Maritza Rico testifies for New Destiny Housing on preserving FJCs
Rico describes New Destiny's housing work and NGBV Advisory Council membership, asking that gender-based violence retain dedicated senior leadership and that Family Justice Centers remain a front door. She also warns that NYCHA emergency housing vouchers funding runs out in November and some 2,000 households remain unmatched.
Thank you, Chair Farias and members of the Committee on Women and Gender Equity for the opportunity.
My name is Maritza Rico, and I am the Policy and Advocacy Manager at New Destiny Housing.
New Destiny provides permanent housing for survivors of domestic violence to break the cycle of abuse and homelessness.
We develop and operate supportive housing for survivors and their families, and we provide housing navigation and aftercare, helping survivors find an apartment and the services that keep them stable in it.
We are also a proud member of NGVV's Advisory Council.
I want to begin with what NGVB has meant for our work.
Our staff are co-located in family justice centers in all five boroughs, which are overseen by NGVB.
There, we connect survivors to housing resources every day.
The daily working relationship has made countless connections to housing possible for New Yorkers who had nowhere else to turn.
NGVB leadership has also been an invaluable partner in fighting for housing subsidies, flexible funds, and other resources survivors tell them they need the most.
We understand the goal of a more coordinated approach to community safety, and we want this restructuring to succeed.
Earlier this year, New Destiny joined our fellow advisory council members in writing to the mayor with our concerns, and we appreciate the administration's response,
including Deputy Mayor Francois'commitment to attend our quarterly meetings and the recognition that NGVB and its network of partners are a model for the Office of Community Safety overall.
We ask that this commitment extend to the design of the transition.
itself.
Two things matter most to us.
One, that gender-based violence work retains dedicated senior leadership with real standing at City Hall, someone whose top priority is the tens of thousands of New Yorkers who become
homeless each year because of abuse, and the thousands more who need services to survive and heal.
And two, that the Family Justice Centers and NGBB's role as a front door for survivors are preserved.
New York City has the best-in-class model with impressive quality, coordination, and breadth of trauma-informed services available to survivors and their families.
The administration's letter...
May I please wrap?
I have one more paragraph.
The administration's letter rightly acknowledged that more work remains at the intersection of gender-based violence and housing, and I want to close on an example of why we need this attention.
And I thank you and your staff, Dan in particular, for meeting with us about this.
NYCHA administers close to 4,800 emergency housing vouchers, including more than 1,000 survivor-led households, and the funding runs out in November.
City Hall and NYCHA have done an extraordinary job with limited resources to find options for households losing this federally funded voucher.
But about 2,000 households have not yet been matched to any alternatives, and time is running out.
We have been urging the city to use CityFEP as a solution of last resort, and that moment has arrived because survivors reach safety without passing through DHS shelter, some from HRA domestic violence shelters, others directly from fleeing their home.
and they are not eligible for city FEPS.
Inexplicably, eligibility requires a DHS shelter history that an HRA shelter stay does not satisfy.
DSS can fix this administratively by designating NYCHA EHV households as qualifying referrals under the existing category for preventing shelter entry.
We would welcome the chance to work through the details with DSS and with this committee.
Thank you again for the opportunity to testify.