New York City’s Department of Social Services Commissioner Gary Jenkins announced on Tuesday, February 7th that he will be stepping down from his position on March 3rd, 2023. Jenkins made the revelation during an interview with NY1’s “Inside City Hall.” Though Jenkins is currently the subject of an ongoing investigation by the city’s Department of Investigation, he insisted that he was resigning to pursue other opportunities.
“After 36 years, I’ve decided to step down,” Jenkins said. “There’s no discord, there’s no running away,” Jenkins insisted. “This was something that was already planned.”
“Because this agency helped my family, from a single-mom household…we were recipients of public assistance and we actually lived in a shelter for a little over a year,” Jenkins said. “I always said I wanted to go back and help others.”
36 Years of Service
Jenkins worked in New York City’s social services for more than 30 years. When the nearly 45,000 asylum seeking migrants began arriving in the city, the department he led was directly responsible for providing shelter for them.
An experienced staffer of the department, he was previously an administrator and first deputy of the Human Resources Administration. As a child, Jenkins spent some time in the city’s shelter system. Mayor Eric Adams said that Jenkins’ first hand experience of the system gave him an upper hand when doing his job as he understood better what people go through there.
Statement from Mayor Adams
The Mayor’s Office released a statement thanking Jenkins for his services.
“Commissioner Jenkins has served New Yorkers for 36 years, providing our most vulnerable neighbors with compassion, dignity, and a path toward stabilizing their lives. Under his leadership, the Department of Social Services invested a historic amount to support unsheltered New Yorkers — bringing and keeping more than 1,100 people living on our subways into shelter as part of our Subway Safety Plan and inviting those with lived experiences to the table to help craft our housing and homelessness plans,” Adams wrote.
He continued, “Commissioner Jenkins also brought his own experience living in a shelter as a child to the job, a unique understanding of the struggles families in shelters face, and a steadfast commitment to treating all of our clients with dignity and care. I’m incredibly grateful to Gary for his decades of service and wish him the very best in his next chapter.”
LittleAfrica News has previously reported on the investigation that involves Jenkins. The investigation is looking into Jenkin’s role in the firing of Julia Savel, who alleged that Jenkins knew that laws were broken by allowing people seeking shelter to spend the night in the city’s intake center. Savel alleged that Jenkins attempted to cover this up as well as the fact that the shelter system was overcrowded at that time.
