Opinion: How New York City’s social work services can rise to meet today’s challenges and help our communities

Jacqueline Mondros, who has served as dean and professor emeritus at Stony Brook University School of Social Work, brings a unique blend of academic leadership and hands-on knowledge of the human services and nonprofit world. 

In this opinion piece, Dean Mondros shares a clear-eyed look at the challenges facing our community and offers insight into the steps we can take together to address them. This submission has been edited for length and clarity.

I have been a social worker for 52 years, and for the last 34 years I served in academic administration at some of the top schools of social work in the country.  I’ve seen a lot of change over the past five decades in students, in universities, and especially in social services.  

As a young social worker, my colleagues and I felt hopeful. The United States had passed civil rights legislation; federal, state, and city funds supported community services; there were strong advocacy organizations; and activism was encouraged. New leadership in city halls across the country were supported by a robust federal government. Sadly, much of the energy and funding have disappeared. While federal funds flow to ICE and the military, New York state is projected to lose $15 billion dollars annually for Medicaid and food assistance programs. This will potentially impact 1.5 million Medicaid recipients and 1 million SNAP beneficiaries in New York.

Our communities, particularly those of color, are struggling. A recent article in the Columbia Journal of Race and Law reported that nearly half of New York City’s Black children will be investigated by child protective services by the time they turn 18. As of January 2025, over 91,000 people were sleeping in shelters, with over 4,000 others sleeping in the streets. A 2023 Department of Health and Mental Hygiene report noted, “deep inequities in treatment” with one in four adults experiencing a mental health crisis. And no, our children are not alright: almost half of teenagers reported chronic depression. The 2024 Mayor’s Office of Community Mental Health documented not only the mental health crisis, but the critical shortage of the workforce to meet the need. Non-profit organizations reported a 30-45% vacancy rate in client related jobs. 

The gap between needs and resources has widened. People need services and the service providers are underfunded, understaffed, and under siege.  

Social workers with a master’s level education are the critical staff in these services. They are a major workforce in homeless and domestic violence shelters, in community mental health teams, in foster care and abuse, in health care, in services for the elderly, and in school services. Their median salary is just over $61,000. They often work with difficult populations at a time of extreme crisis. They earn about the same as prison guards, and less than police officers, albeit without the same health or retirement plans. They are mostly un-unionized. It’s worth remembering that they enter potentially dangerous situations without weapons or back up support.

I have learned a great deal about the needs of social workers in public and non-profit settings since I co-founded Social Workers Justice in 2022. Their salaries are so low that they work second and sometimes third jobs.  Most have no retirement plans. They make home visits, almost always individually, and frequently their travel is not reimbursed. Most don’t receive loan forgiveness for masters’ degrees that can cost up to $124,000. Their caseloads are so large that they cannot spend adequate time with their clients. There are not enough of them, and not nearly enough speak the languages of their clients or reflect and understand the communities they serve.  Over half of Black social workers and over a third of Latinos fail an entry exam that doesn’t meet scientifically established standards for testing, doesn’t measure competence, and has a long standing and national track record of extreme racial disparities. They feel silenced when they raise grievances over issues of inequity. They are tired and demoralized, and yet they continue to do this very hard and important work.

The social service sector cannot solve these problems alone. Providers don’t receive enough funding to adequately address the needs they face. Moreover, the city has a long standing practice of delaying reimbursements for services rendered. This has the effect of not allowing organizations to plan for increasing staffing, for raising salaries or adding benefits, for reducing caseloads, for introducing much needed expansion of services. It may be a way of managing the city’s budget, but it severely mismanages our community’s needs.

Two books have become my current guideposts: “Abundance” by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and “Why Nothing Works,” by Marc Dunkelman.  Their message is that we can solve things like affordable housing and human services, but we don’t.  One party defunds things, leaving action to the private sector which has little incentive to solve them.  The other party funds solutions but doesn’t address implementation, or introduces multiple layers of regulation that creates strangleholds and endless delays.  And people are fed up. Even tough and unflappable New Yorkers have had it.  We want things fixed!

I end this column with a few reasonable and pragmatic steps that our City and State could take to fix the current situation or at least make things better:

• The City and State should begin now to reimburse non-profit agencies on time.  That will help them to plan for growth, including hiring staff, lowering caseloads, and expanding services.
• The City and State should include a Cost of Living Raise of 7.8% for persons working in public and non-profit organizations. That will help attract new social workers to fill jobs in essential services.
• Loan forgiveness should be expanded for all masters’ level social workers who work in public and non-profit organizations.  That will attract and stabilize the workforce.
• The entry level LMSW exam should no longer be required for licensure.  The State should not be using an unscientific exam which poses a significant obstacle to hiring Black and Latino social workers.
• The new City and State administrations should convene a special commission, composed of leaders of social service agencies, to determine and plan implementation of best practices in human services, to identify where expansion is necessary, and determine the budget commitments necessary to implement. The plan should be reviewed and revised each year in light of emerging needs.  
• City and State officials should work with financial institutions to meet the credit and banking needs of human service agencies, using the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) that requires banks to meet the credit needs of the communities they serve.  Similarly, the State should work with insurance companies to lower insurance rates for these organizations.