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Nov. 5 - Nov. 11, 2021
Sunnyside settlement house transformed how it
aided hundreds of residents during pandemic
BY JULIA MORO
Settlement houses in New
York are tasked with supporting
communities throughout
every crisis the city faces.
Sunnyside Community Services
was among the many organizations
that adapted their
services during the COVID-19
pandemic to continue aiding
hundreds of older adults each
day.
Shyvonne Noboa, the division
director for senior services
at Sunnyside Community
Services, said that she and
her team did everything they
could to stay connected with
seniors after the center closed
due to the pandemic, providing
home care and access to
food, as well as making over
28,000 wellness calls throughout
the pandemic.
“Our older adults in our
Queens community are incredibly
resilient,” Noboa
said. “We connected with
them so that, although they
were isolated physically from
our services, they were never
alone.”
Before the pandemic, the
Sunnyside location would
have more than 200 seniors
walk through their doors.
As the coronavirus changed
the dynamic of their service,
Noboa said they rose to the occasion.
“It’s been a long 18 months,”
Noboa said. “When we first
were faced with this pandemic,
we hit the ground running.
We really had to learn a different
way to listen to their needs
to identify and connect them
to needed services.”
Noboa said shifting their
services to help older adults
during the pandemic was like
“crisis mode.”
“We really didn’t have a moment
to pause and think about
what was going on,” Noboa
said. “Pre-COVID, we were doing
home visits, coming out to
our center to have lunch or sit
through an education session
— it was different.”
Employees had to shift to
a more intuitive approach to
care with their wellness calls.
They could no longer make
house visits and see laundry
piling up to know someone
needed help around the house.
“There was a sense of
safety knowing that you could
just walk through the door,”
Noboa said. “There was such
a sense of comfort, trust and
safety that was really taken
away with the pandemic.”
Sunnyside Community
Services made sure to virtually
connect their older adults
to activities that would keep
them healthy. Online Zumba,
yoga and other activities
were, and still remain, available.
The Sunnyside location
adopted a hybrid model this
past June.
“We really have created an
Sunnyside Community Services made sure each of the older adults
they serve had food during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Courtesy of United Neighborhood Houses
online senior center,” Noboa
said. “So if participants aren’t
able to partake in our center
in person, we’re still remaining
connected virtually.”
Noboa said the highlight
of this experience was being
able to see the older adults
since the center opened for inperson
programming in June.
United Neighborhood
Houses (UNH) — a policy organization
that supports 45
settlement houses, including
Sunnyside Community Services
— is currently looking
ahead to the new mayoral
administration in hopes of a
more unified approach to social
service.
Nora Moran, UNH’s director
of policy and advocacy,
said that under Mayor Bill de
Blasio’s administration, there
was a lack of partnership between
the mayor’s office and
human service organizations
in general.
“Throughout COVID, this
was definitely a big challenge
where proposals were being
made to change or cut funding
without looking at existing
resources on the ground in
neighborhoods and figuring
out how to maximize those to
best serve a community,” Moran
said. “Instead of looking
at what was in place already,
they were building up a new
system that didn’t really make
sense.”
UNH is looking for a mayor
that will invest in community
based programming that
already has deep roots in the
neighborhoods they serve.
“We’re trying to figure
out how to best keep people
safe, housed, educated and
healthy,” Moran said. “Because
of that, we feel there
should be more of a collaborative
relationship between settlement
houses and the mayoral
administration.”
UNH does not publicly support
any candidate because of
its 501(c)(3) status that prohibits
them from doing so. However,
Moran said their policy
positions are pretty clear.
To learn more about
Queens settlement houses under
UNH, visit unhny.org.
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