I'm Matthew Phifer.
My role is Vice President of Education and Employment.
We have a strength based approach to youth development, starting with age two,
working up through age 24; a myriad of different programs serving about 4,000
young people a year in a multitude of ways.
Everything from enrichment supports to school-based support, community-based
afterschool programs, college access, socioemotional counseling, mental health
support, reentry issues, working with credible messaging around violence
mitigation and harm reduction, barrier reduction.
There's a lot on the education side, and the employment side is no less.
It feels good to do a meeting with a young
person remotely and all the implications of what we're doing and supporting.
But then again, some of the stuff that's
taking place in person is just a whole other level.
It's staff putting their health on the line.
Even though we have really codified
important practices regulated by CDC, OCFS, and DOH like, we're still in person,
we're still dealing with that reality, and it's no joke.
The best way to characterize it is like
our boss says, human services require human services, which is true.
You need humans in person.
So toeing that line is really rough.
I've got the largest staff in the agency.
My team in normal times is about 200.
I immediately started realizing, oh,
people are going to get laid off because we're going to lose funding or furloughed.
And then, oh, my division is going to be the one that takes the lumps here.
I had to lay off 132 people on Zoom, you
know, like the most impersonal gut-wrenching.
You know, it's like, hard not to be crying
in front of 100 plus people because I care about my teams.
And I had a young person who was in
college, we helped get into college for one of our programs.
He goes off of mute while I'm reading the
HR parting line, and he's just like, "Hey, we understand.
I understand.
I just want you to know we love Henry Street.
If there's anything we can do to continue to be a part of this, please let me know."
It was like the most gracious understanding.
Like, he didn't want me to feel bad and
here's somebody making 17 an hour in college.
It was just a really poignant and emotional time.
We've normalized crying. S
o, I'm the leadership person over our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion team.
Some of our team members, the Advocacy and
DEI team created a proposal around community safety and violence.
We want to analyze and audit our
organization and understand where we are working with the police, what we should be
doing, get community input, et cetera, and make cogent decisions in a really tactical
and strategic way amidst conversations of defund the police.
If you're just reading the headline,
you're not reading the subtext of like, it's not just defund the police.
It's like reallocate provide preventative
services and different things so that folks don't need to be incarcerated and
folks aren't doing things that are getting them arrested.
And we're actually taking action on this to really gauge what we should be doing
going forward. Let's think about this and let's involve community stakeholders and
professionals in assessing what we really think our mission should be going
forward in terms of our orientation towards law enforcement.
We're really thinking more and more about boots on the ground and what that looks
like in this new reality relative to everything.
And I think that's the best answer that we're considering going forward.