Improving the Delivery of Essential Services to NYC Families
Testimony & Public Comments
March 17, 2026
On Tuesday, March 17, Associate Executive Director of Data and Policy Alice Bufkin, Senior Policy Associate Caitlyn Passaretti, and Policy Associate Jenny Veloz co-submitted testimony on behalf of CCC for a FY 2027 Preliminary City Budget Hearing on General Welfare. The testimony need for city leaders to include investments in the City Budget that support children and families across housing and homelessness, food security, child welfare and youth justice. CCC’s recommendations prioritize the well-being of NYC’s children by decreasing time spent in homeless shelters, increasing access to stable housing, combating food insecurity, and supporting services that protect communities, families, and youth.
Read the testimony below.
Testimony of Alice Bufkin, Caitlyn Passaretti, and Jenny Veloz
Citizens’ Committee for Children of New York
Submitted to the New York City Council on the FY27 Preliminary Budget Hearing General Welfare
March 17, 2026
For over 80 years, Citizens’ Committee for Children of New York (CCC) has been an independent voice for children advancing child and family well-being through research, advocacy, and civic engagement. With deep expertise in data, policy and child-serving systems, CCC champions proven solutions and mobilizes allies to secure reforms that improve child outcomes and promote equity. CCC drives systemic change to ensure every child is healthy, housed, educated, and safe.
Thank you, Chair Hudson and members of the City Council General Welfare Committee, for holding today’s important hearing on the Mayor’s FY27 Preliminary Budget. Below we uplift recommendations for how to improve the delivery of essential services for NYC families and children.
Address Family Homelessness
The current housing and shelter crisis calls for bold actions and enhanced funding to reduce housing instability for families with children. The most recent CCC’s Keeping Track of New York City’s Children data book revealed that in 2024, 29% of NYC renters pay at least half of their income towards rent, and nearly one in three renter households with children are living in overcrowded conditions. Additionally, there were more than 17,000 residential evictions in 2025, and nearly 34,000 children reside in the NYC shelter system.[i]
CCC is co-convener of the Family Homeless Coalition (FHC), a coalition comprised of 20 organizations representing service and housing providers, child advocacy organizations, and people with lived experience of housing instability and homelessness. We are united by the goal of preventing family homelessness, improving the well-being of children and families in shelter, and supporting the long-term stability of families with children who leave shelter. CCC supports FHC’s 2026 Policy Priorities. Below we uplift a number of the critical investments and policy changes necessary to prevent homelessness and support families struggling with housing instability.
Reform CityFHEPS Administration
The City Fighting Homelessness and Eviction Prevention Supplement (CityFHEPS) is a critical rental assistance program that reduces and prevents homelessness in New York City. Since 2018, it has helped tens of thousands of individuals and families find and maintain housing. As vital as this tool has been for New Yorkers, significant administrative burdens create persistent barriers including time-consuming and burdensome application and approval processes . To address these barriers, CCC and FHC recommend the following reforms to the administration of CityFHEPS.
Recommendations:
- Streamline the Voucher Process: Certify income eligibility for CityFHEPS upfront at the shopping letter stage and allow eligibility for a year before a new shopping letter or a rebudgeting process is required, unless there’s substantial change in income or at the voucher holder’s request. Delegate voucher approval authority to community-based organizations (CBO) to alleviate burden for limited DSS staff. Allow CBO partners access to all relevant systems, such as Welfare Management System, to expedite the process on behalf of clients.
- Address Inspection Rules: Address inspection rules that require a unit from DHS to inspect certain units and delegate authority to inspect all units to community-based partners that currently handle voucher inspections for all other units.
- Expand and Enhance Data Transparency: Expand and enhance existing CityFHEPS data transparency requirements to more effectively identify solutions to challenges faced by voucher holders during processing and utilization of vouchers.
Restore Homebase to the Core of What it Does Well
Since the pandemic, Homebase providers have been saddled with huge administrative and capacity burden without necessary adjustments in funding and staffing levels to match the current demands of New Yorkers facing housing instability and the expanded scope of services expected from the City. As a result, wait times have increased for critical Homebase services. A shift in scope is needed to enable Homebase staff to focus on outreach and offering holistic support. To ensure that Homebase can return to providing its core services effectively and efficiently, CCC and FHC recommend the following:
Recommendations
- Ensure sufficient resources: The tremendous increase in caseload and ever-expanding set of responsibilities, paired with lack of adequate funding, have limited Homebase providers’ ability to provide its critical services including eviction prevention, emergency rental assistance and benefits access. Homebase funding must be increased.
- Ensure sufficient staffing: Sufficiently staff HRA centers and training centers staff to minimize wait times and churning of New Yorkers at HRA Benefits Access Centers who are at risk of losing housing or lack public benefits or SNAP.
- Dedicate Funding for Rental Assistance: Create a separate RFP with dedicated funding for rental assistance processing to reduce strain on Homebase providers and expedite processing, ensuring families facing housing instability can access resources more easily.
- Dedicate Funding for Aftercare Services: Create a separate RFP with dedicated funding for aftercare services to ensure organizations can properly dedicate staff and tailored services, including support for recertification and income supports to resolve issues earlier.
Shelter Intake Reform
For families in need of family shelter, the intake process is overly burdensome and designed to produce overly high numbers of initial denials. Processes that are meant to confirm families’ need for shelter have too many barriers, are often uprooting, and needlessly lengthen families’ time spent in housing insecurity.
Recommendations:
Application Process Reform: The application process to prove homelessness takes 62 days on average. Methods of proving homelessness are difficult to achieve, and the reapplication process can be uprooting.
- Change the housing history requirement from 2 years to 1 year.
- Allow families to reapply from their current temporary shelter placement, holding their bed/room placement as their reapplication is processed.
- Allow reapplications over the phone.
- After 1 eligibility denial, allow a self-attestation to housing history.
Placements Near Schooling: Nearly 40% of families in shelter continue to be placed in a different borough from where their youngest child goes to school disrupting children’s education.
- Ensure that shelter placements for families with children in school are within the same community school district or the same borough of the school of the youngest child.
- PATH staff should ask parent(s) if they are interested in a shelter transfer to be closer to their child’s school and give written information on how to request a school-related shelter transfer.
- Ensure that a family’s shelter placement request is reviewed within 7 days of the initial placement and again at 30 days. If a closer placement is available, shelter transfer should be offered as soon as possible.
Combat Food Insecurity
Last April, the State Comptroller’s office released a report stating that while one in nine households in New York State experienced food insecurity between 2020-2022, the majority of those households lived in New York City.[ii] The report also noted that the Bronx experienced the highest percentage of food insecurity (20.2%). As a result, more families are turning to food pantries and banks to help alleviate food insecurity.
It is imperative that New York City continue to invest and fund resources that are vital to the health and well-being of children and families, where 33% of SNAP-enrolled households have children.[iii] We must meet current needs and prepare for the increased demand for emergency food that will occur due to federal actions that weaken SNAP, freeze funding for pantries and farmers, and potentially raise food prices.
We applaud the inclusion of $53.6 million baseline funding for Community Food Connection (CFC) in the FY27 Preliminary Budget. Food pantries are the last line of defense against hunger for so many, yet these essential services are being asked to do more with less. While this funding constitutes a substantial investment in CFC, more is needed to provide critical support for communities facing worsening affordability and food insecurity crises.
As a member of the NYC Food Policy Alliance, a network of 60+ food system stakeholders that advocate for public policies and funding that ensure equitable access to a healthy, sustainable food system, CCC recommends the following investments be included in the FY27 Adopted Budget:
- Increase and baseline funding for the Community Food Connections (CFC) program to $100 million to meet the rising demand for food assistance (including enhanced access to fresh food) across New York City, especially in the wake of unprecedented federal cuts to nutrition programs.
- Protect food benefits and make healthy food affordable for all New Yorkers by increasing investment in universal, low-barrier food affordability strategies by advocating for necessary city-level investment to support SNAP administration and HRA workforce to protect effective access to SNAP, including:
- Increase baseline funding for Health Bucks from $500,000 to $700,000 to expand access to fresh, healthy food for low-income New Yorkers and support local farmers.
- Maintain $3.1 million for Get the Good Stuff programs
CCC also supports the continuation of funding for the following City Council Initiatives:
- $8.26 million for Food Pantries Initiatives
- $1.5 million for Food Access and Benefits Initiatives
- $2.134 million for the Access to Healthy Food and Nutritional Education Initiative
Enhance Services for Systems-Involved Youth and Families
Restore Alternatives to Incarceration (ATI) and Supportive Programming for Youth and Young Adults
Extensive research demonstrates the positive impacts of Alternatives to Incarceration (ATI) and reentry programs, including lowering recidivism and crime.[iv] Moreover, studies estimate between $3.46-$5.54 in returns for every dollar invested in ATI programs in addition to reduced costs for the criminal justice system and better community health outcomes.[v]
Despite the well-established benefits of these programs, since 2023, the City Administration has cut millions from probation programs proven to support re-entry by connecting young people to mentorship and services. Failing to provide robust reentry services or supportive probation programs will harm youth and is counterproductive to building safe communities.
CCC supports the recommendations of the New York City Youth Justice Coalition, including the following investments and restorations in the FY27 Budget:
- Restore and invest $4.1 million for the IMPACT program
- Restore and baseline $5 million for the NextSTEPs program
- Invest $40 million for the Community Justice Reentry Network
- Baseline $2.4 million with a cost-of-living adjustment to each new year of funding for the Mentoring and Advocacy Program (MAAP)
- Invest $30 million for NYC’s Assertive Community Engagement and Success (ACES) program to ensure that all young people with risk factors have access to this kind of prevention model
- Maintain current funding for Family Court Alternative to Detention Programs to ensure young people and their families are successfully supported in the community.
- Expand Parent Support Services and create an open door policy for Family Support Services for youth as a prevention intervention
- Invest $8.1 million for the Anti-Gun Violence Employment Program
- Invest $8.5 million to reinstate, expand and fully fund YES services with original work scope as an effective impactful preventive tool
- Invest $59.1 million for ATLAS funding
- Invest $1.6 billion to raise the Cost-Per-Participant funding for youth in detention in COMPASS programming
- Invest $3.2 million for NeON program funding
- Invest $3.7 million for the WorksPlus Program
- Restore and baseline $130,000 for the Adolescent Portable Therapy
Invest in Child Welfare Primary Prevention and Workforce Stability
Fundamental to preventing child welfare involvement is investing in the primary prevention supports families need to be safe and secure, including housing, child care, healthy food, and economic supports.
At the same time, the prevention workforce currently in place to support families is in crisis. In 2025, CCC and the Council of Family and Child Caring Agencies (COFCCA) surveyed prevention services providers to better understand the challenges facing families involved in the child welfare system and providers’ ability to serve them. Our results echoed the need for upstream prevention and workforce stabilization.
To help ensure that prevention services can best serve children and families, we recommend the following:
- Enhance child welfare prevention contract flexibility to allow providers the ability to aptly respond to different family circumstances
- Invest in salary increases, scholarships and tuition assistance to help agencies sustain a highly trained and credentialed child welfare workforce.
- Ensure that child welfare staff are paid completive salaries and agencies are paid the true cost of services on prevention contracts.
- Reform the current NYC procurement system to ensure timely payments to contracted agencies.
Thank you for your time and consideration of these recommendations to support New York’s children and families.
