Remembering Susan

Susan outside Love Gospel Assembly Soup Kitchen in 1988.

A native New Yorker and 1969 graduate of Columbia University School of Social Work, Susan dedicated her professional career of more than 30 years to the city’s poor and homeless people. Before leading Care for the Homeless, she was a clinician, community organizer, professor and consultant. Then in 1985, she became project director for the New York City site of the National Health Care for the Homeless demonstration project and implemented a unique health care delivery model that deployed health care givers to sites that homeless people visit for other aid, like food and shelter.

Under her direction, the pilot proved effective and, in the early 1990s, she oversaw its transition into an independent non-profit funded by a combination of public and private sector support. As Executive Director of Care for the Homeless, she successfully integrated other initiatives into the core health care program so that it responded more comprehensively to a range of unmet health care needs among New York City's homeless population. These included HIV testing and counseling; early intervention, counseling and case management for homeless people with HIV/AIDS; mental health care for homeless families and children, as well as single adults; an oral health project featuring a portable dental unit to bring dental care to homeless people, and advocacy and education for homeless people and those who work them on issues related to health, health care and homelessness, including Medicaid managed care.

She chaired the Board of the National Health Care for the Homeless Council and the group's Standards and Membership Committee and its Committee on Medicaid Reform. Other organizations she actively participated in include the Council for Homeless Policies and Services and the National Ryan White Title III Coalition, serving also on the New York City Council’s Legislative Advisory Commission on the Homeless.

She was eulogized at a Mass of the Resurrection and Committal Service among her faith-community at Saint Peter's Lutheran Church, on the evening of November 18, 2004 by Barbara Knecht, past President of the Board of Directors.

We wish to acknowledge the generosity of the following friends and colleagues of Susan as well as supporters of Care for the Homeless’s mission for their generous contributions in memory of our founder.

Joan McAllister
Sue Sheid
Linda Drollinger
Jean Hochron
Frank DeLeonardis
Kathleen & Thomas Schmidt
Ann Emmerling
Kristine Krelick
George & Harriet McDonald
Joan Ohlson
J. David & Anita Seay
Bob Taube
Linda Scharer
Jennifer Wasmer
Bernice Gordon
Eve Abzug
Linda Scharer
Jennifer A. Wasmer
Joan & Melvin Weinstein
Marilyn M. Jabaut
Norman Stroh
Jane Bender
Barbara Minch
Janet Alperstein
Sally Rogers
Terry Rochford
Erik & Kathryn Hanson
Elizabeth Munson
Scott Fabean
Watson F. Bosler

Tribute Given at Saint Peter’s Church, Citicorp, November 18, 2004

Good evening. My name is Barbara Knecht. I am vice president and past president of the Board of CFH.

Susan gave many gifts in her life. I would like to describe a few that I received, as well as some that other Board members and staff of CFH remember.

I met Susan when she was running the NY Health Care for the Homeless Program within the United Hospital Fund, and I worked for the Deputy Commissioner of Homeless Services when it was located in the City’s Human Resources Administration. My responsibilities included oversight of the health services in the shelters - a position I held, not by virtue of my qualification for it, but for lack of an alternative candidate during a hiring freeze. Susan failed to take advantage of my ignorance. Instead she tutored, and mentored me. Of course she knew she would be better off if I were educated, but it was also second nature for her to share her knowledge and experience with anyone she came in contact with. And how did I repay her? Mostly, I asked her to do impossible things. Susan, we’re opening a new shelter, will you be able to arrange medical care? Of course, she would respond, I need to plan services and figure out the staffing and space - when will it open? “Ohh… aaa..,” I would say, “…next week.” She always said “yes.” And she always made it happen. Because the only people who would really suffer while we haggled over space or conditions were the homeless people who would be living in that shelter. And it was their lives Susan dedicated her life to improving.

Bruce Vladeck was the president of UHF who supported the incubation of the program and hired Susan to run it in 1984. Around 1991, he realized that homelessness was not abating, and that he had a thriving program under his wing, and running programs was not in UHF’s mission. The program was going to need a new home. Susan came to see the DC, Jeff Carples, and me to discuss the situation. Bruce had made a couple of suggestions, but Susan wasn’t sure that any of them was quite right. The problem, in her mind, was philosophy. Susan had developed a widely inclusive program. It brought medical services to the places in four boroughs of NY where homeless families and adults lived and gathered: shelters, transitional housing, soup kitchens, drop in centers, and the streets. Virtually no other not for profit agency served such a wide range of homeless people in so many different locations, nor did they offer her holistic approach.

One option, of course, was to transform the program into a new agency, but that isn’t the proposal Susan came to Jeff and me with. She was too modest, too mission focused, and too collaborative to begin with the answer. She came only to ask our help and support to analyze the options and collectively make a decision about the best structure that would support her vision. She expanded her advisory board and, at the end of a thoughtful process that included many of you here this evening, Care for the Homeless was created as an independent not for profit organization in 1993.

CFH grew and developed and succeeded because of the relationships Susan nurtured and because of the high standards she maintained. She hired staff who believe in the mission and many of them have been with agency a long time. The medical teams include 13 people who have worked for the program over 10 years. At central office Nancy Magno, our finance person, joined the staff in the UHF days. Bobby Watts, now acting ED, has been with CFH 16 years, Toni Cipriaso 11 years. Loyalty to Susan is high among the short timers – those who have only been around 5-10 years like Zipporah Portugal, Paul Dinter and many others. These are people who have found a home in the caring world Susan built at CFH.

The board, too, has longevity and loyalty. Jim Woods and Michael Ziegler go back to the beginning. As a long time member of the nominating committee, I can tell you that every single board member has joined because of the compelling story Susan was able to tell them, and because she has always placed the mission - to improve the lives of homeless people and to work to end homelessness - above anything else.

Lee Perlman [who met Susan and joined the board only about a year ago] said this:
"...what I found remarkable about Susan is that...she totally drew me in. .... The person that I saw and interacted with was a 21 year old activist with unending energy, drive, and passion."

I think Susan would particularly like to be recalled as an activist, a passionate and yet gentle activist who believed deeply in collaboration. She served on half a dozen professional working groups, usually in a leadership role, including the Board of the National Health Care for Homeless Council, the Executive Committee of the Council on Homeless Policies and Services, the NYC Council Legislative Advisory Commission on the Homeless and others. She built the entire agency on collaboration - with the people at the health care centers that provide the medical services, with staff of shelters, soup kitchens and drop in centers where our services are housed, and with the individuals at the federal state and city agencies that fund us.

On more than one occasion, funders asked Susan if she could take on a last minute project with their unused funds. She always said yes. They asked because the agency always received excellent evaluations. One year, after our federal review, Susan reported to the board that we had done very well, but they had one significant criticism. They thought that the average age of our board members was too high. And it was time to recruit younger members.

And so she did. One of those who joined the Board was a former staff member, David Wunsch, another testament to the loyalty and standards Susan engendered. David has many wonderful memories including this one, which he sent to me last week:

"My wife and I have been talking a lot about Susan these days, actually even before I heard the news on Monday. Kate knew her as well…

One memory we shared was arriving home to find her raspy voice on the answering machine advising us to name our yet to be born second child 'Andrew'. She knew we had a boy on the way. I really think she had a hard time resisting the urge to tell people what they should name their children. Matthew is now a year and a half old, but we decided to call him Andrew for an evening in her honor."

He continued:

"On the serious side, I can’t even estimate the number of people I have run into over the years who tell of the time Susan took to help them learn the ropes of whatever they were doing related to homelessness. Her generosity at work, again. There is so much to be said about Susan."

Nancy Magno commented to me yesterday about Susan’s focus on people and how she made the staff feel special, she was always concerned with their families and never forgot personal details of their lives. Nancy said: "Susan would follow up with me about things related to my children that I'd forgotten about!"

Bobby Watts elaborated on this in an email:

"Susan was always focused on PEOPLE. …She hated the phrase 'the homeless' and would insist that throughout the agency’s … words and works… that we all thought of homeless people as PEOPLE, first and foremost. Our relationship with our clients was to be as fellow human beings… Without establishing a relationship with the clients, and earning their trust, she told all of us, it wasn't likely that we would really be able to 'reach' them …"

He goes on:

"Her relationship with the staff of CFH … was not only employer-employee, but Susan knew each of the staff as people -- she knew our history, what was going on in our lives, … about our joys and struggles. And with her amazing mind, Susan remembered all the details about all of us. .... Susan was involved in most of the milestones of the last 16 years of my life. When we were expecting our first child, Susan threw for me, what she called 'the world's first baby shower for a man.' What other boss would think of doing that?"

Beth Weitzman, another Board member, also remembers that quality:

"My sweetest memories of Susan are connected to my kids. When I first met her, I was working part-time at UHF. At that time, my older son, Isaac, was a tot and I soon became pregnant with my second son, Michah. Susan always connected back to that point in time and never failed to ask about the kids and how they were doing. And her interest was never superficial... she remembered where they went to school, always noted how they had donated a portion of their bar mitzva monies to CFH, and so on. Perhaps the easiest way into a mother's heart is to ask about her kids... and Susan always remembered to ask."

There are so many things that guided Susan and I’d like to share two reflections on Susan and her faith and her relationship to the church that we are in. The first comes from Paul Dinter, the associate director of CFH:

"Staff at CFH could be forgiven if, on occasion, they experienced the 8th Floor at 12 W. 21st as 'Saint Peter's South.' Not that CFH ever pretended to be, or sought funding as, a 'faith-based organization!' But Susan was immensely proud of her community here at Saint Peter's (and in particular of the gleaming new kitchen she helped put in place) and her pride and love for her extended church-family overflowed into her conversations, her humor, and her extra-curricular activity that she shared with her extended work-based family. Whether it was a Monday-morning review of Mandy's [Rev. Derr's] Sunday sermon or a Friday lunch-time preview of Sunday's after-church brunch, CFH's office staff all felt like honorary Lutherans at one time or another. For Susan, we were all woven into the skein of her commitment to others."

And this one from Linda Scott, Board member:

"…In this current cultural/political climate, when we hear so much about values, morality and faith, I think it’s important to remember that Susan’s lifework was very much faith-based. I think her goals and motivations were rooted in the fundamental precepts of her faith. She knew she was blessed and saw it as her responsibility to share those blessings with those who were not so fortunate. She was steeped in a faith that calls for feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and certainly housing the homeless. And too, her work was driven by a sense of justice and fairness – the very basis of her Judeo-Christian tradition.

But inasmuch as her work was faith-based, she never ever asked any of us to acknowledge, share or support her faith. She may have thought her faith required her to do the work she did, but she never thought that only the faithful could do it. So she put together a somewhat rag-tag crew – a group of us with differing faiths and differing values – and got the work done.

I think Susan’s faith was a quiet and humble faith – made all the more effective because she translated it into action that made the City a better and more humane place. Amidst all the noise and rhetoric we’re hearing about the need to 'return' to values and faith, I think we can look at Susan as a real role model of faith-in-action."

A few final words.

Bobby emailed me this afternoon to tell me of two ways the National Health Care for the Homeless Council has decided to honor Susan :

	A soon-to-be-published Council paper on how to document disability among homeless people will be dedicated to Susan. She chaired the committee that spearheaded the report.
	Each year, at the national Health Care for the Homeless Conference, the Policy Committee of the Council (which Susan founded) holds a Policy Luncheon which they have decided to name the Susan L. Neibacher Policy Luncheon.

In Susan’s spirit of collaboration and cooperation, CFH would welcome your suggestions for other ways we may honor her work and her memory. We have formed a small committee of the Board to consider our own and the community’s ideas for public tributes; the staff will be thinking of internal ways they would like to see her remembered. We welcome everyone’s suggestions by email or phone or letter to any member of the staff or the Board.

We have made one decision so far:

As many of you know, we have been struggling for the last few years to develop a new shelter in the Bronx to replace the one we ran until 2000. I am extremely sad that Susan will not be there on opening day – whenever that may eventually be – as this was her dream way back in 1991 when we discussed what the name and mission of the new agency would be. It was her hope that some day she would create a place where homeless people would be able to stop and find their way out of homelessness. Well, Susan did create the place that one day soon will open on Jerome avenue and that place will be named in her honor because her spirit will be found throughout that place in the people and programs that she nurtured and inspired.

Thank you.

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