Good morning everyone. I think I wanna spend my couple minutes helping you to understand what it is on the not-for-profit side, not to be paid. If you think back just two years ago during the period of Covid, we had employees who were on the street risking their lives because we deemed them essential. Those are the same people who left their children at home because they lost childcare to make sure that other New Yorkers’ children were taken care of at the very same time.
Those were the same New Yorkers that in fact lost an income at home, but were working food pantries to make sure New Yorkers were taken care of. They risked their lives each and every day during that two-year period, which typifies the work that we do to keep New York strong at this point on an everyday basis.
We owe vendors back 190 days. So to the point that calls don’t work anymore, they show up to our office and dun us. While the mayor yet talks about the A rating of the city. Well, that A rating is on the backs of not-for-profits.
Just consider that a $4 million line of credit costs us $23,000 every month. And so for the agencies that are owed 15 million like we are, and 30 million, you are talking about 80, 90,000 dollars a month in interest payments. And for our folks who make 40 and $50,000, we can employ almost an army for interest payments. It has got to stop.
And so when we start to return contracts, because we cannot keep our doors open, I want you to think about that in the retrospective view of 175 years of this work in New York City. And we’re almost to the point where we’re ready to close our doors and shut programs and eliminate valuable services to New Yorkers.
What does that say about us as a city when we have older adults who worked their entire life and they’re trying to live on $785 of Social Security, for which the federal government is working on taking away, but it is us, the not-for-profits, that fill the gap to allow New Yorkers that mopped our floors, that cleaned our offices, that served in food pantries to live each and every day.
And enough is enough, and it’s time for us to be paid. Thank you.