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Protecting & Nurturing Children & Youth

Caring for Children and Youth

All children deserve the opportunity to build social skills, gain confidence, and develop lasting values that will serve them well as adults. Our network of support services is designed to address the physical, emotional, and psychological needs of children and their families in need of assistance.

Our
Impact

197

children adopted by
loving families

3,764

children placed in safe
foster care

4,103

children learning in
day-care

46,433

youth in after school
programs and sports

Our Programs and Services

Our agencies are committed to reuniting children in foster care with their biological families whenever it is safe and appropriate. When this isn’t possible or proves unsuccessful, we work to secure stable, permanent adoptive families for children in need.

To support working parents without childcare or the help of family, we offer a variety of programs staffed by qualified, compassionate professionals and volunteers to provide academic support, sports, recreation, arts and cultural experiences.

Our community centers are located in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Central Harlem, Staten Island, and Kingston. They are varied and operate to meet local community needs of children, teens, families and seniors, with space to play, exercise, learn and socialize. and explore, in accordance with applicable safety guidelines.

Children need safe places to be nurtured, learn, and thrive. We offer a range of quality day care options that cater to each family’s unique set of needs. Our caring staff is licensed after passing intensive background checks and completing rigorous safety and child-care training programs.

Carefully screened providers care for children in the providers’ own homes. These caregivers and their homes are monitored and evaluated on a regular basis to ensure safe and comfortable environments.

Qualified, compassionate teachers and day care workers provide care in community settings in accordance with Department of Health guidelines. Programs include art, games, and instruction, with indoor and outdoor activities to promote children’s social, physical, cognitive and emotional growth.

Our Head Start programming is staffed by professionals who promote school readiness for children, age three-to-five and the active involvement of families. We focus on the well-being of the child by providing nutritious meals, health care, education, and family development services that promotes language, literacy, social, and emotional development. Enrollment and participation is based on income.

All children deserve a loving, stable, and safe place to call home. For more than a century, when this is not found at home, Catholic Charities agencies have been provided high-quality foster care in New York.

When their families are unable to care for them, we help to place children in safe, temporary, homes. Children enter foster care for a variety of difficult circumstances and often endure emotional issues that displacement from home can cause. Foster parents are screened, certified, and must complete a comprehensive 30-hour training program before providing a child with a home. This enables them to capably address separation and loss, shared parenting, behavior management, positive discipline, and permanency planning.

Children with serious emotional, behavioral and other challenging conditions may benefit from family-based alternatives rather than larger institutional settings. To help establish and maintain a healing environment, we support foster parents who offer therapeutic boarding homes with frequent home visits, respite, and emergency on-call services.

Young, mothers without adequate housing, especially between the ages of 14-21 need a safe, stable  place to live and resources to help them raise their children. Our residences provide young mothers with emergency shelter and the support they need to achieve educational and personal goals, to learn to care for themselves and their children, and lead independent lives.

Coping with unemployment, poverty, or the demands of caring for a child with special needs can feel lonely and overwhelming. Our preventive counseling services can help provide support and stability to families and keep them together in times of crisis. Serious problems such as alcoholism, addiction, domestic violence, and mental health conditions can be debilitating and isolating for those who struggle with them.

We do this by providing:

  • Parent training
  • Casework
  • Advocacy
  • Supportive service referrals
  • Home visits to monitor family dynamics
  • Mental health assessments
  • Domestic violence assessments and counseling
  • Assistance with housing and daycare services
  • Intervention with school systems

No one should have to worry about where they’re going to sleep or where their next meal will come from. We provide support for individuals and families to deal with times of crisis.

By providing services like food, clothing, shelter, emotional support, employment, and education, our crisis intervention outreach offers support to individuals and families coping with physical and mental health crises.

Caring for an adult or child with developmental disabilities can be exhausting, isolating, and overwhelming. Our respite services match families with qualified professionals so caregivers can rest and recuperate.

Caring for a child with a developmental or learning disability can be overwhelming and challenging. We offer a range of services for children from birth to age three with developmental delays including screening, evaluation, testing, therapies, and service coordination to help children thrive.

We offer youth sports as a means to promote strong socialization skills reduce anti-social behavior and and create safer communities. Our staff provide high quality sports and fitness programming and wrap-around support services to youth.

Stories

Natalie Rhoden: Caring for our next generation
Kids, they are the most under represented group that often gets pushed along, instead of paid attention to. My rule is the least, the last and the lost. Children always fall into one of those three categories. I can’t see leaving them, you got to help them, you have to.
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