Children's Aid

For more than 165 years, Children's Aid has been committed to ensuring that there are no boundaries to the aspirations of young people, no limits to their potential. We know what it takes to ensure children and youth grow up strong and healthy, and ready to thrive in school and life: excellent education and health care, social-emotional support, and strong stable families. Today, we serve nearly 50,000 children, youth, and their families at more than 40 sites in four under-resourced neighborhoods in New York City.

All children have access to the opportunities and supports they need to realize their fullest potent

Goal One: We will help families heal from COVID-19 trauma through holistic aid. Relief efforts include food access, behavioral health support, academic and learning loss interventions, and family engagement.

Goal Two: We will build on our anti-racism commitment by continuing to implement a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion roadmap, ensuring our culture, policies, procedures, and practice align with our values.

Goal Three: We will focus on furthering greater alignment across our network of community schools. We will adjust program curricula, document best practices, and facilitate trainings.

We believe continuous learning and professional development are vital for all staff and our success as an agency. In July 2020, we launched LEARN, Children's Aid's first learning management system. LEARN offers access to a wide variety of online learning and development resources, and registration information for in-person and online training opportunities. The software currently contains our annual anti-harassment training and new hire orientation, and will soon include resources for building program, supervision, and administrative knowledge and skills.

As workers lost their jobs and stores across New York shuttered, requests for food assistance to Children’s Aid more than doubled. Our staff on the front lines increased emergency food distribution across all sites and we set up several outdoor distribution tents. Within our health services, our doctors, nurses, and therapists provided essential services on the front lines of the crisis. For patients who needed in-person care, our clinics continued to remain operational and provided essential care. Many of our health services quickly transitioned to telehealth, which included COVID-19 medical guidance, case management, and psychotherapy, ensuring both continuity of care and staff safety. Similar to the pressures facing our health services, families at risk of entering foster care faced particularly tough challenges, such as financial hardship, family conflict, and other issues. We worked with them to help stabilize the home and avoid the removal of children. We transitioned our family visits to virtual when appropriate, and continued in-person visits when deemed necessary. We also supported and helped our foster parents provide loving homes for those children who did require placements into foster care. And after so much disruption at school, many students fell behind academically. To help families maintain stability while meeting children’s educational, social-emotional, and health care needs, we adjusted how we deliver many of our services: we converted 19 community schools and 10 early childhood centers into virtual learning programs; we leveraged app-based educational platforms to provide academic enrichment; and we distributed learning devices to our students with limited access to technology. Our staff also curated at-home activities tied to our existing age-specific curricula, so that after-school programming, tutoring, GED training, and college and career prep could continue.