New York Nonprofits in the Aftermath of FEGS: A Call to Action

As with any industry, nonprofits in the human services sector close and merge, but recently, there have been many questions about why so many have disappeared. 18 percent of New York City's human services providers were insolvent in 2013. With the closure of FEGS, it became clear that action was needed, both to examine systemic issues in the sector and to respond quickly and be an active partner with government in addressing this problem. Although FEGS was a unique organization and its collapse was due to a number of different factors, its bankruptcy took place against the backdrop of a broken system in which there is a severe mismatch between program expectations and available funds. Too many nonprofit entities do not have the systems in place to appropriately assess risks, undermining their ability to evaluate government proposals, real estate, and other financial and programmatic decisions. This report serves to provide urgently needed attention to the looming crisis

Building in Good Jobs: Linking Workforce Development with Real Estate-Led Economic Development

Municipal governments in the U.S. are increasingly devoting public resources to the redevelopment of abandoned, contaminated or underutilized land. Private sector appetite for new development opportunities and public sector creativity have combined to create building booms in a number of central cities that only a few decades ago were in seemingly irreversible decline. In the midst of this government-supported revitalization, however, both working poverty and chronic unemployment in central cities remain disturbingly high. Without explicit efforts to link property redevelopment with efforts to put un- or underemployed people to work at family-supporting wages, the negative impacts of growth (displacement, housing cost appreciation) often affect the historically disadvantaged far more profoundly than its positive impacts do