Dear Community Partners:
Thank you for your leadership during this unprecedented time. We are grateful for your partnership in our efforts to serve New Yorkers in need during the COVID-19 pandemic.
As a follow up to our previous communication on Sunday, March 22, and our community-wide conference call on Monday, March 23, we wanted to share an important recent development.
HRA Center Locations
To help stop the spread of COVID-19, we have consolidated our HRA Job, SNAP, and Medicaid Center locations, effective
12:00pm yesterday, Tuesday, March 24
. As we have reported in our previous communications, we asked the State for – and received – permission to accept Cash Assistance (CA) applications online, which, as you know, began on
Friday, March 20
. The interview portion of the CA application process is being conducted by telephone. Please note that SNAP applications, and those for emergency benefits such as utility or rent arrears, were already available through ACCESS HRA.
As a result of these consolidations, we are advising New Yorkers to apply for public benefits online at ACCESS HRA in order to prevent unnecessary visits to an HRA center. For clients who cannot or do not want to apply online, a list of Job, SNAP, and Medicaid center locations that will remain open can be found here:
Job
,
SNAP
,
Medicaid
.
Clients are being informed of this change via ACCESS HRA, email, robocalls, text messages, flyers, and signage in our offices as well as social media. For the most recent information about this and other changes, however, please visit our
website
.
We will also continue to share information and recent developments as they become available.
If you were not able to join the call, please find an audio recording
here
, password:
DSSevent032320
.
We have been scheduling informational calls as there are new developments, but many people have asked us to schedule a standing call so please hold
Tuesdays at 5:00PM
as a placeholder.
As always, thank you for continued partnership in serving New Yorkers in need, particularly now when our clients need us more than ever. For your use, here is a
link to the flyer
for clients regarding the public benefits changes that we have described.
If you have any questions or concerns about this change, please do not hesitate to reach out to Vanessa Fuentes in the Office of Advocacy and Outreach, at
fuentesv@dss.nyc.gov.
Sincerely,
Department of Social Services
