Serving to New Yorkers rebuild their lives

As the vacation season strikes into full swing, it’s a becoming time to replicate on the collaborative efforts of our metropolis’s municipal workforce and their nonprofit companions who’ve come collectively underneath Mayor Adams’ Subway Security Plan over the previous ten months. Collectively, now we have offered a hand up for essentially the most weak, these New Yorkers who’ve been residing unhoused.

The mayor unveiled the plan again in February, realizing that if we strengthened and bolstered our dedication to meaningfully and comprehensively help the unsheltered to seek out higher choices, we might construct a stronger and safer metropolis and subway system.

Up to now, town has succeeded in partaking hundreds of unsheltered people via our outreach, greater than 3,000 have taken us up on our provide for shelter. Presently, virtually 1,000 of essentially the most weak people now we have engaged on the subways since launching the mayor’s plan are nonetheless in shelter, receiving care that promotes stability and addresses the extremely advanced medical and behavioral well being situations many consumers expertise.

However numbers can’t present your entire human actuality. One in all our purchasers, a lady, was born and raised in Queens, and whose life took an sudden flip that left her and not using a residence.

Susceptible, afraid, and alone, she took to the streets and subways, not sure of what to do to vary the trajectory of her life. That’s the place our outreach groups discovered her, and over time, earned her belief. They informed her that the YMCA — which in partnership with BRC, one in all our main homeless companies suppliers, might present her personal room, the place she might safely restore her well being, concentrate on placing the items of her life again collectively and regain her dignity.

With some trepidation, she determined to offer it a strive.

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“I really like how all of the workers is heat and pleasant once we enter the constructing, contemporary fruit and meals is all the time provided with a loving smile, and the room is heat and comfy when it’s chilly outdoors,” wrote the lady in a letter she despatched to the mayor. “Thanks a lot for serving to me and for principally saving my life by giving me what I wanted essentially the most: a spot to remain the place I really feel welcomed.”

This consumer, a lifelong resident of town, and lots of of as soon as unhoused folks like her are in a position to have these life-saving alternatives as a result of our metropolis got here collectively to assist her.

The Adams administration has and is dedicated to creating and sustaining extra fashions of success like this which is able to allow all of us to return collectively, because the can-do New Yorkers we’re, to assist the unhoused.

Over the previous 12 months, and going ahead, town has made and can proceed to make complete investments in short- and long-term methods that may rescue hundreds extra people like this lady, every with their very own story, their very own fears, and their very own hopes. The mayor’s plan breaks down the silos and brings folks collectively to make sure a seamless transition from the road and subways, to transitional housing, help companies, and everlasting housing.

Additional, it addresses the systemic challenges that trigger New Yorkers to finish up on this place, from our psychological well being disaster to a extreme housing scarcity.

Serving to this consumer and hundreds like her to steer higher lives is only a begin. There’s far more that may and might be completed. However as the vacation approaches, it’s a good time to take inventory of our blessings and look to the work that lies forward.

Jenkins is commissioner of town Division of Social Companies.