OUR CLIENTS ARE AMONG
THE HARDEST TO SERVE

Randy Quezada ’97

Nearly 35,000 individuals in New York City are homeless. That number represents 23 percent fewer children and 10 percent fewer families than in June 2004 when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced his commitment to reducing the number of homeless New Yorkers by two-thirds in five years (2009). Just this past December, Robert V. Hess, commis-sioner of the city’s Department of Home-less Services (DHS), announced an important initiative geared toward achievement of the mayor’s goal: “In an historic agreement between the City of New York and the Veterans Administration to help end veteran homelessness in the City…the City will place 100 veterans into permanent housing in 100 days. Veterans Affairs and the City will also convene a Task Force that will report back in 100 days with a strategic plan to end veteran homelessness in New York City.”

As special assistant to Commissioner Hess, Randy’s job is to “make sure what the Commissioner wants to happen, happens.” From policy and program development to implementation of new strategies and initiatives, Randy “connects the dots.” His challenge is to achieve real progress through “informal” management; that is, to get things done through DHS staffers who actually report to other leaders, such as deputy and assistant commissioners of the agency.

 DHS, like similar agencies in other cities, strives to “overcome” homelessness, a more comprehensive and strategy-dependent goal than managing homelessness through the provision of short-term, emergency shelter. Randy’s work involves management, qualitative analysis, and policy recommendation and formation. Recently he has been particularly involved in two special projects: the first is to end encampments on the city’s streets by moving homeless individuals into shelters or more suitable housing alternatives; the second is the campaign focused on homeless veterans. In the former case, an interagency task force meets regularly to coordinate how best to address the issues presented by encampments and their take-down while ensuring that clients are engaged and placed in safe and decent housing.

Before he came to DHS, Randy worked on immigration issues, such as immigrants’ voting rights, where the subjects of his activism and advocacy were policy-makers and the public at large. Now he must use the same skills to motivate DHS staff, rally them around agency and program goals, and motivate them to act outside of well-established comfort zones in order to meet new challenges.

“This public service work does not attract much press attention but I feel strongly that we must be there—in the trenches with our clients who are poor and homeless or at risk of losing their home,” Randy says. “The daunting social issues that they must struggle with on a daily basis make them the most challenging population to serve.

“DHS’ mission is two-pronged: to prevent homelessness wherever possible and provide short-term emergency shelter and re-housing whenever needed. On any given night we shelter 35,000 people. They have fallen off an unstable platform and require emergency shelter. We are about what it will take to get them back on their feet.

“I believe DHS is on the right track with respect to priorities; we’re working hard to meet the mayor’s goal of reducing homelessness by two-thirds by 2009. To meet this mandate, the agency is developing new strategies and new initiatives. We are working closely with many other city agencies to achieve this goal and to ensure the best outcome for our clients, which is permanent housing.”

How do ideas surface? Ideas come from management, and most managers move up through the ranks. Randy is happy to be among the “idea people,” with direct access to DHS executives who are going to listen to his ideas. In fact, Randy’s main reason for leaving his prior position with a nonprofit organization was that the issues he worked on were not a priority for that organization.

Randy majored in philosophy and political science at Penn. He was a New York Urban Fellow and earned a master’s degree in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government [at Harvard University]. He has always been committed to public service. “Public service work is challenging—it’s important work and it is good work,” he says. Randy’s commitment grew out of his experience with Prep for Prep and was reinforced at Milton, he said, “where the emphasis was on how you fit into a community, and what you bring to the community to make it a better place.

“I’ve always envisioned a career in the public sector as giving back, taking care of others and not simply myself. I’ve always been very fortunate. School came easier to me than to some others and I had lots of opportunities. That fueled my desire to provide opportunities to people less fortunate than I am and to make sure that communities were not marginalized as a result of poverty and homelessness.”


Cathleen Everett

 

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