Graham Windham

Our Core Service Values
Safety - Children can only thrive if they are safe. Safety first.
Relationships - The humanizing influence of relationships is central to our work. We use strong authentic relationships to promote healing, growth and well-being.
Good Care - We truly and emphatically care about our children and families…every last one. Our care is demonstrated, day in and day out, by our words, our deeds and by addressing the true needs of those we serve.
Belief - We believe in our children and families…in their essential goodness, in their capacity to endure, heal, grow and succeed.
Family - Children grow and thrive best in families. Therefore, a sustained and concentrated focus on family strengthening and permanency planning (permanent and loving homes for all our children) is essential. All our services must be family friendly, family-centered, and whenever possible, family-driven.
Community - The neighborhoods, religious organizations, schools, help groups and individuals who comprise the everyday world of our children and families can provide critical, affirming, life-sustaining support. Graham Windham, therefore, focuses its helping efforts firmly in the community, in solidarity and collaboration with its citizenry.
Education - Education is a primary force for individual and collective progress and achievement in American society. Graham Windham strives to provide our children and families with a broad array of quality opportunities to maximize their personal, academic and vocational potential.
Strength-based - Graham Windham is committed to strength-based services, utilizing a child’s and family’s existing competencies and abilities to shape and implement their individual and family service plans.
High Standards - We set the challenge bar high for the children and families we serve…consistent with the upper limits of their promise and potential.
Rights & Responsibilities - The “rights” of our children and families stand squarely and unambiguously on their own. At the same time, progress can be expected only when those rights are accompanied by an active acceptance of responsibilities, commensurate with their capacity to self-manage. All of our children and families have a voice at Graham Windham, and share with us responsibility for their success.
Advocacy - We use our knowledge and influence to improve social conditions, expand educational opportunities and develop resources for our children and families.

Given our mission, it is critical that we engage families in a different way than what what’s been done in the past. In 2011, we adopted an agency-wide casework practice called Solution-Based Casework, which has been shown to reduce the rates of abuse and neglect among families involved in the child welfare system. This model provides powerful techniques for partnering with families to produce lasting changes that result and safety and stability for children, and it does so through the right mix of empathy, support and accountability – not by pity, charity or condemnation. Graham Windham was the first agency to bring Solution-Based Casework to New York City and it is now being adopted by over a third of the City’s child welfare system.

At The Graham School, we’ve developed a highly successful approach for helping students who have struggled in school because of factors like learning disabilities, emotional and behavioral challenges, and a disrupted family life. We closely integrate academic and therapeutic services in the residential program and Special Act School that are located on the same campus. We’ve also developed innovations like the Bengals, a positive peer group model that we are now expanding across New York City.

Many agencies that are larger in size like us tend to diversify their programs as they grow. Instead, we are intensifying our services for select targeted populations – children and families in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems. As part of this, we transitioned away from the early childhood programs we had provided for years, because they weren’t serving our core populations. This intentionality and focus has been key to building a particular model of excellence at Graham Windham.

We’ve also been intentional about ensuring continuity in our approach and values through careful succession planning. When our President & CEO of 15 years – Poul Jensen – made plans to retire by the end 2012, I was brought on to the team a few years in advance. I headed the Program Performance and Planning team, and became involved in shaping our programs and focus. Poul and I then shared the leadership role in 2012; I became President and he provided continued guidance and support as CEO. This arrangement allowed for a remarkably smooth transition at this critical juncture in our history.

One of our key strategies is to maintain a high degree of focus on our performance. We have an in-house Program Performance and Planning team that rigorously assesses our outcomes for the children and families, and we use the data to inform key decision-making around program development. While we focus on strengths as part of our culture, we also know that there is critically important information embedded in our failures, which we can use to improve our practices.

We’ve also made a commitment to focus primarily on models and interventions that have some data backing them, so that we have a well defined approach for all that we do. We also carefully research these models, and assess whether and how they can contribute to

Our numbers indicate that we’ve made significant strides toward our outcomes. In the past few years, we’ve reduced the incidence of repeat child abuse in families in our foster care prevention programs, and are now below the system average. Our numbers for the percentage of children who enter foster care after receiving these preventive services have also been below the system average. In our foster care programs, we’ve significantly reduced the number of times children are moved between foster homes, giving them the stability that all children critically need as they grow. We’ve also maintained very high graduation rates at the Graham School, and are working toward continuing improvement in all of these areas and others.