Takeaways from NYC’s mayoral forum on nonprofits

Just two of the eight top candidates running to become mayor of New York City showed up to a virtual forum focused on nonprofits held on Friday. Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams and Dianne Morales, a former nonprofit executive who led Phipps Neighborhoods, shared their respective visions for the role nonprofits would play in the city in their respective administrations if elected.

Each candidate laid out plans for addressing pay gaps in the nonprofit sector, which has a workforce predominantly made up of women and people of color. Morales said she would ensure wages for human services workers were raised, and Adams emphasized that he would conduct an analysis to make sure fair pay was being given. “We need to do a real-time analysis across the board to make sure that we are giving our nonprofits a fair distribution of dollars, to make sure that they are also paying their employees a living wage,” he said.

Morales also said more efforts should be made to fund smaller nonprofits that are more representative of the city’s communities and to redesign the contracting process at large. She proposed a public rating system to evaluate the efficacy of the city’s contracting process, with input from community organizations. 

“What we're talking about is a Morales administration that would actually bring nonprofits to the table, not in any kind of symbolic way, not in any kind of performative way,” she said.