Gregory J Morris, NYCETC CEO, sits down with Michael Sedillo, Executive Director of the Mayor’s Office of Nonprofit Services, to discuss city contracting reforms, payment delays, and how his office is working to build accountability and partnership with New York City’s nonprofit sector. Watch the full interview on our YouTube channel, and read our summary below, which has been edited and condensed based on the original conversation in April 2025.
About your journey: I would say I’ve always really been someone who derives a deep satisfaction from helping people. It’s just part of my DNA. I grew up in a family that believed in public service and helping people… At the same time, I’m someone who likes to do the work, not just talk about it, but actually be about it… I remember I sat next to a guy who eventually became a really good friend, real procurement nerd, one of those people that nerd out on their sphere of influence or what they focus on. I remember asking, ‘What is procurement?’ And he said, ‘It’s everything.’ He blew my mind. He reframed for me how the execution of and delivery of our human services, our construction – everything we do – is a function of a procurement. Our function – our ability to deliver for New Yorkers – is a function of how we navigate this process…
About bridging gaps: There’s been a lot of changes in the last year in the procurement space… It’s possible that program staff and city agencies and program staff at nonprofits might speak a different language… The friction point – where the rubber meets the road – is the procurement budget, analyst, fiscal, and legal shops that allow for the service delivery… When I go to different non-profits, they do speak the language. They know what PASSPort NYC release 6 is. Executive Directors have to think about a lot of different things. It’s the same here for Deputy Mayors or Commissioners. But the folks who are in the system day to day, they are highly knowledgeable at the nonprofit and at the city agencies… I don’t think of bureaucracy as a bad word. I think bureaucracies are people, and where you see strong outcomes, there is strong alignment. In my role, I hope people feel like they have an ombudsman and an ear at the highest levels of city government.
I’ve been at City Hall for five and a half years. I never saw a weekly meeting on nonprofit payments. I convene them, and that is a venue that I must make sure to never take eyes off the ball. This is a strategy from the Joint Task Force report at the start of the administration…
About defining success: This is an emergency… I’m very aware that this role is all hands-on deck to get folks paid… I’ve been very fortunate to bring a couple of key staffers who I worked with at the Mayor’s Office of Contract Services, who know the passport system and have the relationships across agencies… From the selection to registration to the payment process, here are the key places where we can track cycle time and pinpoint where things are getting stuck.
We have started tracking cycle times agency by agency. We have asked each agency to develop an action plan that is responsive to their cycle time data and their qualitative data… Every quarter, I need to see chipping away at both the cycle time and the backlog of budget modifications of invoices. And at the same time, we are maniacal about tracking is the sentiment. We do a quarterly provider sentiment survey, and I expect from these interventions to see a significant increase in partnership.
What’s interesting about the data is that there are specific portfolios that have their own nuanced reasons why there are data issues, but there are a handful of agencies whose performance is strong. People feel like they’re having a better experience because they are having a better experience, but also, they’re having a better experience because there is that partnership and they are solving problems together.
On “cutting through red tape”: It’s important to me that people feel like they have an ombudsman and an ear at the highest levels of city government. I’m very happy to be very accessible to folks… I hope your audience knows that they shouldn’t think twice about reaching out to me. One, it’s my job. Two, I’ve set up systems in place to be able to make sure folks are executing on it.
It’s key that we’re building to allow for the bureaucracy to be responsive to our nonprofit providers… We’re thinking about building a community with our Chief Nonprofit Officers because there are some agencies that are high performing and some that we want to really support… This is about organizing people, making sure they’re clear on what success is, and making sure principals understand and are tracking that success and care about it.
On MONS Initiatives: In 2022, I was the City Hall lead for the Clear the Backlog Initiative that unlocked over $6 billion for nonprofit providers. It was a seminal part of my city career. Thinking through how you move, change, and move a massive bureaucracy or bend it to your will. But the secret sauce was having somebody who the commissioner appointed to be accountable totally and own the results and the creativity of harnessing their agency’s resources to unlock this contract…
We worked with different folks and created an Executive Order that established Chief Nonprofit Officers at each city agency and oversight entities as well. It’s these folks who are there to offer customer service, to be responsive to the sector, and to be accountable to my office in reducing cycle times and getting nonprofits paid. Everybody should go to the website where every Chief Nonprofit Officer and their contact information is listed.
We worked with our partners at OMB. Human service contracting positions that have to do with nonprofit payments were exempted from the hiring freeze we’ve been in.
The other initiative I’ll mention is the culture change standpoint – a space to celebrate both our nonprofit providers, but also our city agencies. It’s an opportunity for us to pinpoint to our city agency partners what excellence in customer service and service delivery is. We’re asking our nonprofit partners to nominate city agency staff who go above and beyond for them… We want to lift them up. We’re trying to flip that narrative and make it an opportunity to celebrate excellence, but my North Star is getting folks paid.
On the contracting crisis: This is what keeps me up every night. I know every day our Chief Nonprofit Officers at agencies are solving problems on behalf of their nonprofit providers. They get very creative, especially if there are existential issues from a payroll or other standpoint. Reach out to your Chief Nonprofit Officers. That’s who I go to when there’s an issue.
You do not have to suffer in silence or suffer alone in this. It is my job to work with you and get you what you need. My email is at MSedillo@mons.nyc.gov. Please email me if it’s a dire situation. It’s always helpful if you include the contract number and the contracting agency. I often hear folks don’t want to upset a contracting agency. That’s what I’m here for and I do it with great respect for my public servants.
My two main stakeholders are the nonprofit providers and the city agencies. I need to support and push both. But ultimately, I need to make sure that City Hall and the Deputy Mayors understand that my hair is on fire about this and that they’re doing what they can to unlock resources…
On what’s next: I believe in transparency and the value of making performance data public. The real magic that I have seen in the past is making sure principals who are accountable to results see performance and are given the tools to act upon it… I know there’s a huge pain point in discretionary contracts… I want to make sure folks know that there are other tools available, like the Returnable Grant Fund from the Fund for the City of New York…
I would like to go very bold. But we got a modest but very impactful reform by adding the multi-year contract language to discretionary contracts… We put in the allowance clause. I wish there were a silver bullet from a policy standpoint. I think it comes down to management and that’s why we’re leaning on contract statute – a baseline set of cycle times from the key parts of the contracting process that lead to payment. ‘It takes agency X four days to go through the budget modification. It takes you significantly longer. Why is that? Why are you set up that way?’ And then, we have different teams from City Hall that we’ve deployed to go into the agencies and lift the hood up – ‘What is the process here? Why is this like this?’ This is drawn from the playbook of the backlog initiative and having a data-driven management style.
Our partners deserve the best-in-class systems to navigate payment processes. I do think that there is a little bit of a shock to the system when you do the necessary changes to upgrade and update systems… Bumps will be along the road with any system change, but we’ve done a lot of different things to ensure that you have the capital and can do a lot of different creative things to make sure you have the capital, to navigate any sort of technical issues that might come up.
You have the ear of City Hall leadership on this. This is not an administration that is afraid to get in the weeds. Everyone from the mayor on down understands that we rely on nonprofits to execute our human service – the highest levels of government are aligned and rowing in the same direction to get to do the hard work of navigating this system to get you paid.
Watch the full conversation on NYCETC’s YouTube channel, and subscribe to the Workforce Weekly — the Industry Voice for Workforce Development in NYC.