The Safe Center of Long Island, once hailed as a model nonprofit providing comprehensive services to traumatic crime victims, abruptly shuttered on March 14 due to a lack of funding, leaving clients in the lurch.
The Bethpage-based organization helped more than 5,000 survivors of domestic violence, rape, sexual assault, child abuse, and human trafficking, according to the center’s 2023 annual report. Questions swirled who would fill the gap in mental health counseling, child advocacy, legal services, emergency housing for victims of domestic violence, employment training, public outreach, and its 24/7 multilingual hotline.
“Due to ongoing financial challenges and the absence of a clear transition plan to ensure continuity of services, The Safe Center will be discontinuing services,” the organization’s website now says. “Over the past several months, we have worked closely with Nassau County to identify a partner to continue these critical services. However, at this time, we are not aware of any plan to ensure continuity, and unfortunately, The Safe Center cannot sustain operations.”
The Safe Center was the only shelter for survivors of domestic violence in Nassau County. It was founded in 2014 following the merger of the Nassau County Coalition Against Domestic Violence and The Coalition Against Child Abuse & Neglect — two agencies that had been around for more than three decades each.
Cindy Scott, the cofounder of the Safe Center, who retired three years ago, said she was “incredibly disappointed” to learn that the organization that she spent years building has gone under.
“The issue now is, who’s going to pick up these needed services?” she asked. “Who’s going to be manning the hotline? Who’s going to be facilitating the child advocacy center? Who’s going to be operating the shelter? Those are the three core services.”
The center notified its employees throughout the week of Jan. 13 that there would be layoffs. The center said the changes earlier this year had been due to financial concerns and a lack of government funding. In 2023, more than 85% of the organization’s funding came from government grants, and had a budget of more than $7 million, according to its most recent tax filings.
Nassau County District Attorney Anne Donnelly expects the closure to negatively impact prosecutors’ ability to try cases against some of the county’s most vulnerable victims.
“The Safe Center halting operations is deeply concerning and will leave a tremendous gap in services for some of our most vulnerable victims,” she said. “This closure will have an adverse effect on our prosecutions involving children and their families, while stripping away a crucial, centralized resource for supportive services, making an already unimaginably difficult set of circumstances even harder for victims of crime. As always, our assistant district attorneys will remain in constant contact with victims, and we will continue to offer our support in every way that we can.”
Nassau County police, whose special victims squad detectives worked closely with the staff and clients at The Safe Center, referred a request for comment to Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman’s office.
Blakeman released a statement saying the county would step in to fill the void on a “temporary basis” with the assistance of Nassau University Medical Center. He blamed the closure on “levels of service not up to standards and mismanagement of funds.”
The Safe Center had said in January it would be transferring some of its core services to its New York City partner, Safe Horizon, while keeping its hotline open. But all services were instead halted while Blakeman said Safe Horizon had yet to agree to a contract that would take over the Safe Center’s operations.
Jeffrey Reynolds, president and CEO of the nonprofit Family and Children’s Association (FCA), said bridging the gap in services will not be easy.
“The Safe Center really provided unique services that weren’t covered by other agencies and quite frankly none of us went down that road over the years because they did a really good job … and nobody wants to duplicate the wheel,” he said.
Neela Mukherjee Lockel, president and chief executive officer of the nonprofit EAC Network, which operates a Central Islip-based child advocacy center (CAC) — a kid-friendly facility that specializes in helping victims get treatment and justice in the aftermath of traumatic crimes — said the closure of The Safe Center is a big loss for the community and partner agencies like hers.
“We count on each other,” she said. “In Suffolk County we partner with other agencies and entities to make sure that if there is domestic violence in the home, that those families are getting the resources that they need from our partners. In Nassau County, it was one entity providing both and really doing a remarkable job of it. And there’s a big gaping hole now.”
