Children's Aid

Wagon Road Camp provides a fun, inclusive summer experience set in a woodsy, natural environment for hundreds of kids from New York City and the surrounding Westchester area. Children are guaranteed some of the best summers of their childhood at Wagon Road. Horseback riding lessons, archery, and adventure ropes courses are just some of the outdoor and recreational activities available to campers. A rigorous swim program is also taught by Red Cross-certified water safety instructors. Yet, the most defining aspects of the Wagon Road summer camp experience are the friendships campers develop that stick with them well beyond childhood.

Many young people face extraordinary obstacles in pursuit of their aspirations. The Next Generation Center is designed to meet their special challenges and map out a route to success and stability. Next Generation’s mission is to identify and attract young people who are in or aging out of foster care, or who have been arrested or homeless. These experiences often make it difficult for adolescents to graduate high school or find employment.

The Next Generation staff takes a case management approach with every person who walks through the door with the intent of helping them define and achieve their goals. Next Generation Center is more a community than it is a building or a collection of programs. Especially given some of the experiences that participants have faced, they appreciate having a place to shoot a game of pool or make music. Creating this environment makes it more effective for introducing these men and women to new ideas and challenging them to meet goals.

As staff get to know participants, they are able to guide them into the right programs, which include: Next Generation Caterers, a catering company with dozens of clients that employs youth participants who have become skilled in all aspects of healthy food preparation and who participate in every facet of the business. All youth who complete the pre-catering job training program are eligible to receive their Serve Safe certification.

• High School Equivalency degree programs
• Internships and job readiness
• Visual, creative, and multimedia arts activities
• Legal counseling
• Housing assistance

Next Generation Center is the secondary home that so many young people need during their challenging adolescent years. It’s a place where plans take shape and change happens.

Healthy children and youth are better prepared for academic success. Our school-based centers offer a proactive approach to keeping kids healthy and producing better school attendance.

Serving more than 4,000 students annually, Children’s Aid’s school-based health centers provide comprehensive and continuous services at no cost to children and adolescents to help them thrive.

For many kids, Children's Aid’s school-based health centers are their first and only access to health care.

Our philosophy at Children’s Aid is to address the needs of the whole child, and school-based health centers are considered by experts to be the most effective way to provide preventive care—especially in lower-income communities.

By constantly monitoring the medical, dental, and mental health of children at the most important developmental stages of their lives, and by providing continuous care where they already are every day, Children’s Aid improves their chances of success.

With parental consent, our pediatricians, nurse practitioners, and trained health professionals work in collaboration with a family’s primary care physician to provide the high-quality health care that all children deserve and that their parents expect in a world-class city.

We also provide confidential reproductive health care to adolescents at certain locations, as appropriate.

Children’s Aid provides comprehensive sexuality education and one-on-one counseling services that equip young people with what they need to make safe, healthy decisions throughout their lives. Our sexuality education programs, which provide young people with opportunities to gain knowledge about adolescent sexuality and examine their goals, are respectful, nonjudgmental, inclusive of the needs of all sexual identities, and culturally responsive to young people from different backgrounds. Meeting them where they are our health educators work across multiple platforms to meet the needs of young people. Trained educators lead group workshops and one-on-one sessions, work with parents and caregivers to increase and improve communication with their teens, and escort young people to clinic appointments. We do all of this to ensure that young people can focus on school and building a bright future.

Carrera Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Program.

Since 1984, the Children’s Aid-Carrera program has been working with young people starting at age 11 or 12 and following them through high school. This approach incorporates many of the solutions Children’s Aid provides to youth throughout their lives to help them navigate the social and economic barriers that might keep them from fulfilling their potential. Among these fundamentals are education; employment; sexuality education; and medical, dental, and mental health services.
Just Ask Me (JAM) Peer Health Education Program.

This youth development initiative trains high school youth to be ambassadors for sexual health education in their communities. After participating in high-quality training, JAM Peer Educators facilitate sexual health education workshops for their peers in local high schools. Through all of our sexuality education workshops and initiatives, we reach thousands of youth every year.

Children’s Aid offers a number of programs that help youth and adults obtain their High School Equivalency diploma. Programs are free and accessible to non-native English speakers.

NGC Education

Based at the Next Generation Center in the Bronx, the NGC Education track supports young people (ages 18-24) who are out of school and many of whom are involved with the child welfare and juvenile justice systems. Students meet with instructors to create an individualized study plan, focusing on the areas where they need the most reinforcement.

The teaching design is based on an interdisciplinary model that addresses the many instructional approaches students may need—small group, tutoring, lecture, ESL support, and more. Pathways to Graduation Children’s Aid is proud to partner with the NYC Department of Education to offer students (ages 18-21) free full-time or part-time classes to help them earn their high school equivalency diploma. Placements are made through Referral Centers for High School Alternatives.

Adult Education Adults (21 and older) can enroll in high school equivalency courses through the Ercilia Pepin Parent Leadership Institute at a Children’s Aid community school in Washington Heights. Classes are currently offered in English and Spanish.

Children’s Aid’s foster care program places children with supportive families in their own neighborhoods when their parents cannot offer them the stability, safety, and support they need to thrive.

The foster care program is prepared to deal with the widest range of child welfare situations—from temporary situations that allow birth families to address issues until they can be reunited, to specialized homes with highly trained foster parents for children who need constant care for chronic medical and developmental conditions, or children reacting to trauma. In those cases, dedicated foster parents are in constant partnership with the experts managing the case and treating the child. For all kids, Children’s Aid strives to keep them in familiar surroundings with loving caregivers rather than residential programs.
Keeping children in our embrace.

Children’s Aid created what would become the modern child welfare system when, more than 160 years, the founder placed New York’s orphaned or abandoned children with families who would care for them. We have adapted over the years to meet current challenges, and today 500-600 young people of all ages are in stable, supportive homes—in their own neighborhoods—through our foster care programs. Children continue to have access to all Children’s Aid counseling and medical services as well as the education, enrichment, and recreational programs that we offer to help them fulfill their promise. Meanwhile, we offer an array of services to their birth parents to address the specific problems that led to the child’s removal.

From counseling to parenting guidance, education and job readiness, or interventions to break the cycle of abuse, we help parents build strong, healthy homes so that they can reunite with their children and move forward together. In some cases, it becomes clear that the family cannot reunite without posing permanent risks to the children. Children’s Aid facilitates legal adoptions for parents-to-be who demonstrate a deep commitment to forming healthy family relationships and who understand children’s sensitivities and challenges. Finding the correct match of parents and children is the most crucial aspect of this work.

New York State has a parental responsibility to the kids in its child welfare systems, and the alliance works to make sure our leaders are helping these young people realize their full potential.

While Children’s Aid leads the alliance, it is very much a coalition of more than 100 organizations and hundreds of advocates. So far the group has had a huge impact on the well-being of foster youth by securing historic budget funding for financial and social supports designed to help more foster youth land on a college campus and stay there.

Overcoming towering challenges

Historically, the outcomes for youth who have aged out of foster care have been staggering. The Fostering Youth Success Alliance came together to change that fact here in New York State. Since its inception, the alliance has secured funding that has increased with each new budget. As part of its advocacy, the alliance has enlisted hundreds of youth from every corner of the state to make the case in Albany as well as City Hall. All of the youth advocates leave feeling empowered and with the knowledge that they have made their voices heard.

Children’s Aid provides behavioral health services in school-based and community health centers to help children cope with emotional problems so they can thrive in school and in life.

When behavioral health care is available, children and adolescents can build a solid foundation to realize their potential. We help them navigate their lives as part of our commitment to strong families and communities. Making behavioral health accessible, Children’s Aid is licensed by the State of New York, and we provide kids and families with confidential individual and family counseling or group therapy. So many factors can have a powerful impact on children's well-being: parents’ financial worries, unaddressed ADHD, fear of deportation, or the overarching stresses of poverty and acclimating to a new country. We help young people focus on their potential instead. We also provide crisis intervention and emergency assessments for children and adolescents suffering from abuse, trauma, or serious emotional disturbance.