Mission and History
Started in January 2007 as a model of how places that serve the low-income community can at low cost and without professional case managers, refer people to the government benefits for which they are eligible. To do this, we train volunteer community members, people who access the same Public Assistance, SSI, Medicaid and Food Stamps as their clients, to do the referral work, and thus make them community leaders. The peer relationship of volunteers to clients empowers both groups, and is what makes CtA unique in the NYC case management world.
Building Community Leadership
CtA's goal is to get people who are entitled to government resources to have them. According to Abraham Maslow's "Hierarchy of Needs" theory, once the "physiological needs" of food, housing and money are met, people go on to "safety needs", e.g., job security and medical insurance, and then to "social needs," e.g., educating their children, belonging to neighborhood groups and affecting government policy. This is what we want to achieve, in our clients and in our volunteers.
