The Jewish Board of Family and Children Services marks a milestone of helping New Yorkers

The Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Service – one of New York’s largest and longest-running mental health and social service agencies – celebrated its 150th anniversary last month. And leading the organization since 2021 is CEO Jeffrey  Brenner, who has used his knowledge from being a family physician in Camden, New Jersey to lead the nonprofit during his tenure. Under his leadership, the Board has been committed to quality and being accountable about the way it delivers services to New Yorkers, all while looking back at the past to see how the execution of those services has evolved and broadened. 

New York Nonprofit Media spoke with Brenner to learn more about the Board, a Nov. 18 symposium marking the organization’s recent milestone anniversary, and what’s next for a nonprofit that strives to address the needs of any New Yorker. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What is the Jewish Board and how long has it been around? 

So we're a $220 million organization. We're one of the largest mental health and social service agencies in the state of New York. We have been around for 150 years, and we were formed by Jews to take care of very poor refugees and immigrants from Eastern Europe and Russia in the latter part of the 1800s. We hired a group of historians who've helped us learn more about our own history, and they actually found an additional 50 years of history. We actually have antecedent organizations that stretch all the way back to the 1830s. There's about 100 different organizations that merged over time, split apart, merged back in. So it's a big family tree. 

Tell me about the myriad of services your organization offers. Which ones are the most popular?

We organized basically into four divisions. So part of the agency serves the needs of the Jewish community. So we've got a whole variety of grief groups, support groups, domestic violence services that specifically target the Jewish community, including working with Orthodox Jews with intellectual developmental delay. [Our] second division is 1,200 units of supportive housing for people with severe mental illness and often a history of being unhoused. We've also got domestic violence services there. For the third major bucket, we run mental health and addiction clinics across the city and all five boroughs. We do 5,000 visits a week of therapy and psychiatry for New Yorkers of all ages and all backgrounds. Also, there's some specialized services; day programs for people with severe mental illness, outreach teams called act teams and care coordination. The fourth bucket (is) youth and family services, primarily targeting kids and their families, programs for adolescents in foster care who live with us, programs for kids with severe mental illness who live with us for a period of time and then a variety of outreach services for all those populations. 

Are there services offered specifically for LGBTQ+ folks?

We have [been] tailoring in a whole bunch of the different services. A significant chunk of the foster care kids that live with us have gotten thrown out of their homes because they're LGBTQ. So that's one example of that. In our clinics, we have clinicians that specialize in care of LGBTQ youth. Life for any kid is hard. Life for an LGBTQ kid in a family that doesn't understand them, in a community that may not understand them, can be doubly hard. I have a trans daughter and my family has been loving and caring and supportive. It's not easy, even when you're completely open and happy for your child to be who they are. So clearly, families need support. 

Your organization recently held a symposium to celebrate 150 years, how was it? What has the organization learned after all this time? 

We think it's really important to study our history, take lessons from it, both the good and the bad, and then use that as a way of thinking about where the field goes, and where our agency goes into the future. At different points in our history, we were a leading organization in different fields. For example, in the 40s and 50s, we were a leading organization in children's mental health and children's residential care. Our predecessors back then were publishing in peer reviewed journals and speaking at conferences. So we found a whole bunch of academic books and academic authors who feature different parts of our history in their history of the field of child mental health or the field of social work. So we invited those academics to come and participate, share with us what they learned about the field and our part in that history. 

And then we pulled out some elements of things that we're embarrassed about, things that in modern vernacular and modern eyes probably were mistakes and wanted to learn from those things. And then say, “What are we doing now that 50 years from now, we might be embarrassed by?” I'll give you an example. We built out a beautiful website that looks at 150 years of history, and we found we have some client records stretching back to the 20s. So we took a real case file from a 10-year-old kid treated in the 40s and we redacted it, took all the confidential information out, and we shared it with (academics) and with some of our staff to make it a discussion item in one of our panels. And then we actually put quotes from the patient notes up on the screen. And it was very clearly an LGBTQ kid who was 10, and where just our treatment was sub optimal because at that time society didn't really understand LGBTQ individuals and didn't really know how to approach their care. Frankly, back then child psychiatry and psychiatry in general was full of like, gobbledygook nonsense, like old Freudian stuff and a lot of stigma as well. 

So this kid ended up getting like 50 electroshock therapy treatments and no one really ever acknowledged him or who he was or his own identity. I think there was a lot of caring in the notes. They obviously cared about the kid, but they didn't know what they were doing, and I think it's important for us to have a realistic view when we say our predecessors struggled with a certain area. You know, seeing an actual case, I think, helps us understand that. At the end, we wrapped up with a discussion of what are we doing now that we may cringe about later on and how can that inform our strategy in the next couple of years? If we want to be a cutting edge, super sophisticated, thoughtful organization. How do we do that going forward?

What brought about that transition from mainly extending services to Jewish immigrants to offering services to people of all backgrounds? 

When we look back, it seemed to be somewhere between the 50s and 70s that they were beginning to have some success with their approaches and their treatment, and the Jewish community itself was no longer incredibly poor and discriminated against and was beginning to succeed economically. There's actually writing back in the 50s saying there were far fewer Jews that need our services than historically, like our programs are emptying out. But over here, there's a lot of demand from all other New Yorkers saying, like, “hey, we need some care too. Can you let us into your program?” And they made a decision back in the 50s and 60s to start enrolling all New Yorkers. And that's awesome. That's a pretty cool history.

Did the demand for services among the Jewish or Middle Eastern community spike after Oct. 7 and after Trump’s reelection? What was that like?

Yeah, for sure. We spent a lot of time doing talks and helping people understand how to take care of their mental health, more of a communication strategy and a population health strategy. We were doing support groups, doing talks and lectures and things like that. People are overwhelmed, they're anxious, they're worried. If they have any pre-existing anxiety, depression, if they're a group that could end up being targeted, I think it makes them more vulnerable at a time like this.

What’s your day-to-day look like?

I'm very focused on using my time to make sure that we have measurable and organized approaches to making the agency better and better for our clients. We've all had experiences where we go to a hospital, we go to a clinic, we go to a restaurant and the food's cold. You sit in the waiting room and wait for a long time, the provider runs in the room and runs out of the room and no one listens to you. So I don't want that ever to happen in the Jewish Board, and I want the experience that our clients have to be amazing and life changing, and I'm convinced that we do life changing care, but do we do it every day with every client, every staff member in every location. That's hard to do, and I don't think we're quite there yet, but I want us to be there.

What in your work history best prepared you for the challenges you face in this role?

I think spending 10 years on the frontlines of Camden, New Jersey, one of the poorest cities in the country, trying to take care of moms and kids and large extended families and all the struggles that they were going through. The stories of the people I took care of are with me every day, and I'm still haunted by the care that I did in Camden. I would routinely send my clients for counseling, for social services, for housing, and they got put on waiting lists, and when they got into services, the services often weren't very good quality. So I'm determined that we change lives because we don't have a waiting list, because we are accessible, we're easy to get people into. The quality of the service is amazing. We can change lives, but we can only change lives if we have really well trained staff doing evidence based models in an incredibly patient centered, client centered and organized way with measurable outcomes, strong workflows and all the things that a great organization needs. Some of the services have a sliding scale that goes down to zero, and some of them are state or city funded. So it just depends on the service.

Why do you think people of all backgrounds find comfort in seeking help from a Jewish organization?

We have four core values, and they harken to much older Jewish values. And I hope that when people come and get care from us and services from us, that they're feeling like they're in a place that's got some real anchoring of values. Our core values are universal, they're not just Jewish values. So Catholic charities deliver services now to people of all faiths, not just people who are Catholic. There are Quaker services. There are all kinds of different religious groups that run hospitals, that run refugee services, that run mental health services all over America. Baptists run a lot of large hospitals in the south and I think, as a physician, my experience has been that faith-based services often go the extra mile. They do the right thing, regardless of whether it may make them more money in the short term. 

What’s next for the Jewish Board? 

We're very focused on scaling evidence-based models, and with the social work residency we have, we're doing a lot of operational changes to our clinics so that we can serve more and more New Yorkers. We know that families, kids, and adults are having a lot of mental health challenges. I never want someone to end up on a waiting list. I never want someone to walk away not feeling that their therapist was incredibly qualified, incredibly well trained. So I'm focused on the details of care, because I want to give people an amazing experience. It's a very vulnerable moment when you finally sign up for therapy, and I want someone to walk away feeling like they had an incredible experience.