Partnerships can transform parent-child visiting and speed up family reunifications , but the barriers remain high. It’s nearly 2pm and Adriana isn’t late; this is how she always walks, fast, with her head down, as though she’s perpetually ducking something. Twenty-five years old and slight, there’s something breakable about her, with pretty, fragile features curtained [...]

“Community reps” from neighborhood partnerships guide parents through their moment of extreme crisis, as child protective services decides whether or not to remove their children. “I’m not ACS. I’m a community representative,” says Ed Parker, as he hands a business card to an anxious mother and her slouching 16-year-old daughter. The mother, her daughter, three [...]

The city’s Community Partnership Initiative represents New York’s vision for catalyzing neighborhood action in support of families, but it has taken hold only on the margins. Is it a step back to trade a grand vision for less ambitious, more measurable goals? High on a hill in the Bronx, in an office cluttered with particleboard [...]

The nucleus of the child welfare system is, by definition, an intrusive bureaucracy responsible for investigating abuse and placing children in foster care. Yet it is also a system intended to help families overcome potentially crushing difficulties, connecting them to all kinds of supports and services. These dual purposes can succeed to their greatest potential [...]

Schafer Hall, an East Harlem housing program for young people making the transition from foster care to independence, has had its ups and downs. A few years back, residents used to slam doors and play music loudly late into the night. They would curse out security, loiter in front of the building and sometimes become [...]

At 22, Christopher Guzman would like to consider himself an adult. But life in the new, brick Bronx building known as Louis Nine, where he lives, reminds Guzman of his teen years spent in too many group homes. “It’s just the atmosphere, it’s just the rules and regulations of certain things that brings it back [...]

Rosetta Savana was 17 years old and living in her 19th foster home when she found out she was pregnant. She’d already had two miscarriages, so she was thrilled when her first ultrasound indicated that her baby was doing well. But then she ran into a series of health problems of her own: her lifelong [...]

Jonathan Mercado made his plan when he was 11, the third time he’d been taken from his mother and the first time he realized she wasn’t going to stop using drugs: As soon as he was old enough to get out of foster care, he’d find a job, get an apartment and take in his [...]

Eighteen-year-old Chantilly, who spent 13 years in foster care in more than 20 homes, knows exactly what she wants for her baby daughter, Chantasia: “One place to live, where all her stuff is, and she doesn’t have to worry about whether she’s going to be there tomorrow.” When Chantasia was born last year, Chantilly’s foster [...]

The family support system designed to keep children safe at home and out of foster care has been in crisis since late spring, following threats of budget cuts, problems with contract administration and changes in policy at the city’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS). Despite an influx of emergency funding, the number of families taking [...]