Biotech Exec Carsten Thiel Provides Support to NYC Children’s AID
Although this year has been far from what anybody would describe as normal, the crisp air of November brings with it a welcome change for the city as New Yorkers begin to look forward to strolls through the vibrant colors of fall foliage in Central Park, breaking out their winter layers, and turning on their heaters for this first time in months to cozy up at home. However, the cooler weather also brings with it worries for how the city weather the coronavirus battle once the options for outdoor activities become for limited. After a difficult and devastating spring the summer months in New York felt almost normal, but as the city’s daily positivity rate — which hovered around 1% for months — recently saw a seven-day rolling average of 1.92%, concerns about a second wave have grown.
Fortunately, although there were fears that the 1,800 public schools in New York City would become super-spreader sites of Covid-19 if they were allowed to resume in-person classes, initial data from the city’s targeted testing efforts have shown an unexpectedly small number of positive cases. Of the over 16,000 staff members and students tested in the first week of the city’s regimen, only 20 staff members and eight students came back with positive results. Additionally, in neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens that had experienced new outbreaks, only four positive cases were found out of more than 3,300 tested at the mobile testing units set up at their schools. For now, it seems that the largest school system in the United States is a welcome bright spot as the city tries its best to recover its severely weakened economy.
Despite the promising initial results that bode well for the schools ability to remain open this winter, budget cuts to dozens of nonprofits that help at-risk children bring another layer of difficulty to the coronavirus problem. The city’s Education Department slashed $15 million in funding for NYC school support programs, including a $3 million cut to the community schools program, which uses school campuses to offer a range of social services and family support. These services are brought to life with the help of nearly 30 children’s nonprofits, including Children’s Aid, one of the largest and oldest in the United States. Now more than ever, nonprofit organizations like Children’s Aid need the support of donors to supplement funds lost by the budget cut, and ordinary citizens like biotech executive Carsten Thiel have been stepping up to the task.
Although Thiel holds a PhD in molecular biology from the Max Planck Society and was offered a position in Harvard University’s post-doctoral research program in the 1990’s, he built a career on the corporate side of pharmaceuticals and biotech. His drive to study biology and chemistry was born of an innate desire to help people, and while he enjoyed research and academia, he knew that he would be able to help the widest breadth of people by utilizing his analytical and people skills to ensure innovative products were brought to the masses. Having become fascinated by the concept of DNA as a genetic roadmap early in his youth, Thiel has sought throughout his life and career to make sure that those who need help most are able to receive it. This has caused him to subscribe to a patient-first ideology that was often tested within the highly lucrative pharmaceutical world, but no matter the situation Thiel remained staunch in his principles, something that he carries throughout every aspect of his life.
Early in Thiel’s career, he was put in charge of the global launch for a drug that had been recently found to have the ability to aid in weight loss. His company was excited at the prospect of marketing the drug toward the masses, but without maintaining a strict low-fat diet any user of the drug had the possibility of experiencing unpleasant gastrointestinal side effects. Thiel recognized this and understood that while sales may initially be high because of the promise of losing weight, many would become deterred when they found that they were no longer able to eat whatever they wanted and result in frustration and disappointment. Instead, he developed a strategy of marketing the drug to doctors specifically, guiding them to prescribe it to their patients suffering from obesity as he believed those were the people who could not only benefit most from the product, but also have the ability to maintain the strict diet needed to not incur the negative effects, creating long-term results that would aid in an overall healthier lifestyle.
Later in Thiel’s career, he again found himself in an ethical dilemma when directing the product launch of a colorectal cancer treatment. He and his team had been working on the project for over a year and were mere weeks away from seeing it to fruition when they received notice that a biomarker had been discovered that would indicate whether or not the drug would be effective for a patient. Some on his team thought that rather than delay the project they had already spent so much time and effort on, they should continue moving forward with the product as scheduled, citing that if more people tried the treatment there would be more sales. However, Thiel encouraged them to look at how they could positively affect the lives of many simply by disclosing the biomarker — doctors could test for the biomarker before prescribing the treatment, not only saving the patients money that is often desperately needed for other forms of treatment, but also preventing them from wasting precious time trying a treatment that may not work. Thiel was able to convince them to not only create a standardized test for practitioners to use, but also provide initial education on the product and even specialized customer service support.
Thiel was born and raised far from NYC in Berlin, Germany, however no matter where he has lived since, he has always been grateful for the education he was able to receive and sought to ensure that others have the best opportunity to succeed. He counts himself as extremely lucky to have had his interest in math and science encouraged by his medical professional parents as a child and credits this initial spark toward his ability to succeed later in life. In fact, it was during a biology class when he was still young that he developed a passion for the miniscule inner workings of the human body, when he learned that DNA is essentially a genetic roadmap through which one can learn everything there is to know about any given species. He realized that if one could just discover the key to this roadmap, they would have the ability to aid in the curing and prevention of any disease or ailment. Now more than ever, that realization has been all the more meaningful, as Thiel has been instrumental within his current company in their work at identifying and trialling drugs that could potentially be used to treat Covid-19.
Children’s Aid is extensive in the services they provide to the youth of NYC, including adoption and foster care, after-school and weekend programs, arts, camps, early childhood education, events, family support, medical, mental health, and dental, juvenile justice, legal advocacy, special initiatives, sports and recreation, and youth development programs. Most recently, they have also been making large efforts to keep those dealing with child poverty save during the coronavirus pandemic, and for Thiel the wide breadth of their aid meant that in supporting them he was not only helping with the immediate need of coronavirus-related services, but also promoting the importance of education.
Founded in 1853 by Charles Loring Brace, an American pioneer in social reform, Children’s Aid began in a time when social services for poor and homeless children in New York City only consisted of orphan asylums and almshouses. In the beginning, it was able to support an estimated 30,000 poor and orphaned children living on the streets of the city, operating fresh air programs, industrial schools, and lodging houses. Additionally, the organization was the pioneering force behind the Orphan Train Movement, which over the course of fifty years placed more than 120,000 orphaned children with families across the country. Although the ambitious social experiment sparked controversy at the time, its creation led to a large number of child welfare reforms such as child labor laws, adoption, and is now recognized as the beginning of the foster care system in the United States.
As the city has evolved, Children’s Aid has evolved with it to meet the changing needs of the children and their families of New York. Most recently, they have quickly adapted their services to ensure that the impoverished children of New York are kept healthy and safe, both from the virus itself and from the economic and educational challenges it has brought with it. They never closed their community health clinics, instead remaining open to provide testing for children and young people symptomatic of Covid-19, and have leveraged technology to ensure their child welfare staff can continue serving the nearly 700 children in family, therapeutic, and medical foster care as well as their family through counseling services and home visitations. They have also ensured the youth in their child welfare programs who were living on college campuses that have been closed were found new living arrangements and computer equipment to access online learning. Additionally, they established a coronavirus relief fund with which they provided food boxes to hungry children and offered supplemental instruction, tutoring, and academic enrichment.
Among the multitude of services Children’s Aid provides regularly, they have been instrumental in their involvement with the Community Schools program, a large-scale program in New York City schools aimed at confronting child poverty. It seeks to use the school as a community that expands beyond education, becoming a gathering place where children can get services such as counseling, eye exams, or dental care, participate in after-school programs that assist with homework and keep them engaged, and also where parents can get involved with schools, take a class, or pick up extra groceries. Rather than focusing on academics alone, the community schools seek to focus on the overall well-being of the children, and a large study of 113 New York schools found several statistically significant improvements and no areas of deterioration. Elementary and middle schools saw the percentage of students advancing to the next grade on time increase in the first two years, and in all three years the number of disciplinary incidents fell. In high schools, graduation levels increased in two of the three years, and at all levels of school the portion of children chronically absent fell in all three years.
Unfortunately, the economic fallout caused by the coronavirus pandemic made a devastating impact on the city’s finances, resulting in a $9 billion citywide budget shortfall and a $70 million cut to the education budget. This initially saw a $9 million cut to the community schools program, but advocates, students, and nonprofits like Children’s Aid rallied to argue for scaling back the cuts. While they were successful in seeing the cut reduced by $6 million, the city did not restore another $3 million that supports contracts at 20 of the community schools, of which Children’s Aid serves six. The loss has the potential to sever a critical lifeline for students barely hanging onto school amid the pandemic, and supplemental aid will be necessary to help make up for the deficit.
The coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated the many challenges families living in poverty in NYC already face everyday, from hunger and homelessness to job insecurity and limited access to medical and mental healthcare. Youth homelessness is at the highest rate it has been since the Great Depression in New York City, and 44% of New Yorkers are food insecure. A child’s job should be to learn and grow, but they cannot be expected to excel in academics if they are hungry or experiencing their family’s stress. Donors like Carsten Thiel show that anybody can make a difference, if they stay informed and make the effort.
Originally published at https://patch.com on November 7, 2020.
