Tuesday, 24 Sep 2024

De Blasio rebrands wife’s $1B ThriveNYC — and makes program permanent

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In trouble? Try a rebranding.

Mayor Bill de Blasio has quietly moved to rename and make permanent first lady Chirlane McCray’s embattled billion-dollar ThriveNYC mental health initiative, shifting the program into City Hall and creating the Office of Community Mental Health to house it.

De Blasio signed the executive orders inking the changes without fanfare on Wednesday, a few days after the initial announcement was buried by the news of sexual harassment allegations leveled against city Comptroller Scott Stringer.

The transition was swift.

The next day, City Hall sent a press release that identified ThriveNYC’s top honcho, Susan Herman, as the “director” of the new Mayor’s Office of Community Mental Health.

ThriveNYC went entirely unmentioned in the Thursday statement, though the email address for inquiries from the press still used the ‘thrive.nyc.gov’ domain.

Meanwhile, the website for McCray’s controversy-scarred initiative quietly added a banner to the top that reads: “We’re becoming the Mayor’s Office of Community Mental Health. Learn Why.”

It’s a far different picture than the one painted by Hizzoner and McCray as they rolled out the new office during his daily press briefing on April 29.

“And third, we want this work to deepen and we want to make sure it’s community focused. So, [we’re] establishing a permanent Mayor’s Office of Community Mental Health,” said de Blasio during that morning press briefing.

“In the end, the way to reach people with mental health challenges is early and often – it’s schools, it’s at community-based organizations, it’s in shelters, it’s in so places where people need help, but, historically, have not had a place to turn,” he continued. “This vision and this office will ensure that mental health services are available at the grassroots all over the city.”

McCray followed her husband — and like him — barely referenced the rebranding.

“With this executive order and the creation of the Mayor’s Office of Community Mental Health, we ensure these innovations will serve New Yorkers for years to come,” she added, never actually saying the new office would subsume her signature initiative.

A subsequent press release only mentioned that the new office will oversee Thrive’s annual spending of “$225M in significant community-based mental health services” in the 10th paragraph.

In response to questions about the seeming effort to bury the moves, City Hall pointed to a tweet sent that day from Thrive’s account — which has just 1,001 followers — that appeared to be the only definitive statement about the news of the day.

“Today, @NYCMayor and @NYCFirstLady announced that we are becoming the Mayor’s Office of Community Mental Health,” read the tweet posted by @MentalHealthNYC.

All told, the de Blasio administration has spent at least $1.2 billion on Thrive-linked programs since it launched in November 2015.

ThriveNYC program came under significant fire and has been the subject of a number of City Council hearings over the years — over allegations de Blasio was using the program to boost his wife’s profile, questions about its spending and effectiveness and lack of information on the overall goals of the program.

Good government watchdogs blasted it for failing to keep basic statistics, like the number of New Yorkers its much-touted hotline actually connected to mental health treatment.

Meanwhile, criminal justice experts assailed its priorities — spending much of its budget on milder forms of mental illness instead of severe disorders like bipolar and schizophrenia.

McCray and the administration justified the strategy using a hotly disputed theory that getting New Yorkers into treatment and therapy would make it easier to diagnose and treat more severe problems later on.

“Thrive has helped hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers get connected to mental health care,” said de Blasio press secretary Bill Neidhardt. “It’s shown the need for a permanent, larger government effort. We held a long presser on this and we’re glad people are engaging on the substance of this issue.”

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