Alliance Alert: The Alliance for Rights and Recovery is pleased to see that both the NYS Assembly and Senate one-house budgets reject proposals to expand involuntary mental health treatment. This is a significant step in ensuring that mental health care remains person-centered and rooted in voluntary, community-based solutions.
We applaud both the Assembly and Senate for including a 7.8% rate enhancement for community-based agencies and their workforce. This funding is essential to ensuring that providers can continue delivering high-quality care, retain dedicated staff, and meet the growing needs of the communities they serve.
Additionally, we are also grateful to the Legislature for funding critical alternative services, including additional INSET teams, Peer Bridger pilots for community hospitals, and Daniel’s Law mental health first responder programs. These investments will provide compassionate, effective support for individuals experiencing mental health crises. The budgets also kept the Governor’s proposal to fund up to 7 new Clubhouses in areas outside of New York City.
We want to extend a huge thank you to everyone who has participated in our advocacy efforts, including those who joined us for our March 4th Legislative Day. Your voices and dedication helped secure critical funding for our priority services and successfully stopped harmful expansions of involuntary treatment from being added to the budget.
As the Legislature and Governor’s Office negotiate the final budget, we urge our advocacy community to stay engaged. The Alliance will continue monitoring the process and will alert you to opportunities to take action as we approach the April 1st deadline for the full state budget.
Together, we can ensure that New York invests in a mental health system that prioritizes dignity, choice, and recovery-focused solutions.
We will continue to review details of both legislative bodies’ one house budgets and alert you all to key provisions included. Stay tuned for further updates and read below for more.
Advocates Laud Assembly and Senate Proposals to Strengthen
New York’s Mental Health Crisis Continuum, Fund 7.8% Rate Hike and
Reject Expansion of Involuntary Treatment
March 11, 2025
Contact: Luke Sikinyi, VP for Public Policy, 518-703-0264
Harvey Rosenthal, CEO, 518-527-0564
The Alliance for Rights and Recovery, a partnership of people with major mental health challenges and recovery-focused community providers located across New York, gave enthusiastic support to the service and funding enhancements included in the NYS Assembly and Senate’s FY 2025-26 budget proposals and their rejection of proposals to expand the use of involuntary mental health treatment.
The Assembly and Senate budget proposals fund an array of innovative outreach, crisis and criminal justice diversion and hospital discharge services for New Yorkers with major mental health challenges that include:
- Expansion of New York’s groundbreaking INSET peer-to-peer engagement and support programs and of Enhanced Voluntary Services packages that provide effective alternatives to the use of involuntary treatment,
- Additional Peer Bridger teams to support people to successfully break the cycle of repeat relapses and hospital readmissions,
- Creation of up to 7 First Responder teams of mental health and emergency medical technicians that will provide a health-led rather than public safety response to people in mental health crisis, in keeping with the recommendations of the Daniel’s Law Task Force.
The Assembly and Senate proposals do not include support for expansions in the use of involuntary inpatient and outpatient treatment.
“The Assembly and Senate proposals fund an array of innovative and effective outreach, diversion and discharge program models that have had major success with New Yorkers faced with major mental health, substance use and trauma related challenges and crises,” said longtime advocate and CEO Harvey Rosenthal. “The success of these approaches is based on voluntary approaches that draw in rather than drive away people in frequent states of crisis who experience them as compassionate rather than coercive.”
“We greatly appreciate the Legislature’s longtime support for voluntary and culturally responsive engagement and service models and the action they recently took to fund a new study that is currently looking into the effectiveness of Kendra’s Law,” Rosenthal added.
In keeping with widespread bipartisan support for funding increases for extremely hard-pressed community agencies, the Assembly and Senate proposals both provide for a 7.8% rate increase that has been sought by a broad coalition of community service providers.
“We are thrilled by the Assembly and Senate’s recognition of the extraordinary challenges community providers face each day to attract and retain a dedicated and stable workforce and to address ever mounting costs,” said Alliance Vice President of Public Policy Luke Sikinyi. “We urge both houses and Governor Hochul to come together in support of the 7.8% increase.”
The Assembly also mandated the use of Mental Health Incident Review panels to investigate incidents of violence involving and affecting people with mental illnesses and based on their findings, will promptly issue public recommendations to improve the coordination, integration and accountability of care in the mental health service system.
The advocates are looking forward to reviewing further details from the Senate’s budget resolution proposal later today.
“The Governor and Legislature have been strong partners in advancing landmark reforms, and we look forward to working together to ensure the budget delivers the meaningful changes our state desperately needs,” said Sikinyi. “By advancing voluntary care, enhanced coordination, increased accountability, and system investments, New York can lead the way in creating a truly transformative mental health system.”