A soon-to-be nonprofit exec responds when ‘God had bigger plans’

President Donald Trump’s onslaught of executive orders targeting the nonprofit world, among other groups, has left many organizations preparing for uncertainty over the next four years as they continue to administer essential services to communities all across the country.

Since 1980, WellLife Network has provided people with developmental disabilities and mental illness with an array of services and care as well as providing supportive and affordable housing units in New York City and Long Island in the midst of a housing crisis. 

Sherry Tucker has been at the helm of WellLife for seven years, managing around 1,800 employees and volunteers while caring for more than 25,000 individuals and families yearly. Despite the chaos and confusion regarding funding cuts and freezes for the nonprofit sector, WellLife has kept busy as the organization recently broke ground on a 136-unit affordable and supportive housing community in the Bronx and is currently prepping for another in Medford, Long Island.  

Tucker spoke to New York Nonprofit Media about her unexpected journey into her role as CEO at WellLife and how that has shaped the work the nonprofit does in New York.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

I wanted to begin with a fun question. If I met you at an event or outside somewhere, and I didn't know what you did for a living, how would you describe your job and what you do?

I am the leader of an amazing organization in a very unexpected position. I never thought that this would be where my journey would carry me to be in New York and to lead a large behavioral health organization like WellLife Network, but that's how life is. Twists and turns get you into places that you never expect. But I'm an accountant by trade and I started as a person that helped them in a consulting capacity to figure out some of their financial challenges. It evolved into a 15 year relationship where eventually they lured me up to New York. So the position encompasses anything and everything about this organization. We care for and support individuals with developmental disabilities, mental health challenges and substance use disorder issues all across New York City and Long Island. We do that by providing housing and support services, care coordination, clinical services, anything and everything we can to provide people the stability to achieve their goals and dreams. 

What does a typical day look like for you? How do you start the day? How do you prepare for it? What's your routine like?

Are you ready? It's a big day let me tell you. For my own self care, I typically get up at about 5:30 a.m. and take about a three mile walk or run. That's my best thinking time to come up with solutions to challenges that we've been facing that's been kind of rolling around in my head. So I do that, get myself ready for the day, come in and what my day typically looks like is, I'm jam full of Zoom meetings. I'm sitting in front of the computer just zooming in and out with various things but we still do have some in person meetings. The life of a CEO, I've said many times, you don't really work anymore. You just solve problems and you have meetings to try to help other people solve problems. Whenever I want to do actual work and do what I used to do like spreadsheets and calculations and come up with things to try to help us solve problems, I usually do that on the weekends or at night after hours because I'm too busy trying to connect all the dots and make sure everybody is being properly directed and supported. We have over 104 programs that are either funded through Medicaid, self pay, commercial or Medicare and then contracts with the government, whether it's state, county or city. We have the whole array of those types of funding supports. We’re really trying to grow the affordable, mixed use apartment buildings, because there's such a shortage of affordable living in New York and Long Island. So, we spend a lot of time finding properties in these areas. It's a very laborious and tedious process to get all the regulatory bodies aligned to give us the money to build the buildings and get people living in them. But it's the most rewarding thing. We work really hard to make sure they're well constructed, so they'll have longevity. There's people with supportive services living there, about 60%, and then 40% are people that are from the community that meet the standards on the income for affordability, which is usually about 60% of AMI (Area Median Income). So that takes a good part of my day as well.

In terms of housing, how do people get connected with the housing services and options that WellLife offers?

We have a full housing continuum for individuals with intellectual or developmental disabilities which is through a referral system from the state. So those houses are group homes and they have to get in the system under the Office for People with Developmental Disabilities to qualify. Then they refer them to us. So there's no direct referral for those types of houses. For the mental health side, where most of the situations are based on diagnosis, those come through referrals. For the mixed use affordable housing with no support services, there's a housing lottery that's available for people to put their name in. The unfortunate thing is that the housing lottery has well over 100,000 people in it. It just really shows the dire need that is facing New Yorkers in terms of trying to find affordable living. For those that are in the supported units, they come through a referral process, depending on where the funding came from. So it's quite a process. It's not like you can just walk in off the street and say, I want to live here.

Could also talk about the children's community residences that WellLife offers?

Yes, we have three of those that are in Suffolk County, and these are homes that are designed for families that are in need. Our workers are going into people's homes and trying to provide them with the tools and support to keep the family united. Typically, there's a mental health condition in the child that's creating a lot of stress and turmoil in the home, and they don't have the coping skills or the knowledge base on how to deal with it. So, our people come in and try to help them figure that out and link them with services and support. If the situation comes to a point where it's dangerous for the family or the child, or any combination thereof, then they're referred to come in and live in our community residences. The goal is to have them no longer than one year in these homes, and they are coming into that house to kind of decompress the situation that caused them to be there. Every weekend, they're supposed to be going home to be with the family, spending time with them. But during the week, they live in the house with our team in these homes, and they go to school. They’re connected with all the different services that they need in order to get themselves in a better place to be reunited with the family full time and go back there. There are some cases where there is not a family present so they'll stay with us through their 18th birthday, and then that's when they are required to move on because of the age parameters for those houses. And there is a challenge there in terms of trying to find placement for them, because the adult system for an 18-year-old is very difficult. So there's some transitional housing that's starting to develop, and we're interested in trying to participate. That would allow for a little bit of a runway for them to step into that arena. And the goal is ultimately to try to get them independent and living on their own without the supports if that's possible.

You mentioned your journey here was unexpected. You said your background is in accounting, you have an MBA. Talk to me about how you got here?

So, I grew up in Indiana and received an accounting degree from Indiana University and went into public accounting. We decided to move south and ended up in Florida. They required an additional year of schooling in order to be a CPA. I decided, ‘If I'm going back to school, I'm going to get a piece of paper.’ So that's how the MBA came about. But I did that while I was working in public accounting, and then eventually I moved into the private sector and started working for an ophthalmologist. He had a lot of businesses, so I was the controller running all those businesses. We decided to move to Tampa, and once we got there, I stepped back and kind of raised the kids a little bit and did some part-time work. And then as the kids got older, I jumped back into the arena and started working as a controller for a printing company. Then a real unexpected, very big twist and turn in the road happened when my eight-year-old son was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and it was a very aggressive form of cancer. He passed after 10 months of treatment. It was quite earth shattering and turned our world upside down. It really changed my perspective. I really enjoyed working in these different businesses, but I saw that I wanted to do something that had more impact and meaning, because I saw just how fragile life is and how important it is to make the best of every day. When Zach passed, we started a small foundation in Florida called Giving Hope Through Faith. We really turned to our faith to help maneuver through all the challenges that come with losing a child. That foundation was used to help other families that are facing cancer. Over 10 years, we helped over 600 families and raised a million bucks. It felt like God prepared me for that, because I had this accounting background. It was no problem for me to get this set up and run a nonprofit-type business, but it really opened my eyes to the nonprofit world. I wrote a book about our journey, something I never expected to do being an accountant; I'm not a writer, but hey, it happened. I tried to get a job in Tampa as an executive director of a foundation called the Children's Cancer Center. It didn't work out, but it connected me with a man who also is an accountant, who was doing work up here in New York. God had bigger plans and the plan was to get me up here so I could help this agency. So it'll be eight years next month that we've lived up here in New York, and I've been running the company now as the CEO for seven of those eight years. I really had no experience in the behavioral health, human services industry, until I started doing the consulting work here. But in accounting, once you have the understanding of how the business cycles work and all of that, you just figure out the rest. I never really thought I would be a CEO, but it just evolved, and it just kind of came through organically as I got to know the agency more and more and did different things. It just felt natural that that would be the next step, and thankfully, they felt the same.

What’s the name of your book?

It's called “Unfinished Love: Walking by Faith Through Pediatric Cancer,” and it basically starts the day that Zach was diagnosed and ends about a week after he passed. You step into my head and take a ride through the journey that was just mind bending and horrendous in terms of the suffering. The lessons and the the courage and the strength that he had as a little eight year old kid was just, he taught us all so much, and I look at it as what a special gift we had, that we had those eight years with him, and that we got to learn all the lessons that we did from him. Obviously I wish so many times over and over that that wasn't his journey, but you know, it is what it is, and we, my husband and I, were both determined we're going to make the best of this situation and try to bring as much love and good into the world as a way to build his legacy.

Could you talk more about the rewarding aspects of your work as well as the challenges that you encounter?

It's hard to keep everybody informed and united. So I started writing a weekly message, and I send this out every week, and I talk about anything and everything. Lately, there's been all this anxiety and concern about what's coming out of Washington. How is that going to change? What's that going to do to us? So I tried to give perspective of what I think. This is how I think we'll deal with it. Don't worry. We're in good shape. We built up a nice reserve. If there's a pause in funding, we can weather the storm. It kind of feels like we're in COVID again. We manage day by day. Which executive order is coming out today? Okay, how are we going to react to that one? You know, with the bill that passed last night, it's a little concerning. They keep talking about, “Well, they're going to have to cut Medicaid somehow.” So, I've had people talk to me today about, well, what does that mean for us? We’ve worked hard to make sure we were financially stable. The thing that I understand now after the years that I've been here, is that it always works out one way or another. The government, yes, will put pressure on us but they're never going to walk away from helping the people that we serve. Because what would they do? We're not going to leave the vulnerable people who can't care for themselves. There's always going to be that need. We have to have faith that we'll get through it. That's what the team does. Our mantra is every staff person is going to feel valued, seen and heard. The best rewards are when I hear these success stories of people who come to us broken, challenged, no resources, homeless, and they get a place to live, food to eat, people to support them and they are able to get a job or do some kind of amazing thing. The challenges are when things don't go well, when the regulatory bodies put something in the way, or they do things that just make no sense. Or when we have a person that does not succeed, we have to go back, take a look at everything and try to figure out what happened. How can we do better? How can we try to help make sure this doesn't happen again in the future? 

What message would you like to share with policy makers and the public about the importance of the work that WellLife does?

I would say for policy makers in this time of transition and change, to really make sure they understand the implications of the decisions they may make. It may not seem real but they need to understand what impact a decision might have on people who are depending on the dollars that they're able to allocate. For the general public, it would be to understand that everybody has value, and nobody should be overlooked or disregarded. There is value in every person on this earth. We're all humans and we all need to respect each other. We're in it together. We need to make the very best of the circumstances we're in by working together and not against each other.