CASE STUDY
Strengthening Public and Human Servcies
LOCATION
New York, NY
ISSUE
Promoting Opportunity
ACTIVE
2024-present
Using data and community insights, we’re working to better understand trends in the human and public services fields, and how its processes, workforce, and the communities they serve can be
supported to reach their fullest potential.
Challenge:
One of the most basic responsibilities of state and local governments is making sure its communities have access to the services, programs, and care they need to thrive. In New York, hundreds of thousands of people rely on these public services, which provide a foundation that strengthens the community as a whole.
This means shelters for homelessness prevention, services for older adults, employment services for young adults, substance use and mental health treatment, reentry programs for people returning from incarceration, resources for survivors of violence, home healthcare, and much more. And with the lasting socioeconomic impacts of COVID-19, an aging population, and other factors growing the need for these programs, government agencies are increasingly relying on an ecosystem of community-based organizations and other nonprofits to ensure communities are supported. In New York City alone, state and local agencies paid nearly $9 billion a year to these public services.
Government agencies are increasingly relying on an ecosystem of community-based organizations and other nonprofits to ensure communities are supported. In New York City alone, state and local agencies paid nearly $9 billion a year to these public services.
This need has turned human services-related industries into some of the fastest growing in the state. In New York, employment in the sector has grown 89 percent since 2000, from 7 percent of all private employment to 12 percent in 2023. However, a number of challenges and inequities within these industries are being exacerbated by this growth, with wages in the sector not only remaining stagnant, but often paying below cost of living wages for many roles. Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) people and people with lived experience often bear the brunt of this, as well as are underrepresented in higher-paying or leadership-level positions in the “helping professions,” including the mental health field. People with lived experience, especially those who are formerly incarcerated, often pursue careers in the helping professions (i.e., social work, counseling, or reentry services) to help others who are justice-impacted. However, they face additional and unique obstacles in entering and advancing the field. This lack of representation greatly impacts outcomes for the communities they are meant to serve, as well as opportunities for large swaths of workers—and the quality and amount of care available overall.
Approach:
As part of our mission to support governments and other public institutions in effectively serving their communities, CUNY ISLG sought to better understand trends in the human-services sector, especially the ones administered through state and local government funds. We found there was limited knowledge on this intersection; notably, who provides these services, what challenges they face, and how this impacts service provision. Without these answers, it’s next to impossible for policymakers and other leaders to rethink how these systems work to make them more effective, efficient, and sustainable for all.
As part of our mission to support governments and other public institutions in effectively serving their communities, CUNY ISLG sought to better understand trends in the human-services sector, especially the ones administered through state and local government funds.
CUNY ISLG researchers and policy experts are digging into these questions from different angles. From one front, we’ve been analyzing the experiences of people who work in the mental health fields, especially in the nonprofit settings that serve the most vulnerable and historically marginalized populations. This work endeavors to understand the barriers to becoming a helping professional generally and in particular for BIPOC persons, the challenges faced while working and advancing in those fields, and the impact that has on retention and service provision as a whole.
On a more macro level, we’re working with nonprofit leaders in New York to better understand the breadth of the state’s human services landscape and the prevailing wages of those nonprofit employees that provide human services contracted by the State. This is in an effort to quantify the need for investment in the human services workforce and measure the benefits of paying these staff a wage that accounts for the true cost of living.
Progress:
In spring 2024, we published “I Want to Be the Help I Never Received”: Barriers to BIPOC Representation in the Helping Professions & Recommendations to Address Them, a report that synthesized a literature review and an extensive focus group effort on the challenges that staff, particularly BIPOC, and people with lived experience (i.e., survivors of DV, justice-impacted persons, etc) face in working in the helping professions.
Using this report as a roadmap for going forward, CUNY ISLG seeks to continue this work. With all that has been done in the past decade toward righting inequities in the helping professions, the time is ripe to take a meaningful, data-driven approach to supporting BIPOC people and people with lived experience in preparing for, entering, and advancing in these fields.
In spring 2025, we published Critical Services, High Growth, Low Wages: Employment and Wage Trends Across New York’s Human Services Workforce. Published with support from a coalition of nonprofit leaders and staff, the report offers two analyses: the wage-trend analysis allows the field to better comprehend the breadth of the State’s human services landscape and explore whether human services workers experienced real wage gains over time. A second analysis then measured the gap between human services wages and the cost of living in New York.
Upcoming related work will provide deeper insight into how increasing wages for the human services workforce would impact individuals, their communities, and government—that is, comparing the cost of increasing wages against savings to government, and the benefits accrued to individuals and their communities because of higher incomes. Stay tuned for these and other analyses on how New York and other states can better support the people and services that keep our communities running.
Contact Policy Program Director Alison Diéguez at alison.dieguez@cuny.edu or Associate Research Director Stephanie Rosoff at stephanie.rosoff@islg.cuny.edu, for more information
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