.

Jewish Association for Services for the Aged, $40,000 for legal and social services for elder-abuse victims in Queens.

New Jersey Medical School Public Health Research Institute, $196,000 to study the evolution of drugresistant bacteria by working with the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics at the American Museum of Natural History to construct an evolutionary tree of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus mutations.

Manhattan New Music Program, $134,000 to train teachers in the 44-school special education district to use the arts to work with severely disabled elementary school students.

Special Projects

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, $50,000 to protect the interests of low-income people in federal and state budget negotiations.

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909 Third Avenue New York, NY 10022 www.nycommunitytrust.org Address Service Requested

February 2011 Newsletter

grants

Inside:

Jobs? They’re out there. Really.

Helping City Arts Groups Survive in Tough Times Other Grants and more…

Nonprofit Org. U.S. Postage PAID Permit No. 5013 New York, NY

The grants described in this issue were approved by The New York Community Trust’s governing body at its December 2010 meeting.

For grantee contact information, or for more information about the grants, please call The Trust’s receptionist at 212.686.0010, ext. 0.

This issue and past newsletters can be found at www.nycommunitytrust.org.

If you’d prefer to receive our newsletter by email, write to newsletter@nyct-cfi.org.

Trust-funded programs at The Point CDC in the Bronx include skateboard and skate park design.

Most of the grants in our newsletter are made possible through the generosity of past donors who established permanent, charitable funds with us during their lifetimes or through their wills. To learn more about setting up a fund, please contact our general counsel, Jane Wilton, at 212.686.2563.