Two Goddard Riverside employees were recently honored by their peers at United Neighborhood Houses—the umbrella organization for settlement houses in New York.
Derrick Manigo, the director of our Assertive Community Treatment teams, received the Pathfinder award, which honors people who “are charting new directions and inspiring change through their creativity, commitment, and courage.” ACT teams, as they’re known, are mobile psychiatric clinics that support people with severe mental illness to live and thrive in the community.
“One of the things I’ve been pushing with the state and the city is the need to have a medical provider as part of our teams,” said Manigo. “That’s been my primary objective for years now.”
Manigo said the urgency of treating the body as well as the mind became clear from the work itself. He said all too often his teams helped clients get a handle on several difficult issues over the course of years, only to see them die suddenly from chronic health issues.
“We had a client who had been homeless for 15 years,” he recalled. “We got him into housing, we helped him deal with his substance use, we reconnected him with his kids and grandkids, we helped him buy Christmas presents with his own money and take trips to see them. And six months later he was in the hospital with cancer.”
Manigo has hired a medical nurse practitioner to work with our Adult ACT Team, and is working on a sharing arrangement with the new Young Adult ACT Team.
“Goddard is the first to have a medical provider on our team,” said Manigo. “We are trying to trailblaze that for all ACT teams.”
Goddard’s director of advocacy, Larry Wood, received a Civic Champion Award connected with his decades of work ensuring that members of our community—especially residents of public housing—are registered to vote and are counted in the census.
“It’s stuff that we’ve consistently done year after year–making sure people know where to vote and putting signage together accordingly, with phone numbers and websites to check to confirm their status and where their polling site is,” he said. “I think every step that you make easier for folks is going to increase turnout.”
Participating in the census is also a key part of being civically active, because census data determines how many Congressional seats New York is awarded. During the most recent count, in 2020, Wood set up informational tables in the community and hung flyers in key buildings. It was a heartbreakingly close result: New York came up 89 people short and lost a seat.
“Every voice matters, every person counts,” said Wood. “It is so vital.”