Southside, WOC outline plans forward

Last month, both Southside Community Center and the Onondaga and Tompkins County Women’s Opportunity Centers (WOC) announced a cut in services and staff due to challenges caused by the coronavirus.

Like other nonprofits in Tompkins County, Southside and the WOC have experienced challenges on multiple fronts, from social distancing making providing services difficult to budget cuts making it difficult to afford staff. After these announcements — and subsequent responses from the community — both centers have offered further details as to their current states and plans for the future.

The WOC is a nonprofit that provides free programs and services to advance women’s success in the workplace by providing employability skill training. The center announced its financial crisis in a press release Sept. 21, saying that all employees — except for two managers, one for each location in Tompkins and Onondaga counties — had been laid off due to a financial emergency. In addition, its Syracuse location has been surrendered to be totally remote.

The New York State Department of Labor annually awards the WOC with the NYS Displaced Homemaker Program grant, which accounts for 40% of its income, according to the recent release, but the state has defaulted on this grant funding since March, only recently announcing that the center will be receiving the funds shortly with a 20% cut.

Ryan Harriott, executive director of the Tompkins County WOC (womensopportunity.org), explained that while the center was able to adapt many of its services to the COVID-19 situation, the financial challenges compounded as the center went longer without expected state funding.

“Running a nonprofit and a center is pretty costly,” she said. “If we take out our savings, we’ll be here for nine months. Do we want to be here for an extended period of time, or do we want to be here for nine months? So I thought, all right, this is the best time for us to think about opening up more doors for the Women’s Opportunity Center and finding additional funding that can help support us for the next three years.”

Laying off staff was seen as the best decision for the WOC in the long term, as difficult of a decision as it was, Harriott said. Her goal is to bring staff back once the WOC’s financial situation improves, but there are still considerable unknowns right now.

“I don’t know what the future funding looks like as a Displaced Homemaker Program,” she said. “I can only say what the future looks like at this present moment with the funding that we already received for the 2020 and 2021 budget year. My determination is to make sure that I continue to find funding to support us, to bring staff back, but I’m not the person that makes the ultimate decision when they review contracts or grants and funding.”

The WOC did recently receive all of its back vouchers from March through July, though about 20% of the $270,000 owed was cut due to the state’s own financial challenges during COVID-19.

With a “skeleton crew,” Harriott said the center is largely relying on volunteers to continue delivering services like private coaching, job readiness training, life skills training and more. But despite the desperate situation the WOC is in, Harriott and other staff members remain optimistic about a way forward.

“I take this pandemic with a positive attitude that it may have thrown multiple challenges our way, but that’s exactly what our women deal with on a daily basis,” Harriott said. “I don’t give up. I’m going to push through anything. … I’m going to find any type of funding I possibly can to make sure that we are still here.”

For Southside Community Center, the story is a bit more complicated. Southside, located at 305 S. Plain St. in Ithaca, provides a variety of services to “affirm, empower and foster the development of self-pride among the African American citizens of greater Ithaca,” according to its website.

In late September, local reports mistakenly announced that Southside had closed, and responses on social media to those early reports created considerable confusion and misunderstandings regarding Southside’s situation. Ultimately, this prompted Board of Directors Chair Nia Nunn to send a letter out to community members via Southside’s website (sspride.org) to set the record straight (full letter available at t.ly/AY9i).

“I love the human connection that comes from the online world, but there were some posts out there on Facebook that alarmed people about our circumstances, and there was some misinformation,” Nunn explained. “There almost seemed to be, in some people, a level of either excitement or assumption, waiting for us to fail.”

Southside, Nunn clarified, is not closing but is instead on pause, and a multitude of factors — beyond just finances — contributed to this decision. First, Tammy Butler — the center’s previous executive director — stepped down from her position recently, leaving the center in a state of leadership transition. That subsequently made implementing new COVID-19-conscious protocols impossible, according to Nunn’s letter.

“We made the decision to pause until we have had the time to assess our needs, develop these protocols, delegate roles as ‘all hands on deck’ working board members and put in place interim leadership,” Nunn said in the letter. “We are also seeking new board members with legal, financial, fundraising and human resource expertise.”

Another large factor was the fact that current staff had been without enough work in the building to fill their time since shutdowns began back in March. While the center tried to put its employees on a shared work plan, that soon proved to be unsustainable, so staff is currently placed on unemployment instead.

“Unlike many organizations whose work can more easily shift to remote, ours cannot,” Nunn said in the letter. “Many of us have worked diligently, volunteering our time throughout the summer to try and reach and learn about community needs in innovative ways. [But] we are primarily a physical space, location and a facilitator of in-person interaction and community needs.”

In her letter, Nunn highlighted the backlash to early reports about the center’s situation and said that Southside was being held to a higher level of scrutiny and criticism than other nonprofits, particularly ones led by white individuals.

“There were different decisions made and different ways of communicating and crafting out language that now we’re like, ‘Yeah, that could have been done differently or should have been handled differently,’ and owning that and engaging with people personally to process that is a key part of running an organization,” Nunn said. “But that’s our business, and we need the space to mind our business, as an agency, while simultaneously situating ourselves to be everything we possibly can be to and for and with the community.”

As Nunn explained in her letter, Southside is nearly 100 years old, which means it has a considerably long history in the community, and it plans to be in the community for many more decades. While the center is on pause, it will reassess staffing needs and what programs can be safely restarted.

Throughout this month, the center is gradually reopening a few programs. This began with the reopening of its food pantry Saturday, Oct. 3. Southside also continues to offer virtual and physically distanced programming, with Black Town Hall Meetings and voter registration tables planned for this fall.

Overall, while their specific situations and the public reactions to their decisions vary considerably, both Nunn and Harriott share a perseverant and optimistic attitude for the road ahead, with both determined to find any solution to reach a place of stability and continue providing services to their respective communities.

“Despite so much of the uncertainty, we are still allowing ourselves to dream, to imagine, to reimagine, and the commitment to educating ourselves and the community is central,” Nunn said. “Southside Community Center is not closing. We will not only open but thrive.”