The U.S. is on the cusp of a major transformation in child welfare. Congress just provided funding to all 50 states to implement a new law called the Family First Prevention Services Act, which encourages investment in programs that have been proven to keep children safely at home with their families. How? By providing services to parents that address the root causes of child maltreatment. These are known as “prevention” programs because they’re designed to prevent placement of children in foster care, as well as the potential for future abuse or neglect.
Here in New York City, we’ve been putting families first by offering these programs for years. On any given day, ACS prevention programs serve more than 10,000 families with 24,000 children across New York City. These programs provide families with the help they need to overcome challenges — including trauma, poverty, isolation, mental health, substance mis-use and domestic violence—and ultimately keep children safe.
We’ve seen that once families complete these services, they rarely return to our system. In fact, families that successfully complete prevention services (and more than 80% do) are five times less likely to have another investigation in which ACS finds abuse or neglect in the following six months than families that do not complete these services.
Furthermore, thanks to our prevention services, there has been a dramatic reduction in the number of children in foster care in New York City — currently about 8,000, a historic low. This is a momentous shift from 25 years ago, when there were nearly 50,000 children in foster care in New York City, and from even just 10 years ago, when there were almost 17,000 children in foster care. And our foster care population continues to decrease year over year, counter to the national trend since 2012, when the opioid epidemic began to drive an increase in foster care elsewhere in the country.
To top it off, according to a just-released survey, an overwhelming majority of families receiving ACS prevention services are satisfied with the services they receive. Approximately 94% of survey participants said they are happy with the prevention services their families received; and 71% of participants said that they would recommend these services to a friend and/or family member. Overall, 86% of the parents participating in the survey said prevention services helped them reach their parenting goals.
Child welfare systems across the country see what’s happening in New York City as a model for how to keep children safe by shifting toward prevention services to address issues that put child safety at risk. And they’re looking to us for guidance on how to build these services.
Our new efforts prioritizing prevention is the result of nearly two years of rigorous research about the needs of New York City’s families and children, and how to enhance their safety and stability. ACS engaged over 300 stakeholders — including parents, other family members, legal advocates and service providers — in redesigning our services. Our restructured system will ensure that each of our 10 prevention program models is available to families in every neighborhood and community across the five boroughs. And it will require prevention providers to incorporate family voice into service design, to ensure that prevention services reflect what families want and need, and to increase the number of parents who successfully complete those services.
With this new portfolio of prevention services, we’ll be able to further improve the lives of New York City’s families, and to serve more families involved in the child welfare system while safely keeping them together. More than ever before, we’re listening to the families we serve, and we’ll continue to include their voices in our work to build stronger families and communities across New York City.
Hansell is commissioner of New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services.
