Equitable Pathways to Healing: How Procurement Practices can Transform New York City’s Responses to Survivors
Introduction: Budget Equity for Crime Survivors
In 2020, the United States saw an upwelling of public attention and collective outrage regarding the issue of anti-Black racism and police violence in the aftermath of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and others. That attention and outrage reinvigorated long-standing conversations regarding the massive portion of budgets, including city budgets, that are dedicated to policing. Questions arose about what these budgets reveal about government’s priorities and how those may differ from various communities' priorities. Many advocates and community leaders have insisted on a redistribution of funds from law enforcement to other critical social supports that are both valuable in their own right and can be critical to the production of public safety.
As a coalition dedicated to crime survivors, we believe the needs of survivors and survivors of color in particular should be centrally considered in these pressing moral questions about fiscal priorities. To that end, we are calling for equity in New York City’s procurement practices to reshape the City’s commitment to survivors’ wellbeing.
The Downstate Coalition for Crime Victims (Downstate) is a coalition of service providers, victims’ advocates, survivors, community-based programs, government agencies, and elected officials in the five boroughs of New York, Nassau, Rockland, Suffolk, and Westchester counties. We are committed to improving the lives of crime victims and their communities through direct services, legislative advocacy, and a commitment to social justice. Many of us are survivors ourselves, and survivors are all of our constituents.
As service providers and advocates dedicated to helping secure safety, healing, and justice for all victims of crime, Downstate aims to ensure all survivors get what they need and deserve when they have been harmed. Central to the project of meeting these needs is the availability of a range of services in the right places to ensure all survivors have equitable access to healing and recovery and that is only possible if these groups are adequately resourced. These include:
● High-quality, comprehensive, trauma-informed, culturally-competent, language-accessible services to help survivors and their families heal;
● Programs that help secure access to safe, temporary, transitional, and permanent housing and ones that create opportunities for economic empowerment and self-sufficiency, including meaningful employment;
● Restorative justice programs that give survivors the opportunity to address the impacts of the crime on their lives and shape a course of accountability for the person who harmed them.
These needs are not all met by the range of programs New York City currently funds. Instead, too often, New York City’s current approaches to procurement favor large providers at the expense of smaller grassroots groups. This is in part a problem because smaller groups cannot typically compete given the current metrics used to assess applicants for funding. But more so, the current structure, too scarce in resources for survivors, treats the choice between larger, better-resourced providers and grassroots ones as a zero sum game when the reality is both are needed, and a victim-centered budget would invest at scale in both. We believe that survivors deserve the opportunity to obtain help and healing from the providers that feel right for them. To that end, all survivor service organizations, both large and small, should be equitably resourced to ensure that they are accessible to survivors and positioned to support their healing.
The Current City Procurement Process: Equity Challenges and Opportunities
There are three key challenges preventing more equitable support for NYC survivors: City funded services are disproportionately criminal justice aligned; there is insufficient support for grassroots and people of color-led services; and the procurement system’s design enables the continuation of inequities, despite any good intentions.
Inequitable investment in Criminal Justice Aligned Providers: One critical equity challenge arises from the reality that the victim service programs supported by the city are disproportionately adjacent to the criminal justice system. While these system-adjacent programs can be critical access points and right for many victims, we know that a society that delivers on its promise to help all survivors heal and feel safe cannot rely exclusively on the criminal justice system as the entry point to doing so. Not all victims trust that system or are able to engage in it to get what they want and need. Biases based in race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, immigration status, HIV status, language, ability, and criminal history should not, but do, affect how people and systems respond to survivors of harm. In short, while we know many victims have success in and with the system, we know that there are many more who do not. Our duty is to support these survivors as well. When these system-aligned supports are prioritized over others with different access points, the doors to needed services are inherently closed to many.
Insufficient Investment in Grassroots and People of Color-Led Providers: Undoubtedly, larger organizations have their advantages: they draw on decades of experience and offer multifaceted critical services in a single place. They also can be widely accessible and visible to survivors who do not know where to look for help. Additionally, they can sometimes better meet the needs for survivors for whom seeking services outside their communities is preferable for reasons of privacy or safety. But despite their assets, these larger and better-resourced victim service providers also have their limitations. They are rarely led by members of the communities they serve, even if some of their staff belong to those communities, and there is often a distance between them and the people who live in these communities. Some of that distance is simply a feature of geography, but other dimensions are more significant than that. Different kinds of distance exist based on proximity to various systems of oppression - systems of oppression based on ideologies of race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, ability, and place of origin.
Healing is intimate and inherently connected to lived experiences: survivors often want to heal where they are with people who meaningfully understand their experiences and identity. We cannot ignore how much the daily experiences of navigating bias and oppression shapes the lived experiences of survivors and their understanding of what they need to be safe. Providers who have experiential knowledge of navigating systems while surviving violence are able to offer richer support. An equity-based approach demands that we think more expansively and continually work to broaden the options available to survivors. We cannot be satisfied focusing primarily on the survivors that benefit from the traditional systems and supports. We must do so much more to consider the survivors who are often alienated or invisibilized, many of whom will be among the central beneficiaries of expanded options: survivors with criminal records, survivors who particpate in sex work, survivors who are boys and men, survivors who are queer, survivors who are trans, survivors who are undocumented, survivors who are disabled. An equity-based approach invites us to center those individuals who are most on the margins of the survivor community and anti-violence conversations.
A Procurement System that Facilitates Inequities: One central barrier to the appropriate direction of resources to smaller local organizations is New York City’s approach to procurement. The requirements and measures that determine which agencies are funded and at what level (including, for example, the prioritization of organizational infrastructure over demonstrated durable connection to community) consistently and disproportionately favor larger and better-resourced providers over smaller grassroots groups. This distortion of the distribution of the city’s resources is not race neutral: the vast majority of the groups whose work is structurally undervalued by existing procurement structures are led by Black people and other people of color. And many of these groups are precisely the ones that Black survivors and other survivors of color need in order to heal.
The good news is community-based healing supports exist. Across the city, individuals and smaller nonprofits have developed and are implementing culturally rooted responses to trauma and harm that transform survivors’ lives. These interventions are essential to the health and wellbeing of New YorkCity, but they are rarely funded by it.
Downstate’s Budget and Procurement Equity Recommendations
To address the above inequities, Downstate recommends both a substantial expansion of critical resources to services for all survivors and a transformation in the way that City funding opportunities are publicized, how funding proposals are structured and reviewed, how selected grantees are notified and engaged, how funded work is evaluated, and how City-funded contracts are managed.
To do this, the City should take the following actions:
● Given the severe economic impact COVID-19 has had on NYC survivors and their communities, allocate more funds for anti-violence, healing, and safety net supports, with a focus on the most impacted communities. These investments for survivors must be available to all survivors, regardless of gender identity, immigration status, or criminal justice involvement.
● Call on the City Council to allocate more discretionary funds to the Domestic Violence and Empowerment (DoVE) Initiative and increase public information about how to apply for DoVE funding.
● More widely publicize funding opportunities with the intention of reaching smaller, grassroots anti-violence community-based organizations (CBOs). The City should consider advertising with signs hung at local playgrounds, bus shelters, NYC LINK kiosks, etc. and providing RFP information to 311, allowing callers to learn about funding by making a simple phone call.
● In the review of applications, use a point system to review each application that not only considers the strength and feasibility of the proposed programming but one that gives additional points to small, grassroots organizations that are run directly by survivors and/or other people from vulnerable populations. Additionally, the City should offer more time to smaller organizations to complete applications. For small CBOs, short time frames for applications means making choices that put the quality of service in peril. Often the person writing the grants is the person also providing clinical supervision, programmatic support, etc. An equitable approach would keep those limitations in mind and offer application deadlines commensurate with organizational need.
● Make validated evaluation tools publicly available to all grantees. The City should consider using a portion of all grant funds to hire a seasoned program evaluator who will be employed by the City. This evaluator would work with all anti-DV CBOs who receive City funding to actively coach and mentor them through a meaningful and program-specific impact and outcome evaluation of their City-funded work. This evaluator would regularly convene these CBOs to create opportunities for cross-programmatic evaluation.
● Monitor all City contracts using “restorative contract management” – an approach to contract management that acknowledges the stark power imbalance that exists between the City contracting agency and the CBO, is heavily relational, amplifies the expertise of staff at anti-DV CBOs, incorporates a process of building a collectively determined set of shared values held by both the City contracting agency and the CBO, and avoids heavy City surveillance without sacrificing true, non-punitive accountability.
● Seek out more private funding to create additional opportunities for public/private partnerships and/or release more Request for Proposals (RFPs) that require grantees/awardees to match City funds with private dollars.
Conclusion
We know that government institutions are slow to change, but not immovable. The people that make up the government can develop more equitable processes and systems: one salient example of the City’s attempt at social equity is the Safe in the City program, a citywide initiative to reduce gun violence that funds community leaders and organizations. A federal level example of successful inclusion and equity is the Section 8(a) Business Certification Program for the economically disadvantaged, which institutionalized social equity in government procurement of goods and services. What we have learned from these successful government initiatives is that it can be done. What we need is more.
Ultimately, we know that the communities that rose up this summer against racism are the homes to so many survivors. Survivors are intrinsic parts of so many NYC communities pushing for equitable and sustained change. We must honor and stand in solidarity with those visions for racial justice and resource equity.
As advocates of the survivor community, we know that budgets are powerful tools to provide life-affirming supports for residents, but those supports must be distributed in a way that people can get what they need, when they need it, where they are. The City’s current procurement system does not allow for that, and our survivor community suffers as a result. We believe that the recommended measures will increase social and racial equity in the City’s procurement process so that all survivors can be reached, helped, and healed within their own communities.