Lower Manhattan’s Local Newspaper | | |
Ladies of Good Counsel
Trinity and Pace Team Up to Provide Free Psychotherapy
| Dr. Rebecca Kulzer (left), director of Pace University’s McShane Center for Psychological Services, and Vidia Cordero (right), Trinity Church’s executive director for neighborhood support, have created a program that offers free therapy to the Lower Manhattan community. | |
Trinity Church has partnered with Pace University’s McShane Center for Psychological Services to offer free psychotherapy to the Lower Manhattan community. “This is part of our Community Wellness Program,” explains Vidia Cordero, Trinity’s executive director for neighborhood support. “The program is open to people in need in the community. We became increasingly aware of individuals and families requiring services, who were being placed on waiting lists for six months or longer, often due to financial hardship or lack of insurance coverage. In response, we intentionally created a more accessible approach to care. We do not require insurance information, or ask about the individual’s ability to pay, because the process is that we pay for it. Through the referral process we have developed with McShane, we focus on two simple but meaningful questions: ‘do you need help?’ and ‘how can we help?’ With this approach, we are getting people services in days or weeks, rather than months.”
Dr. Rebecca Kulzer, director of the McShane Center, says, “the usual model for a program like this is to offer ten free sessions and then nothing more. Our model with Trinity is different, because we provide an unlimited number of one-on-one sessions. This means continuity of therapy—the same patient with the same therapist for three to four years. We are one of maybe three sites that do this anywhere in the United States or Canada.”
“When Vidia and I first discussed this,” Dr. Kulzer recalls, “I described the scale of the need, and the frustration of being able to provide only limited support. And Vidia just said, ‘we’re in.’ That’s how we started.”
In addition to patients referred by Trinity, Dr. Kulzer says, “anytime a client who comes to McShane can’t pay or has problems with insurance, we ask if they want to be part of our Trinity partnership. These are patients who would otherwise be denied services, and the whole point for us is to provide access. Our guiding principle, our ethos is to offer high-quality psychotherapy and to address disparity.” (Outside of the Trinity program, the McShane Center also offers low-cost/sliding scale therapy, based on need, priced at between $25 and $75 per hour.) “These services would otherwise cost $350 per session,” Dr. Kulzer notes, “but insurance is a moot point for us, because these patients never have to submit a claim.”
The 45-minute sessions—offered both in-person at the McShane Center’s Lower Manhattan offices (52 Broadway) and remotely—are provided by graduate psychology students at Pace who are working on doctoral degrees, under the supervision of licensed psychologists with decades of experience. Each doctoral student treats a maximum of five patients.
“Every hour of therapy provided by our graduate students requires an hour of supervision by our licensed psychologists, on both an individual basis and in groups,” Dr. Kulzer explains. “This unheard-of ratio is unique. It represents almost triple the minimum requirement, and gives our doctoral students lots of support. It means that our students get training, and our patients get a level of care, that are matched nowhere else. That supervision by senior therapists is actually the largest part of our budget.”
Since the Trinity-McShane partnership’s start in 2023, the program has provided more than 1,500 psychotherapy sessions to patients ranging in age from 15 to 67. (The average age is 40.) “When I reviewed the most recent data from McShane,” Ms. Cordero says, “it became clear that the overall utilization and the need for services have grown dramatically. So we are exploring ways to expand capacity and enhance services to better support the rising number of community members seeking help.”
Anyone wishing to connect with free therapy from the McShane Center, as part of Trinity Church’s Community Wellness program, may call Trinity’s resource line (917-594-6300), or email resources@trinitychurchnyc.org.
Matthew Fenton
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They Speak for the Trees
Grassroots Organization Questions Canopy Culling for Battery Park City Resiliency
“We are losing very large, mature trees,” laments Battery Park City resident Felipe Serra (right). “Those trees are part of why my family moved here. I wanted my five-year-old son to grow up in an oasis, surrounded by greenery and shade.”
Mr. Serra is part of a group of concerned Lower Manhattan residents who are challenging the Battery Park City Authority’s plan to cut down 500 trees in its North/West Resiliency project. Read more...
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Come Sail Away
A Pair of Historic Vessels Offer Summer Boating in New York Harbor
Two vessels from the South Street Seaport Museum’s historic working fleet, the 1885 schooner Pioneer and the 1930 tugboat W.O. Decker, both moored at Pier 16, are embarking on their 2026 public sailing season.
Pioneer, the oldest working boat of any kind in New York Harbor, is the only iron-hulled American merchant sailing vessel still in existence and one of just two cargo sloops ever built of iron in this country. W.O. Decker (right) is the last remaining wooden tugboat in New York Harbor. The 52-foot tug was built in Long Island City for the Newtown Creek Towing Company. Read more...
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Letters
Re: They Speak for the Trees, May 27, 2026
To the editor,
Matthew Fenton’s otherwise excellent article about tree removal by the resiliency project omits to mention that the new trees will not be the same kind as the trees being removed. We have been told that the new trees will be better able to survive flooding by salty water, but artist’s renderings also show that the new trees will be smaller, less majestic, and will provide much less shade than the old trees, even when fully grown.
Richard Joffe
To the editor,
Kudos to BPC resident Felipe Serra for drawing attention to the Battery Park City Authority’s insane scheme to chainsaw 500 mature, 40-year-old shade trees, and replace them with a Berlin-style concrete flood wall. According to the BPCA, we must destroy the environment in order to save it. Obviously, this is untrue. Tree cover has been proven time and again to provide flood resiliency. See, e.g., https://environment.yale.edu/news/article/everglades-mangroves-show-surprising-resilience-storms-changing-climate. Meanwhile, man-made walls have failed time and again to stop flooding. See Army Corps of Engineers’ New Orleans flood barrier system or, alternatively, the Little Dutch Boy. The BPCA’s concrete wall will crack and crumble long before Battery Park City will experience any catastrophic flooding, under even the most aggressive of scientific predictions. At the end of the day, this whole resiliency plan is just a scheme to divert over $2 billion in affordable housing funds away from their statutory purpose (in the midst of the housing crisis, no less) and redirect the loot into the pockets of various contractors who are politically connected to the Governor and other Albany muckety-mucks. While pork barrel projects can still yield returns, this project creates no useful infrastructure, while being so environmentally damaging it would have made Robert Moses blush. We can do better. Contact your elected representative and tell them to put a stop to this steal.
John Dellaportas
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Thursday, May 28
10am-12pm
Mah Jongg Lessons
200 Rector Place
Learn the rules and mechanics of American Mah-Jongg. Free.
1pm-2:30pm
Ellen O'Brien
Bogardus Plaza
Jazz performance. Free.
2pm-4pm
Celebrate Hawaiian Culture
National Museum of the American Indian, One Bowling Green
In celebration of Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, enjoy hands-on activities related to Hawaiian culture. Learn about the process used by Native Hawaiians to create kapa, cloth made from paper mulberry tree bark, or wauke, and as a keepsake, stamp a bookmark with kapa designs to take home. Also on May 29 and 30. Free.
1pm-3pm
Fiber Art Crafts Studio
200 Rector Place
Bring your projects, which can include—but are not limited to—knitting, crocheting, embroidery and small-loom weaving. Free.
6pm
25 Years Later: Creating Resilience for Communities
9/11 Memorial & Museum
HEART 9/11 President & Founder and retired PAPD Lt. Bill Keegan, Newtown, CT Police Sgt. Scott Ruszczyk, Danbury, CT Police Det. Sgt. Amity LaFantano, Chief of Mental Health at the Miami VA Healthcare System, Dr. Spencer Eth, and Professor of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Dr. Jonathan DePierro, will discuss the evolution of mental health care and resilience-building for first responders and communities in crisis since 2001. Free.
6:30pm-9pm
Red Baraat
Wagner Park
A Brooklyn-based global dance explosion, Red Baraat blends Bhangra, funk, jazz, and rock into a wild, joy-filled party led by dhol master Sunny Jain. Free.
7pm
Hester Street
Museum of Jewish Heritage, 36 Battery Place
Screening and book talk. Joan Micklin Silver’s groundbreaking debut feature film, Hester Street (1975), vividly portrays the immigrant experience through the eyes of Gitl (Carol Kane), a young, Orthodox Jewish woman who arrives in New York City from Eastern Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. $10 suggested donation.
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Friday, May 29
11am-11:30am
Curator Tour of Native New York—From the Bronx to Buffalo
National Museum of the American Indian, One Bowling Green
Reflect on 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence with a special curator-led tour of the exhibition Native New York. The Revolutionary War (1775–1783) tested the bonds of the Haudenosaunee (Mohawk, Oneida, Tuscarora, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca nations) Confederacy, an alliance of six nations that controlled most of the territory now known as New York State. Neighboring nations were also drawn into the conflict and all were forced to choose sides or try to remain neutral. Learn more about Indigenous history on both frontiers of the war in relation to the Mohican, Oneida, and Cayuga communities and in the war’s aftermath at Buffalo Creek. Repeated at 1pm. Free.
12pm-1pm
BPC Resiliency Drop-In
6 River Terrace
Meet the Community Construction Liaison and members of the North/West Battery Park City Resiliency project team, get your questions answered, and give your feedback on the work underway.
6pm
DJ MD
Perelman Performing Arts Center
Musical performance. Free.
7pm-8:30pm
Sunset Singing Circle
Irish Hunger Memorial Plaza
Singer/songwriter Terre Roche leads this weekly singing program of classic and contemporary tunes for beginners and seasoned crooners alike. Free.
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