New York City Council

Committee on Aging: Chair, Council Member Hudson

Subcommittee on Senior Centers and Food Insecurity: Chair, Council Member Mealy

Subcommittee on COVID Recovery and Resilience: Chair, Council Member Moya

April 6, 2022

Oversight - Protecting Older Adults at Older Adult Centers During the Continued COVID-19 Pandemic & Reopening Older Adults Centers

Thank you for the opportunity to testify and our congratulations to Commissioner Cortés-Vázquez on her reappointment to the role of DFTA Commissioner.

LiveOn NY’s members include more than 110 community-based nonprofits that provide core services which allow all New Yorkers to thrive in our communities as we age, such as older adult centers, home-delivered meals, affordable senior housing, NORCs, and home care. LiveOn NY is also home to the Reframing Aging NYC Initiative, part of the national Reframing Aging Initiative aimed to counteract ageism and improve the way policymakers, stakeholders, and the public think about aging and older people. With our members, we work to make New York a better place to age.

Background

Two years ago, Older Adults Centers (OACs) closed their doors for in-person programming, shifting to virtual programs to mitigate the risk of contracting the virus. During this time, OACs found new ways to provide critical services from setting up zoom classes to enrolling clients in emergency food systems, all in the face of unprecedented demand and a public health crisis. For a growing diverse aging population, Older Adults Centers were a lifeline during the pandemic, particularly in response to the increased risk of food insecurity and rise in social isolation that plagued many older adults.

For months, OACs operated at a 25% capacity restriction that created administrative challenges for providers to execute. Recently, the Department for the Aging (DFTA) announced that all Older Adults Centers can lift capacity limits and resume programming at 100% capacity. LiveOn NY is appreciative of the new guidance to resume full capacity for OACs and allow all older New Yorkers to return to the Center they know and love in their community. This is a major step towards getting older adults back out into the community and their local centers, which we know are hubs for socialization, diverse programming, and other critical services.

Nonetheless, we know there is more work to be done to fully support older adults back into a new normal. With OACs operating at full capacity, the City has the opportunity to create long term solutions and make meaningful investments to ensure all New Yorkers can access equitable community-based services in their community.

Recognizing this opportunity, LiveOn NY applauds City Council for their leadership in calling for additional investments in Older Adult Centers and the aging sector in their recent response to the Mayor Adam’s FY23 Preliminary Budget by including an additional $8.7 million to expand DFTA's Geriatric Mental Health Program (DGMH), $60 million to provide a cost-of-living adjustment for human services workers, $7.5 million to improve IT education for older adults, $30 million for the Recovery Meals transition, and $12.7 million for the home-delivered meals program, among other key investments.

Recommendations

To programmatically support Older Adult Centers into the future, LiveOn NY recommends:

DFTA and the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) should continue to work in partnership with Older Adult Center providers to respond to future COVID related challenges, as well as share public health response best practices with centers as needed.

As we move forward and the relative risks of COVID variants evolve, it’s critical that DOHMH and DFTA continue to provide science driven best practices and information for Older Adult Centers in response to trends and risk of transmission. Through this partnership, Older Adult Centers can truly support older adults as they safely re-engage with the community.

In addition, the City should continue to work in coordination with community-based organizations including Older Adult Centers, which are often sources of trust to marginalized populations, to further promote access to the vaccine and vaccine boosters.

LiveOn NY and our members have seen the hurdles older adults have experienced to simply get a shot, and distribution has also revealed the racial inequities that already plague communities of color. As older adults return to OACs, it is critical the City continues working with community-based organizations such as Older Adult Centers to ensure older adults are able to receive the life-saving vaccine.

Just as clear guidance was appreciatively shared with providers highlighting the increase in Older Adult Center Capacity restrictions to 100% capacity, DFTA should clearly share this information, and any relevant best practices, with other contracts such as NORCs, Transportation, Case Management, and others.

It is our understanding that the OAC capacity restriction changes do indeed extend to these programs, however, it would be beneficial to have this point clearly documented.

In addition, the City should continue to support the new models of service, such as virtual programming (a priority of DFTA’s that is further outlined below) and grab-and-go meals, that have proven to be successful during this time into the future.

By continuing to work with providers to cement best practices learned during the pandemic into the long-term models of service applied by OACs into the future, New York again has the opportunity to be a model of innovation replicable by centers across the country. These new models have expanded the work of OACs to older New Yokers who may not have been aware of or able to access the network of OAC services available in the past. For example, grab-and-go meals have proven successful in ensuring older adults who may not be comfortable congregating due to COVID risks, or for personal reasons are less willing to meet their nutritional needs by eating at an Older Adult Center, have the option to take their meal home, a decision that ensures one’s nutritional needs can be met in the environment of one's choosing.

In addition to the aforementioned programmatic recommendations, LiveOn NY also offers the following budgetary recommendations, much of which were also emphasized in the aforementioned City Council Preliminary Budget Response:

First, recognizing the operation of Older Adults Centers would not be possible without the tireless work of human service professionals, we join our partners in calling for the City to Just Pay for all human services workers a liveable and equitable wage.

Despite their essential work throughout COVID-19, the wages of human services workers, the majority of whom are women and Black and brown individuals, are slated to remain stagnant at near poverty levels, as a result of government underfunding. This, in a City where costs are notoriously high. To address this crisis, the City must implement changes that address the inequitable pay of human services workers, including:

Establish, fund, and enforce an automatic annual cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) on all human services contracts.
Set a living wage floor of no less than $21 an hour for all human service workers.
Create, fund, and incorporate a comprehensive wage and benefit schedule for government contracted human services workers comparable to the salaries made by City and State employees in the same field.

Allocate an additional $7 million investment to make virtual programming and technology more accessible

While Older Adult Centers are operating at full capacity, for older adults, and particularly those who are homebound, virtual programming will continue to be an important tool to remain connected in one’s community into the future. This ability to remain connected virtually will undoubtedly save lives, given the acute health risks of social isolation among older adults. It is therefore critical that Centers have a strong technology infrastructure to further enable OACs and other DFTA programs to connect with older adults through virtual programming, during the pandemic and beyond. For example, this means making it easy for older adults to find programming that is right for them, by creating an accessible online database featuring the virtual programming offered by OACs.

LiveOn NY is appreciative of DFTA’s continued championing of virtual programming and seeks to support this technology focus by requesting an additional $7 million investment to expand DFTA virtual programming accessibility, through an online database, devices and connectivity. This technology investment would also create a new program to promote tech literacy among older adults by funding community-based organizations to offer this support.

Restore the $10.2 million cut to DFTA including a $1.3 million PEG to the Geriatric Mental Health program.

The budget cut to DFTA under the PEG puts a further strain on the future of aging services. The City should restore the $10.2 million PEG to DFTA's budget, including the $1.3 million PEG to the Geriatric Mental Health (DGMH) program that supports Older Adult Centers to provide critical mental health services to older adults. The cut to DGMH is particularly concerning, as LiveOn NY’s member organizations have raised mental health issues as one of their chief concerns coming out of the pandemic. As we look ahead, it's critical the City prioritizes the need for older adults to access mental health services at Older Adult Centers.

$12.7 million in additional funding to meet the home-delivered meal demand that will result from the termination of the GetFood Recovery Meals Program in June.

The traditional home-delivered meals system is a lifeline for homebound older New Yorkers, providing nutritious assistance and preventing social isolation. This program is critical to serving older adults who are unable to get to an Older Adult Center for their daily nutrition. At this time, the City must make long-term investments to ensure a seamless transition of clients from the Recovery Meals Program, envisioned as a temporary program and set to end at the close of the Fiscal Year, to traditional home-delivered meals, which already serves approximately 20,000 older New Yorkers. As the Recovery Meal program is set to end, many clients will continue to need nutritional support – support for which there is currently no funding allocated to provide.

This investment would include $9.7 million to support continued growth in demand for the HDM program, equating to funding to serve roughly 3,100 new clients at the $11.78 reimbursement rate, as a conservative estimate of the number of clients that might need meals beyond the Recovery Meal clients transition. Additionally, this would provide $3 million to support weekend and holiday home-delivered meals, which are not provided through current contracts, and did not receive the same investment to address reimbursement rate as weekday meals received.

DFTA must assess and invest in addressing the capital needs for van purchases and other infrastructure needs by HDM providers.

LiveOn NY recently informally surveyed providers and found an estimated 65 replacement or new vans are needed to support the home-delivered meal program. This in addition to consistently hearing of capacity concerns due to needs for larger kitchen spaces (some of which are used for both OAC and home-delivered meal services), new refrigerators, and other infrastructure investments. By working with providers to more formally survey and understand the needs, DFTA would be well positioned to make an investment that would put the wheels in motion towards expanded capacity for this mission driven system. Further, such an investment would recognize that the growing demand for home-delivered meals is unlikely to be an emergency situation, as demand has historically risen year-after-year, a fact mirrored by the rapidly expanding older adult demographic citywide.

Fund an additional $2.6 Million for Support our Seniors and continued full funding for all discretionary initiatives.

Many Older Adult Centers rely on discretionary funding including the Support our Seniors Initiative to ensure their communities can be served. Recognizing the importance of these discretionary initiatives, it’s critical the City fully funds all aging service discretionary initiatives.

LiveOn NY is also requesting an additional $2.6 million for the Support Our Senior Initiative that would provide an additional $50,000 per district on average to better support older New Yorkers, in particular for services or programs including transportation, social isolation, technology and more.

Thank you for the opportunity to testify.