Residential Care
From the mid-19th to mid-20th century, New York State housed large numbers of children and adults with mental health challenges in large state-run institutions. By the 1970s, public exposés of the overcrowded, unsanitary, and generally neglectful conditions in many of these institutions led to their closure. In their place, smaller institutions closer to clients’ home communities, administered by local not-for-profits, were intended to provide more humane and effective treatment. This process of “deinstitutionalization” often took place without sufficient attention to the particular needs of clients, without sufficient funding to support the new model, and without adequate regulation of the institutions that arose to fulfill the ongoing need for residential care. Wages for residential care workers also effectively decreased when workers no longer benefitted from the stronger bargaining power of large public employees’ unions.
The Jewish Board was involved at both policy and programmatic levels in this gradual shift from large, state-run institutions to smaller, not-for-profit provided care. In the early 1980s, Jewish Board Executive Director Jay Goldsmith worked to pass Residential Treatment Facilities (RTF) legislation that shifted state funds towards not-for-profit providers including The Jewish Board. Since the early 1900s, The Jewish Board (through its predecessor agencies) had run a large and growing residential campus in Westchester County for young people in need of social and emotional supports. What became ultimately known as “Hawthorne Cedar Knolls” served thousands of children from New York City before closing in 2018 and being replaced by a much smaller residential home in the Bronx. In 2015, the Jewish Board took over the residential services portfolio of the newly bankrupt Federation Employment Guidance Services (FEGS), becoming one of the largest such providers in the city and state.
