VNSNY Receives Foundation Grant to Launch LGBT Outreach Project

The New York Community Trust has awarded VNSNY an 18-month, $125,000 grant that will help support a new project aimed at improving health access and outcomes for New York City’s older lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) residents. The grant will fund the hiring of an experienced LGBT nurse to serve as project manager for VNSNY’s new LGBT Outreach and Expansion Project.

“This manager’s responsibilities will include forging relationships with both LGBT-dedicated and non-LGBT organizations in the community, and also educating New York City’s provider community on the best practices for working with LGBT seniors,” says Jackie Halpern, Director, Foundation & Corporate Relations, who helped lead efforts to secure the grant funding. “In addition, the project manager will conduct educational activities with LGBT seniors designed to raise awareness of the services that VNSNY can provide them, and link them to those services.”

The overarching goal, she adds, “is to help LGBT seniors understand all that we can offer them, and know that we are a trusted ally with a long history of serving this community.” This outreach project is especially important because the New York area’s senior LGBT population continues to lag in access to healthcare services. “There are over 100,000 LGBT individuals 65 and older in New York City,” notes Jackie, “and research shows that this group is more likely to experience poverty, social isolation, depression, chronic illness, and premature mortality. They also often delay seeking care, out of fear of discrimination by healthcare providers. This project aims to help address these disparities by lowering barriers to care among LGBT seniors.”

VNSNY is already engaged in an ongoing initiative to enhance care delivery to the LGBT community, including its intensive commitment to enterprise-wide LGBT cultural competency training, which has resulted in SAGECare Platinum certification for VNSNY Home Care, Hospice and Partners in Care—indicating that 80 percent or more of each division’s staff has gone through the training—and VNSNY Home Care’s specialized post-acute care program for gender-affirmation surgery patients.

“Staff from VNSNY’s Community Collaborations has been meeting regularly with LGBT-focused organizations to better understand the work they do and identify ways in which we might collaborate around LGBT services and issues of concern,” says Rhonda Soberman, Manager of Program Development for VNSNY. “We’ve learned a great deal from these discussions, and have had an opportunity to share the great work provided by VNSNY program and services. We’re confident that our continuum of care, provided in a culturally sensitive way, can support LGBT seniors as they strive to remain at home in their community.”

This new outreach project is designed to coordinate, integrate and expand these efforts. “We’re looking to consolidate what we’re doing and move forward to reach many more LGBT seniors—and to accomplish that, we need a full-time staff member to lead the way,” explains Jackie. “This grant is just the beginning of what we anticipate will be an ongoing and growing outreach to this vulnerable population.”

“We’ve worked very hard since this initiative began in 2016 to address the critical and unmet needs of the city’s rapidly growing population of aging LGBT men and women, as well as to position VNSNY as the city’s preferred provider of home care for LGBT New Yorkers of all ages,” adds Richard Rothstein, head of the VNSNY LGBT Advocacy Group and Vice President of Enterprise Communications. “This grant recognizes how much we’ve accomplished in a very short time in achieving this goal.”