About Us:

The mission of Community Access is to expand opportunities for people living with mental health concerns to recover from trauma and discrimination through affordable housing, training, advocacy, and healing-focused services. We are built upon the simple truth that people are experts in their own lives. For decades, we’ve led the charge for housing and resources for the most vulnerable people in our community. Our story began in 1974 when our founders purchased two small Lower East Side buildings to support families and ex-mental health patients, laying the foundation for what is now known as supportive housing. Now almost fifty years later, Community Access owns and operates 20 beautiful housing programs throughout New York City — provides homes to over 1,500 individuals and families, serves over 3,000 people annually, and employs close to 400 dedicated team members.  Over time, our programs have expanded beyond housing to provide other healing-focused services to meet the needs of New Yorkers living with mental health concerns.  Our ground-breaking employment and training program – the Howie The Harp Advocacy Center – established in 1995 – has been recognized internationally and replicated in The Netherlands. Our commitment to meeting people where they are and taking our lead from participants in guiding service delivery sets us apart.  We look forward to continuing our work of system transformation, highlighting the necessity and value of truly person-centered services.

Learn more about our history, our values, and our impact.

About the Opportunity:

This is an exciting opportunity to join an organization committed to human rights and upholding the dignity of each of us.  For almost 50 years Community Access has fought the good fight to ensure that New York City’s public mental health and supportive housing services center the voices of the people we serve.   We are an organization dedicated to learning – from our successes and our mistakes.   We foster environments where creative individuals have the agency to innovate and broadly contribute to the organization’s success.  This role presents a unique opportunity to work across the organization to strengthen our infrastructure, increase agency wide collaboration, and implement effective change management strategies.

We have recently completed a strategic planning process to set our course for the next 5 years. We are redoubling our real estate development efforts, adding new positions and infrastructure that will dramatically increase our ability to build new housing. We’ll grow from 2,000 to 4,000 units to provide housing for people living with mental health concerns and families who have experienced homelessness. We will continue to invest in programs to enhance community integration and help people access opportunities to live longer healthier, self-determined lives. We are committed to increasing our thought leadership and advocacy to shape policy and services around homelessness and mental health toward those rooted in human dignity, recovery, and inclusion.

The COO will be an important actor in our ongoing journey to become an explicitly anti-racist organization, working with other leaders to further develop elements of an inclusive and equitable culture and contribute to implementation efforts. The statement below provides additional context regarding our efforts.

Centering Racial Equity In Our Work

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Our Commitment to Equity, Diversity, Inclusion & Justice

Nonprofit HR is committed to fostering and maintaining a work environment where equity, diversity, inclusion & justice (EDIJ) are fully integrated into everything we do for the benefit of our employees and the clients that we serve. To fully realize our goal, we prioritize our understanding of the complexities of DEI within our workforce to inform our approach to talent management. We believe that this guides how we do our work, advise our clients to operationalize EDIJ and position our content and educational opportunities to help strengthen the talent management capacity of the social impact sector. See the full statement.