New York City Council
Committee on Aging, Chair, Council Member Chin
Committee on Economic Development, Chair, Council Member Vallone
September 20, 2021
Oversight - Home Delivered and Emergency Meal Services for Seniors through DFTA’s HDM Program and GetFoodNYC
Thank you for the opportunity to testify.
LiveOn NY’s members include more than 100 community-based nonprofits that provide core services which allow all New Yorkers to thrive in our communities as we age, including senior centers, home‐delivered meals, affordable senior housing, elder abuse prevention, caregiver support, NORCs, and case management. With our members, we work to make New York a better place to age.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, food insecurity was deeply exacerbated by issues not only economic, but related to access as well, as older adults were advised to “stay home” to mitigate risk of contracting the virus. Senior Centers, which offer nutritious meals to older adults, were forced to close their doors virtually overnight and even today these spaces operate with significant capacity reductions. Recognizing that many individuals relied on Senior Center meals for more than half of their daily nutritional intake, in the Spring of 2020, an emergency home-delivered meal program was instituted, which became known as GetFood. The City’s emergency GetFood program scaled rapidly to meet the growing need for nutritional assistance yet represented a temporary solution to a more systemic hunger problem.
Today, that very program, GetFood, which laudably worked to keep thousands of New Yorkers fed throughout the pandemic, is poised to come to a close with preparations underway for clients to transition to alternative or existing meal programs by October 15th. For the more than 16,000 older adults still receiving meals through GetFood as of August, the success of this transition will be critical to their ability to remain nourished.
LiveOn NY supports the City’s overarching goal to ensure a seamless transition of clients to existing meal systems without interruption of ensured nourishment. We also recognize that transitioning such a large number of meal recipients from the GetFood program to the traditional home-delivered meal program creates questions of immediate capacity of the current HDM providers. To the extent that capacity to immediately absorb a potential apex of 16,000 clients is unfeasible within a particular catchment area, we recognize that short-term subcontracting of meals might yield the desired continuity of service.
However, it is critical that the City goes beyond ensuring continuity of service through this short-term transition of GetFood contracts, to instead executing long-term investments aimed at rooting out older adult hunger more holistically. Reaching this goal cannot be done without making immediate and significant investments in the non-profit home-delivered meal system that is best positioned to make meaningful strides towards this goal.
To execute this goal, LiveOn NY recommends the following:
Within the November plan, the Administration must invest $16.6 million to serve existing clients within the traditional home-delivered meal program. This investment will allow the Department for the Aging to increase the reimbursement rate to reflect the rising cost of raw food, changes in the labor market, and heightened costs of insurance, gas, and packaging. Currently, the reimbursement rate for home-delivered meals is capped at $9.58 cents, an arbitrary rate irreflective of the empirically verified average reimbursement rate for urban areas of $11.78 — as found by Mathematica in 2015. The current rate creates real challenges, leaving barely enough for provider’s to offer delivery drivers minimum wage, competing for the same market as Uber which, according to Glassdoor, pays roughly $48,685 annually for similar work. The effect? Only a quick search on Indeed will bring you 18 ads for delivery drivers within New York City’s home-delivered meal system -- that means many of LiveOn NY’s members are spending time unsuccessfully attempting to hire home-delivered meal drivers due to low wages set by government contracts. Those 18 current vacancies represent 18 meal routes that somehow still need to be staffed, and exist at a time when these contracts are about to absorb upwards of 16,000 additional clients. Quite simply, not investing in this system is a recipe for disaster.
In addition, the Administration must invest the required funding to the GetFood clients transitioning to the home-delivered meal contracts, at the higher rate. Both this funding and the requested $16.6 million in funding for existing HDM clients should be allocated not only through June 30th of FY22, but in the outyears as well, as it is reality that an individual who is hungry on June 30th, will be hungry on July 1st as well.
Within the November plan, the Administration must make a $3.6 million capital investment in van purchases by traditional HDM providers contracting with the Department for the Aging. Such an investment would, quite literally, put the wheels in motion towards expanded capacity for this mission driven system to serve GetFood clients that will continue to require meal delivery services long term. Further, such an investment would recognize that the expanded demand for home-delivered meals is unlikely to be a short-term, emergency situation, as demand for home-delivered meals has historically risen year-after-year, a fact mirrored by the rapidly expanding older adult demographic citywide. Appendix A offers cost-estimates supporting this request.
Expand investments in case management to ensure all clients can be screened for case management eligibility and receive this critical service should they be eligible. Further, exacerbated by the long-term health impacts of isolation and other stressors experienced over the past year and a half, it is likely that some if not many of the 16,000 meal recipients may require some level of case management to remain independent and safe in their communities. This demand comes on top of consistent increases in demand for case management that have historically led to waiting lists for case managers, requiring additional funding, each year.
Beyond this, the City must begin including COLAs and inflation factors into all City human services contracts. Without this, the wages of workers under these contracts, the majority of whom are women and Black and brown individuals, are slated to remain stagnant in a City where the cost of living is notoriously high. The decision to actively avoid building in the true costs of a core function of City government - ensuring the provision of services for those most in need - creates inaccurate outyear budget projections irreflective of what it will actually take to do business, and all but ensures wage stagnation for this Black and brown workforce.
To close, I would like to go beyond the statistics and the data to highlight the point of all of this work: the people, each with their own story, family, history, and uniqueness all their own. During the pandemic, we heard from one provider, JASA, about their rushing to deliver an emergency food box to an older client who reached out with only about “two potatoes” left in the house. Similarly gut wrenching, was the story of an older adult who had been surviving on cat food after fear and fatigue left her unable to get groceries; in this instance, our member, Stanley Isaacs Neighborhood Center stepped in to ensure she had the food she needed. This is the need we are confronting and the constituents who we put at risk when underfunding their very source of respite.
The recommendations above are not “nice to have” solutions to hypothetical issues, they are the reality of what New York City needs to commit to in order to ensure that no individual opens an empty cupboard in the richest City in the world.
Thank you for the opportunity to testify.