Context
The city’s social services are funded and delivered program-by-program through uncoordinated independent organizations and City agencies. This leads to a siloed and fragmented service ecosystem filled with duplicative intakes and assessments for clients and lack of longitudinal information about clients for the agencies and providers who fund and deliver services. It is a system that makes it hard for vulnerable New Yorkers to address critical interconnected needs.
My team was asked to analyze the existing landscape of service coordination initiatives across the city and identify opportunities to develop citywide initiatives to support cross-agency service coordination and resource navigation.
My role
Aligning on cross-agency opportunity areas
I led a series of workshops for agency partners to surface current and past efforts at service coordination efforts at their agencies, factors that led to successful efforts, barriers that continue to get in the way, and define what successful outcomes of a city-wide service coordination initiative look like for each agency, its programs, and its clients.
Understanding the day-to-day
I set up and ran research with executives and staff at social service provider organizations across the city. I used these sessions to get a better understanding of what coordination looks like at the provider level, and to validate the opportunity areas and successful outcomes that we had defined with our agency partners.
Research revealed that coordination and follow-through on referrals rarely happens, resulting in clients with unmet needs falling through the cracks.
Creating a citywide framework
I used the input from our provider interviews to iterate our opportunity areas and created a framework to define the component parts that make up a successful service coordination initiative. Our team mapped existing service coordination initiatives against this framework to see where the gaps were, and identify areas that City Hall could support the agencies in their ongoing work.
Based on our framework, I created Opportunity Cards to prompt agency and provider staff to generate solutions for improved service coordination.
I worked with agencies to map potential solutions against feasibility and impact.
COVID-19 Pivot
The devastating impact of the pandemic on vulnerable New Yorkers brought a newfound sense of urgency to City Hall and city agencies to find better ways to understand residents’ unmet needs and efficiently connect them to available services across the landscape of city agencies. This moved our work front and center.
Proposing a Mayoral Initiative
I helped turn our work into a proposal for a mayoral initiative to support improved service coordination to streamline COVID recovery efforts. The proposal includes new staff roles and trainings dedicated to service navigation, referral management technologies, and cross-agency governance models to develop a connected and coordinated network of service providers in the City’s hardest hit communities.
The proposal is still finding its way through City Hall.