Today we are releasing our new child well-being index, CCC’s Community Risk Ranking: Measuring Child Well-being in New York City’s 59 Community Districts.

Taking into account Keeping Track data on economic security, health, housing, education, and youth and family issues, the Community Risk Ranking helps us to understand where risks to child well-being concentrate across the city and shows radically different realities among children living sometimes just blocks apart.

Here’s just some of what CCC’s Community Risk Ranking shows us:

• The poverty rate in Hunts Point, which is the highest risk community in our risk ranking, is nearly 10 times that of the lowest risk community, Battery Park/Tribeca.
• The average family in Mott Haven/Hunts Point makes less than $20,000 – that’s one-tenth of the income of the average family with children living on the Upper East Side.
• While the citywide infant mortality rate has declined, in East Tremont, the infant mortality rate of 9.0 deaths per 1,000 live births is comparable to that of Sri Lanka or Botswana.
• Fewer than one-third public high school students in Hunts Point graduated on time – that’s about half the citywide graduation rate.

The significance of this data was made quite clear in NY Times Columnist Ginia Bellafante’s recent column which highlights the need for services for children and families in Hunts Point in the Bronx. While the cumulative risks to children are greatest in this community, far too many children across New York City – from northern Manhattan, Harlem, north and central Brooklyn and the south Bronx – also face significant and multiple risks to their well-being.

CCC has been producing the Community Risk Ranking for more than 20 years as part of Keeping Track, the most extensive database available on the status of NYC’s 2 million children. This year, CCC has refined the methodology for the community ranking based on best practices for child well-being indices and our own understanding of the needs of children.

By highlighting the vast inequality in child well-being across the city and illustrating how risks are interrelated, the ranking can help to identify where additional resources, supports or services are needed to improve outcomes for children.

To turn poor outcomes around, we must increase investments in programs and services that help children thrive and pay particular attention to the impact of such investments on the highest-risk communities where the barriers to well-being are most profound.

Our policy and budgetary priorities must include:

• Expanding affordable, high quality early childhood education to infants and toddlers and increase the capacity for elementary and high school after-school programs.
• Providing all school students with breakfast in the classroom, universal lunch, and improve access to the summer meals program.
• Increasing outreach on prenatal care, bringing health and mental health services to every school, and increasing the capacity of community based mental health services.
• Increasing investments in community based preventive services, including home visiting and parent support programs.
• Connecting families to banks and children to college savings accounts, provide unemployed youth with job training and summer youth employment, and increase the minimum wage.
• Expanding access to rent subsidies, affordable housing and healthy food retail options and increase investments in parks and playgrounds.

We hope that the Community Risk Ranking will be the start of a robust dialogue on how we can make these critical and fundamental supports available to every child and family in need.

Read our Community Risk Ranking to learn more.

You can also explore these and other indicators of child well-being in New York City at Keeping Track Online.