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Clubhouse members and advocates urge City Council to baseline funding and expand peer-led crisis response
Summary
Members, service providers and advocates told the City Council's committees on mental health and substance use and disabilities that baseline funding and expansion of peer-led crisis services (including mobile teams and the Be Heard program) are needed. Witnesses requested specific increases in peer-support and mobile-response budgets.
Dozens of service users, program staff and advocates testified to the committees on mental health, substance use and disabilities that baseline funding is critical for the city's network of mental health clubhouses and peer programs, and many called for reducing police involvement in crisis response.
Charles de San Pedro Jr., a member of Top Clubhouse, opened the panel with a personal appeal — "I love Top. It means so much" — urging the council to baseline funding so members do not face program closures. Hadley Weiss, program coordinator for Top Clubhouse, said members are "deeply afraid that the clubhouse will be taken from them" and asked for stable funding so members can continue to build relationships, skills and recovery supports.
Bianca Simmons, program director at Top Clubhouse (Goddard Riverside), described the clubhouse as a community where people gain confidence and employment skills and urged the council to baseline funding across small clubhouses citywide. Wynn, director of external affairs at Goddard Riverside, asked the council to restore and enhance funding to $3,790,000 for clubhouses, expand the peer specialist support initiative from $4,500,000 to $6,000,000, and fully fund mobile response teams, including $11,000,000 for intensive mobile treatment teams.
Advocates also urged changes to crisis-response policy. Christina Sparrick, an alternative crisis response researcher at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, said police involvement in the Be Heard program is "too frequent," recounted an episode where unannounced police presence escalated personal danger, and urged the council to fund truly non-police, peer-led responses, establish 988 as the number for mental health crises, and ensure trauma-informed, culturally responsive dispatch and oversight.
Other witnesses reinforced these points: Jonathan Chung of NAMI NYC said the preliminary budget's $5,000,000 for a mental health continuum initiative is insufficient and asked for restoration of $250,000 for youth peer support, $500,000 for the peer support specialist initiative and $150,000 for family support services; Toni Smith of the Drug Policy Alliance highlighted harm-reduction successes including two overdose prevention centers and nearly 250,000 site uses and urged fulfillment of a $4,000,000 city commitment; and Camilla Samuelson of New York Lawyers for the Public Interest said that through mid-October 2025 over 3,000 New Yorkers were arrested by ICE and urged trauma-informed services for people released from detention.
The testimony combined service-user accounts of how clubhouses aid recovery with specific budget requests and calls to pivot some crisis responses away from police toward peer-led, community-based teams. The transcript records no formal committee vote on these requests during this panel; the session moved on after public testimony.
