Good help must be hard to find. At the upper levels of city government, the same faces seem to be perpetually recycled in different places. This couldn’t be truer for Lisa Parrish. Over the last eight months, she has been deputy director at the Office of Management and Budget and chief of staff to second- after-Rudy Randy Mastro. Now, she’s been assigned a top job at the city’s most hot-seat agency, the Administration for Children’s Services.
When Parrish starts as a deputy commissioner next week, she will be overseeing foster care and preventative services, including those provided by nonprofit contract agencies. These divisions had formerly been under the supervision of deputy commissioner Aubrey Featherstone. All is not lost for Featherstone, though. He still controls adoption and the division that teaches teenagers in foster care how to become independent.
The Correctional Association of New York–the gadfly nonprofit that monitors jails, prisons and alternative-to-incarceration programs–has lost its Juvenile Justice Project director to the lure of the courtroom. Darlene Jorif is leaving the organization for Legal Aid’s Juvenile Rights Division where she will defend kids at delinquency hearings.