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Isaac Salazar still remembers the staffers at the community-based clinic that helped him navigate New York City’s complexities when he came from Mexico 10 years ago.
It’s what inspired him to go back to school and pursue social work, officially graduating in August from Hunter College.
Last year, he received another lifeline: he was awarded a scholarship known as the CUNY Social Work Fellows, a City Council program that covers tuition and other fees for students pursuing masters of social work degrees for many much-needed jobs in behavioral health at city agencies and nonprofits contracted through the city.
“I was so relieved mainly because, at the time, I was working outside of school, outside of the internship, because I had to pay for my tuition,” Salazar, now 29, told THE CITY. He worked as a care coordinator at Borough of Manhattan Community College while getting his masters, in addition to an internship at Mt. Sinai.
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“So just knowing the financial aspect — a huge percentage of it — would be covered made me so relieved because it helped me to focus more on my studies.”
Salazar is one of more than 100 students so far in its first year across four City University of New York colleges — Hunter, Lehman, the College of Staten Island and York — to benefit from the social work scholarship program since it launched last year, which is funded with $2 million in the most recent budget.
The pilot program was designed to meet a crucial need, as demand for behavioral health workers in the city is expected to grow by “more than 25%” over the next five years, according to the Mayor’s Office of Community Mental Health.
And it comes as many human services nonprofits have vacant positions and high turnover, according to the Center for an Urban Future. Even the city’s Health Department has had staffing challenges.
Salazar began work last month as a staff care coordinator at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Harlem, working with Spanish-speakers like the kind of help he received when he first arrived in the states.
His scholarship — which is limited to CUNY students working within a city agency or at a nonprofit organization contracted by the city — encouraged him even more to do the work he loves to do.
“It just made me feel seen and represented in such a complex system,” he said.
Speaker Adrienne Adams, who has introduced other scholarship programs to help City University students, like CUNY Reconnect, said her hope is the program continues to grow.
“I just always believe that CUNY has been so underutilized by the city, undervalued by the city, when we have the pipeline to do so much more than we’ve previously done,” she told THE CITY in an interview.
“What better place to look than our CUNY schools that have our experts right there at the ready to do this work.”
Robyn Brown-Manning, the senior associate dean of faculty and academic affairs and a doctoral lecturer at Hunter College, said her students’ experiences are vastly different to those and her classmates when she attended the school in the 1970s.
Tuition was free through 1976, when Brown-Manning received her masters. Now, it’s upwards of $7,000 for in-state students per year — and double that for out-of-state residents. Many students today also work full time while attending school and doing required internships.
“They have a lot of compassion and energy and commitment to the work, but there are real financial factors,” she said of her students.
Kendra Hardy, who has worked in social work for nearly 20 years, was reluctant to pursue a masters degree primarily because of the financial burden, she said.
During the pandemic, another city-funded program offered to pay half of her tuition, and she enrolled at York College in Jamaica. The Council’s program paid for her most recent semester, as well as the fees to take necessary exams.
“The possibilities are literally endless in terms of the types of areas you can work with,” Hardy, 46, told THE CITY. For the last 15 years she’s worked at a nonprofit providing necessary case management for senior citizens to receive meals at home, and she recently received a promotion at work following graduation.
“You can work with any population and almost any agency you can think of — they’re always looking for social workers,” she said.
Nisali Silva, 26, took evening classes at the College of Staten Island after her 9-to-5 working at a nonprofit that offers workforce training and other services to young people. She also interned as an operator at the national mental-health 988 hotline.
When she found out she was awarded the scholarship, “it was really a big lift off of my shoulders, paying for grad school out of pocket.”
“It was a release for me that all the work and effort… it felt worth it to me to be able to get something as huge as that,” she said.
Katie is a reporter for THE CITY and co-host of FAQ NYC podcast. More by Katie Honan
THE CITY is an independent nonprofit newsroom dedicated to serving the people of New York.
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