Leading University Settlement through the moment

This spring, City & State named University Settlement CEO Melissa Aase to its third annual list of Nonprofit Trailblazers, recognizing her as a leader who has dedicated her career to making New York a better, safer place to live, commending her for over three decades of service at University Settlement. As executive director and CEO, Melissa has grown the agency’s annual budget from $25 million to $60 million while deepening its impact in neighborhoods across Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. This has contributed to, among other things, the growth of University Settlement’s mental health programs by more than 700%. 

New York Nonprofit Media caught up with Melissa about how she is leading through the current moment. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.  

I understand that you joined in 1992 as a social work student doing welfare rights organizing; became a case manager and supervisor for youth development, employment, and homelessness prevention programs; and then executive director and CEO. Wow! What an amazing commitment to this organization and this work.  

Before we get into it, I’d love to learn more about what initially drew you to the field of social work, and to University Settlement specifically? 

In college and immediately after college, I had some early experiences volunteering, working with people who were experiencing homelessness.  

Those experiences introduced me to the impact of poverty on people in my communities. And I wanted to find ways to respond to that in a positive way, and change it. I was very motivated by the opportunity to be part of a community that was working according to principles of social justice.  

When I was starting my career at University Settlement, I was very impressed by my wildly creative supervisor and team I was a part of, who always celebrated the strengths of the people who were coming to our programs.   

It became clear to me that it would be possible here to connect the important micro practice of human-to-human support with the macro practice of organizing and understanding structures of inequity that led people to need support.  

What previous experiences are you drawing on at this time?  

I’m thinking a lot about how, when the people who founded University Settlement and our peer organizations were starting out, there was no social safety net to speak of. The systems of support and care that are now being torn apart and cut to the bone had to be built from scratch by the people who came before us in this work. They were starting from zero, but when the time comes for us to build back, we won’t be. We’ve learned a lot about the kinds of support that are holistic and human-centered, the kinds of care that really make a difference and help our neighbors move forward according to their own plans for themselves and their families. There’s a lot of work and persuasion and coalition-building to be done, but there are also a lot of existing connections and knowledge that we can reactivate. 

And I’m also reflecting on all the things our organization and our sector have learned over the last 30 years when it comes to disaster response. And make no mistake, what we are facing now is a disaster, among the gravest we’ve seen. 

I’m looking back to things like the era of “Welfare Reform” in the 1990s. In that moment we learned that making it harder for people to access benefits is not an effective way to make these programs more efficient, and we also learned strategies for helping our neighbors keep their benefits while taking meaningful steps to move out of poverty, through education from early childhood on, through health and housing stability, through avoiding violence and the justice system, and through gaining access to work.  

I’m thinking about our experiences after 9/11 and Superstorm Sandy, when our neighborhoods were hit really hard, and we saw again how disasters have disproportionate impacts on marginalized communities, and how we have to be organized and working in coalition with people and organizations who share our values and goals, so we’re being very strategic about ensuring that resources are going to the places where they’re needed most, and not duplicating efforts.  

And of course, our recent experiences of disaster response are top-of-mind, including COVID and the way our federal, state and city governments mismanaged their response to the arrival of asylum-seekers in 2022 and 2023. We learned through mutual aid efforts how our communities are strong and will help feed and clothe one another. And we also observed how important it is for our local governments to stand up for New Yorkers’ values, and how vital it is for our city to have strong, coordinated partnerships with its nonprofit sector to avoid waste, chaos, and harm.  

I’m also really drawing strength from the simple fact of our community’s existence, and our core values: that every person has strength and dignity, and is necessary, and that every person has a responsibility to their neighbor. At University Settlement we have more than 700 employees and thousands of supporters, and tens of thousands of neighbors who are involved in our work. And those people, their immense strengths, are the source of my greatest optimism.  

If organizations can't respond to all of the changes and threats, where do you think they should start?  

We all need to start with the basics: mutual aid, food, health, shelter, safety. And I’d include listening to our neighbors on that list – our work needs to always be guided by our communities’ priorities.  

And as we prioritize ensuring that basic needs are met, we need to maintain our joy, creativity, and focus on community-building. If we’re going to be feeding people, how do we make that feel joyful, how do we make people feel welcomed?  

We are on the precipice of so much more need, while having fewer resources to address it.  How do we face that?  

Now is the time for organizations to be clear-eyed about what we do best and what we might set aside for another day. We need to do what we can to resist the destruction of systems of care while also ensuring we are conserving our strength for the long haul. But we shouldn’t be hunkering down: It's our ethical and moral imperative to be brave, too.  

Leaders should do whatever we can to conserve and build up our workers’ capacity and resources and even consider stepping back from certain activities to retain more resources for basic needs.   

Now is the time to make hard decisions about where to invest. We at University Settlement have examples, over the last 12 months, of places where we’ve had to make tough calls that have helped us conserve some resources for a period of disinvestment.  

 We also need to remember how powerful local community aid can be, and how strong New York City neighbors’ commitment to helping one another has been. There are many kinds of resources, and even if financial resources change drastically, we have many other kinds of human power and social capital to draw upon. Our communities are filled with people who want to help each other – including people with money, who can give more money, and should. We need to leverage that strength in the dark. 

We have such rich communities and networks within New York City – we are lucky to be facing this moment in solidarity with so many others. But those connections also require care and feeding – we need to make sure that our networks are alive and activated so that we can call on one another for support, and not duplicate efforts as resources get scarcer.  

There's a lot of attention on financial risks.  What are some of the other risks you are thinking about? 

We’re thinking first about the safety of our neighbors, including those who are undocumented, those who are women, those who are BIPOC, and those who are LGBTQ+. And these immediate safety concerns have a very real bearing on the morale of our workers, since we are connected so deeply with neighbors, friends, and family who are at risk due to this government’s actions.   

There’s a very real concern that this Congress could pass a law giving the Treasury Department the ability to unilaterally and without sufficient due process remove the 501(c)3 status of nonprofits it accuses of “supporting terrorism,” and our sector needs to remain on guard for that.  

And of course, in a moment like this, our reputation and the trust of our community is at risk.  Organizations like mine have traditionally stood for American values that have become more controversial and partisan over the last few decades, and those changes create new risks.  

Uncertainty also creates costs that are a little bit different and less clear than simple funding cuts. There are costs for planning, and for defending our programs; there are costs for ramping up, ramping down, changing course. These less immediately visible costs add up very quickly.  

Changes at the U.S. Department of Health including shifts in vaccine mandates, coupled with the rollback of safety net infrastructure including food aid, Medicaid, housing subsidies, FEMA, and the Home Energy Assistance Program present very clear risks to the health and safety of our neighbors.  

Our organizations’ and our society’s progress toward building diversity, inclusion, and belonging for all kinds of people are clearly under attack and any progress we’ve made over the last many decades is at risk.  Our collective ability to find joy in the present moment and imagine better futures is under attack, too.  

In light of this, how can philanthropy best show up for organizations like yours right now? 

Trust your partners and the communities you support.  

Now is the time for philanthropies to engage nonprofit partners with maximum generosity and flexibility. Demonstrate your commitment to us – if we are working together, confirm that you are going to be there for us. Multi-year grants help us plan for the future and are vital.  

Please find space in your budgets for additional support for advocacy and meaningful civic engagement.  

And please remember that the perfect is the enemy of the good. We have funders who require us to spend huge amounts of our team’s time reporting out specific outcomes, and we’d love to see those expectations relaxed. Now is not the moment to be precious.  

How can the human services sector be part of a movement to protect democracy? 

We are collectively a very engaged and powerful sector, especially when we are activated in the right ways. When we speak together, when we engage with election cycles, in debates and conversations, we can make real impacts.  

Leaders of social services and other nonprofits all need and want an engaged, informed electorate who understand the threats currently posed to democracy. We have to invest our time and resources in order to help create that informed public.  

Our organizations, and especially settlement houses, are trusted entities within New York City’s less-engaged communities. Research has demonstrated that when we engage people around voting and elections in a non-partisan way, voter turnout doubles, but that work takes resources including time and people power. We need our funders to invest more meaningfully in this work, too.