About

NYC Family Policy Project’s mission is to explore and build evidence – through original research, data and policy analysis – for the policy visions of parents and young people impacted by the child welfare system in New York City.

Child welfare increases parents’ isolation, exacerbates the material deprivation of families, severs children’s most important relationships, weakens communities and reinforces historical trauma and inequity. Dynamics inherent in child welfare intervention—threat, coercion, punishment, and lack of privacy, self-determination and control—undermine its mission of safety. In NYC, nearly 45% of Black and Latino children experience an investigation in childhood, with Black families subject to the harshest impacts at every stage of involvement.

Visions developed by Rise, YouthNPower, Black Families Love and Unite and the Narrowing the Front Door Work Group emphasize the need for a limited child welfare agency and expansive and reparative investment in families and communities.

FPP is currently focused on these core policy areas:

• Family-supportive economic policies that protect against hardship and setbacks. Research documents that family-supportive economic policies can reduce maltreatment, investigations and family separation.
• Neighborhood conditions that support family health and well-being. Inequitable neighborhood conditions contribute to family stress and precarity that increase family exposure to child welfare.
• Reduced reliance on the child welfare system. Many hotline calls reflect unmet needs, not risks, that can be directly addressed through family-serving systems.
• Public information to support advocacy. Transparent public data about child welfare impacts can support local planning and advocacy to reduce family stress and state intervention.

> Learn more about current projects and priorities at FPP

FPP uses the following tools:

• Information – Provide credible and accessible information that illuminates the impact of NYC’s child welfare system as well as concrete examples of solutions so that advocates, policymakers and elected officials have more tools for improving NYC family policy.
• Research – Vision and develop research protocols that seek to identify and understand how to deliver the resources most needed by parents to secure their families’ health.
• Policy Analysis – Publish timely informational policy papers and analyses.
• Place-based Analysis and Community Policymaking – Collaborate to develop efforts to address child welfare drivers in highly impacted communities, in ways that involve impacted parents, youth and community leaders with deep community ties.
• Collaboration – Support forums with diverse stakeholders, centering those impacted, that function as critical spaces and containers for discussion, disagreement and imagining.

Our guiding belief is that good policy decisions are made by diverse groups of informed people, particularly those whose lives will be most impacted, who collaborate to work through complexity and disagreements and hold real power to develop solutions. Our goal is to build a stronger culture of that kind of work around family policy in NYC. 

Central to our theory of change is that, with greater information about local child welfare impacts and the drivers of child welfare involvement, more organizations that don’t think of themselves as involved in reducing over-reliance on child welfare can get involved in making meaningful improvements to neighborhood life that reduce family stress and state intervention. 

> Learn more about FPP staff, research partners and collaborators

FPP is currently funded by Casey Family Programs, Child Welfare Fund, DeCamp Foundation, New York Community Trust, Redlich Horwitz Foundation and through anonymous giving. Special thanks to the Pinkerton Foundation for a founding grant. FPP is a partner project of the Fund for the City of New York.