Molly Krakowski testifies for JASA on implementation priorities
Molly Krakowski of JASA, serving 40,000 older adults, supports expanding SCRIE/DRIE eligibility and urges robust multilingual outreach, requiring housing providers to post eligibility information, and proactively reaching out to those previously denied for exceeding $50,000 income.
Good afternoon.
Chairs Schwing, Lee, and Hanif, and your respective committees, thank you so much for hosting today's hearing.
My name is Molly Krakowski.
I'm Senior Director of Government Affairs at JASA, and very happy to be here today.
JASA is one of New York City's largest and most trusted agencies serving older adults for nearly 60 years.
We provide comprehensive network of services to more than 40,000 older adults across New York City.
Housing stability is essential to that mission and to our mission.
And older adults we serve are facing rising rents, property taxes, food costs, utilities, and other expenses, often on very limited incomes.
Being able to remain in their homes, in the community, can make the big difference between continuing safely and independently or facing displacement.
Jess is very pleased to see the expansion of the income eligibility for SCRI and DREA, and we support many of the proposals before the committee today and submitted written testimony.
But we wanted to highlight just a few of the priorities for implementation.
First, expanded eligibility will only help if people know about it, and I think we heard plenty today.
The city needs to make a robust multilingual outreach central to implementation.
It's not enough to just use the older adult centers and community-based organizations, but housing providers, social service agencies, other trusted sources, landlords, property managers should also be able to do that.
required to post information about the new eligibility.
We're especially encouraged the Department of Finance is going to, we would especially encourage the Department of Finance to proactively reach out to people who were previously denied because their income exceeded the $50,000 threshold.
There are people in the city that they know about who may already be qualifying and they should not have to navigate the process to find out on their own.
We also want to emphasize that even an older adult who's earning $75,000 may still face significant financial pressure in New York City, so we encourage the city
to continue looking at the needs of older adults and people with disabilities who remain just above those eligibility thresholds.
And I will submit written testimony so you can hear more, but we've heard a lot today.
Thank you.