Sherry Tucker, the CEO of WellLife Network, knows what terrible loss feels like. She and her husband Dirk lost their eight-year-old son Zachary to brain cancer in 2006. She could have withdrawn from the world. Instead, she and her husband founded a pediatric cancer nonprofit and later she began providing financial consulting for the WellLife Network, which she would later run.
“I saw that was the most relief from the grief,” she said of founding and working with a nonprofit. “When Zach first passed, we would be invited to assist other families dealing with pediatric cancer. When I would do that, I realized at the end of the day, that I felt good.”
After studying accounting and obtaining an MBA, Tucker found satisfaction in the nonprofit world, finding that helping others helped her heal.
“When you’re not doing something of that nature, you focus on the grief. You feel the heaviness and the weight and the difficulties that come with that. As time passes, that softens,” Tucker said. “The thing that remains true is the more you help people the better you feel. That became my medicine, to find a way to deal with the overwhelming nature of loss.”
Tucker grew up in Indiana, got an accounting degree from Indiana University and an MBA from the University of South Florida. After Zachary died of brain cancer, she refocused on charity.
“It changed everything about me as a person. It made me become more aware of how fragile life truly is and what the focus should be in your journey, helping others,” Tucker said. “Really trying to improve the world around you as much as you can. And not get caught up in the commercialism and capitalism that can become overwhelming.”
She and Dirk started a Florida nonprofit called Giving Hope Through Faith, helping around 600 families of children with cancer and raised more than $1 million.
“We could see people getting better. They had hope,” she said. “I’d say, ‘Look at us, we made it through the worst thing you can experience. We’re still on our feet, being productive, doing things to help people.’”
They ran that for a decade before moving to New York, where they facilitated a group called GriefShare. Tucker in 2010 began consulting for Well Life, in 2015 became CFO and in 2018 became CEO.
Growth for good
WellLife Network, founded in 1980, has expanded, boosted by a core of care givers and business acumen, helping around 25,000 annually across Long Island and New York, including nearly 6,000 at any given time. The group has a budget of $150 million, up from $230,000 and $130 million a year ago.
They employ about 1,500 people in about 138 programs, 70 locations and 3,500 points of service across Long Island and New York City except for Staten Island and they’re continuing to grow.
“We doubled from 2010 to 2025 in revenue and assets. We’ve grown at quite a good pace,” Tucker said. “It’s been up and down through the years, but from point A to B we’ve had a nice amount of growth.”
They serve 700 individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities daily, along with 2,000 in substance recovery and 3,000 individuals with behavioral health issues.
“We’ve become more financially stable, enhanced our services. We’re in good shape to be resilient for any challenges that come in the future,” Tucker said. “That was my goal, to make it as resilient as possible to face whatever twists and turns may be thrown at us.”
They do satisfaction surveys to evaluate whether clients are content with their service. And they’ve been getting positive evaluations.
“We maintain a high standard of satisfaction with those we serve. We ask them each year how we’re doing,” Tucker added. “We don’t get a 100 percent response. We get positive feedback that’s very consistent.”
Then and Now
Founded in Queens in 1980 as the Professional Service Center for the Handicapped, they in 2011 merged with Pederson-Krag Center, creating a bigger group that could do more and help more people.
“We updated our mission to make it more streamlined and focus on the task at hand, which is to give people an experience where they thrive and live a well life,” Tucker said. “We have a united front. Everybody feels that they belong to the same nonprofit.”
The New Hyde Park-based group runs many programs that require a diagnosis of some type of disability to quality for behavioral health and human services and substance use help, along with four food pantries supplied with the help of Long Island Cares and Island Harvest.
Demand for food grew by 30 percent this year alone, as the WellLife has sought to raise funds as well as distribute food from local food banks.
“Those have been cut back,” Tucker said. “We have done some fundraising recently, adding money to reserves to supplement the goods, to give to people through pantries.”
They also provide housing, which they view as the most fundamental aspect of their work, providing the underpinning for survival along with food.
“Housing is what we consider the cornerstone of our mission,” Tucker added. “If you don’t have a place to lay your head down at night that you feel safe and secure, you won’t be able to achieve any dreams and goals.”
They have around a dozen older clients who were at Willowbrook, where conditions were so terrible that it closed, leading to legislation that largely changed residential facilities from big to smaller.
“When it closed, people were allocated to different community agencies,” Tucker said. “We have people who came from the closure of Willowbrook. They’re still labeled Willowbrook clients. They get special consideration.”
Funding the future
WellLife like others are watching decisions in Washington that could impact their income and ability to serve those in need.
“We never are guaranteed from day to day. More recently, we’ve seen federal and executive orders. I’m proud we’ve been able to continue to sustain growth,” Tucker said. “We developed a culture of trust and enhanced belonging with our staff so they give the best possible services they can.”
The federal government is contemplating what could be as much as $10 trillion in cuts to Medicaid over the next decade, impacting money that flows to the state and other levels and then groups.
“More attention will be needed to make sure people remain qualified to receive their entitlements,” she said. “People lose their benefits. We have to get them back.”
Tucker said they are seeing “hidden cuts” in which qualifications change, resulting in cuts as to who qualifies for what. “It’s death by 1,000 cuts, little bits and pieces,” she continued. “We’re trying to prepare for it, by building better systems and anticipating.”
Although WellLife has some contracts with the federal government, most funding is filtered through the state, city and county.
“It’s a big number coming in the future,” Tucker added. “A lot will be contingent on what the state of New York does in reaction to what they feel from the cuts from the federal government.”
Medicaid could be transformed to limit or impose requirements on recipients, but Tucker believes their clients, receiving social, psychological and employment services because of disabilities, are unlikely to be affected.
“We have an organization designed to have opportunity for people with disabilities to be employed,” Tucker said of one aspect. “We have job coaches and job developers working with individuals to help them navigate when they come off of unemployment, have a hospitalization or have disabilities affecting their ability to work.”
They work with the disabled, including training and getting them work, sometimes through a company they run.
“For the most part the jobs we have in an affiliate company, WellLife Clean Corp., are for landscaping and janitorial,” she said. “But our vocational programs help people with any skills. If somebody wanted a retail job, they could come into our vocational program.”
She said their substance use disorder clinics also have a vocational component. “It’s helping them navigate the work environment, how to get job applications in, write a good resume, present themselves well,” Tucker said.
As technology and medications help people live longer, that is leading to a need for longer and more care for people with disabilities.
“As you age, you become more complex, typically medically,” Tucker said. “It requires a higher level of skill for our staff to care for those with more advanced medical complexities.”
Caring for caregivers
The WellLife Network, which recently won one of Energage’s and USA Today’s Top Workplaces USA awards, takes care of staff, trying to shield them from stress and battle burnout.
“We try to incorporate a lot of stress relieving activities,” Tucker said. “We don’t have the ability to meet the pay standards of some others. We can’t raise our prices. We have to work within our means. We try to have benefits that help them to live with assurance that they have good health care, disability, life insurance.”
They do what she calls “funterventions” or activities in advance, such as sports, a 5K challenge, so “interventions” aren’t necessary.
“We’ve done fishing trips, baseball games,” she added. “We celebrate the hard work everybody has done by throwing a big party for them.”
They encourage “sleep hygiene” and seek to support employees’ mental health. Although they have volunteers, they hope to focus more on building a volunteer corps.
“We have done and will continue to do Project Volunteer,” Tucker said. “We have people come in and help us renovate spaces, indoor or outdoor. They come in and help us beautify the group homes for those they serve.”
