The Children's Aid Society

The Children's Aid Society

The mission of The Children’s Aid Society is to ensure the physical and emotional well being of underserved children and families. To fulfill our mission, we provide each child we serve with the support and opportunities needed to become a happy, healthy and successful adult. We assist over 150,000 of New York City’s children and their families each year regardless of race, religion, nationality or socio-economic status. Children’s Aid’s services address every aspect of a child’s life, from infancy through adolescence and provide the guidance and resources a family needs to ensure its children’s well being. With over 45 locations in New York and an annual operating budget of over $85 million, The Children’s Aid Society today is one of the country’s largest non-sectarian child and family welfare agencies in the country. The Children’s Aid Society is a leader in progressive, cost-effective programs; Children’s Aid spends ninety-one cents out of every dollar directly on services to children.

Children’s Aid works through community centers, camps, community schools, courts and in children’s own homes to bring children and families the highest quality programs possible. Most of our work is in New York City and the metropolitan area, but many of The Children’s Aid Society’s programs have had national and international impacts. For example, there are replications and adaptations of Children’s Aid’s teen pregnancy prevention programs in 20 states and adaptations of the Children’s Aid Society community school model throughout the United States and in a number of other nations, including England, France, the Netherlands and Vietnam. In addition, a foster care approach developed by Children’s Aid, known as concurrent planning, became the basis for the 1996 Adoption and Safe Families Act, legislation that greatly changed the nature of contemporary foster care.

SAMPLE OF SERVICES

• Community Schools - National winner of the “Peter Drucker Award for Nonprofit Innovation,” Children’s Aid’s community schools are partnerships with the Department of Education in public schools that combine academics with high quality on-site health and social services and are open up to 15 hours a day, six days a week, all year.
• Health Services – Our network of health, mental health, eye care and dental clinics, which tally nearly 80,000 appointments for children each year, includes school-based and community-based medical, dental and mental health services, as well as our mobile dental van that brings dental care directly to thousands of children in the poorest parts of the city.
• Mentoring Programs - Among them: a corporate tutoring program for preteens at risk of dropping-out as well as a partnership with the black and Latino bar associations that matches minority boys and girls with lawyers and judges; both programs have an over-90% “stay in school” rate.
• Teen Pregnancy Prevention - A holistic approach that combines sexuality education with a full youth development program, based on the philosophy that education and jobs create the opportunity for a better future.
• Arts – Children’s Aid offers a wide range of programs in the visual and performing arts, including musical instrument classes, award-winning choruses, theater, photography, dance classes, the American Ballet Theater’s “Make a Ballet” dance program and CAS/AileyCamp.