Child welfare services in New York City are undergoing vast change. The New York City Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) has moved to a neighborhood-based service delivery model in which preventive service and foster boarding home providers serve distinct community districts rather than broader geographic areas. For foster boarding home providers (FBH), this approach represents a dramatic shift in practice, as historically FBH services were provided to children anywhere in a borough or, in some cases, from any neighborhood in New York City. This change is less wrenching for preventive service providers because the new ACS neighborhood-based services model was built on a long history of programs that have always served a specific geographic region, spanning anywhere from one to three contiguous community districts.

ctThe ACS neighborhood-based services initiative aims to solve three problems associated with centralized, citywide child welfare services for children and families. First, under the old design, children removed from their homes were uprooted and placed in foster homes in communities far from families, neighbors, schools, friends, extended family members and places of worship. Second, family problems that lead to placement were compounded by hav- ing to travel long distances to visit their children or seek support services such as mental health and substance abuse treatment or parenting skills training at remote loca- tions, often in another borough. Lastly, management and quality oversight of geographically-scattered caseloads of children and families were difficult for voluntary foster care agencies and ACS because caseworkers were working with families in neighborhoods all across New York City losing precious case-management time to travel without being able to focus on the needs of children and families in any one community district or knowing in detail what services were available.

Citizens’ Committee for Children of New York (CCC) undertook a two-year study to track the challenges faced, overcome, or remaining on the road to implementation of the ACS neighborhood-based child welfare plan. This report includes a survey of implementation efforts in the Bronx over a two-year period, where the ACS neighbor- hood-based child welfare plan was first initiated in July 1999, and an initial one-year review of how preventive service and foster boarding home providers in the remain- ing four boroughs have adjusted to this initiative. CCC
issued an interim report in January 2001 called Closer To Home: Serving Children and Families in Neighborhoods, that documented the early experiences of preventive service and foster boarding home providers in the Bronx. It is important to note that the preventive service and foster boarding home programs surveyed in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island were at various early stages of implementation of the new neighborhood-based model at the point of our interviews and that our findings and recommendations for these four boroughs are preliminary. Findings and recommendations for the Bronx how- ever, are more detailed because implementation in this borough was studied over a full year implement period.

Most programs surveyed in this second study anticipated that providing neighborhood-based child welfare services would decrease the length of stay for children in foster care because programs will establish a better relationship with families earlier on and individualized care plans will be able to secure a fuller range of services that are better rooted in the community. Programs surveyed expected that shorter lengths of stay in foster care will result from case- workers who are better educated about the resources avail- able in the community district where children and families live and families who will be better able and more willing to use services if offered in their own neighborhoods. The programs that we surveyed were still not convinced that the neighborhood-based child welfare plan would reduce the number of children with multiple foster care place- ments. Other factors such as the child’s behavior, develop- ing safe and nurturing foster homes, foster parent(s) who can relate to, care for, and manage the child in his/her care and addressing mental health and emotional issues for the child played as important a role, if not a more important one, in minimizing the number of disruptions in foster home placements.

The foster boarding home programs and preventive service programs that we surveyed in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island generally agreed with the ACS vision, broad values and planned directions to decentralize child welfare services. However, some providers were skeptical about the need to adopt the ACS neighborhood-based strategy to provide child welfare and other support services to children and families in the neighborhoods where they live. At the same time, these providers expressed concern about the dearth of support services in the community, including: affordable housing