Organization Details:

Association to Benefit Children (ABC) is dedicated to helping New York City's most vulnerable children and families through responsive, replicable model programs designed to permanently break the cycles of abuse, neglect, sickness and homelessness. Since 1986, ABC has built a comprehensive, humane and responsive array of programs and has brought relief to tens of thousands of children and their families.

Description and/or History:
ABC was founded to champion the rights of children and is a leader in the creation of cost-effective, replicable and humane model programs that support and strengthen vulnerable children and their families. ABC’s comprehensive services have been designed to be easily accessible and can be seamlessly “wrapped around” at-risk families. They include family preservation, crisis intervention, early childhood education, housing, mental health, recreation, after school, mentoring and summer day camp programs and legal advocacy.

At ABC’s core is high quality, enriched and inclusionary early childhood education which is the springboard from which all other services have been developed. Intervening as early as possible in the life of a vulnerable child is the best way to ensure long-term success, therefore, ABC’s safe, warm, age-appropriate, nurturing and stimulating early education programs foster both immediate and lasting educational achievement and overall health. Early education services include high quality infant and preschool day care, Head Start, early intervention, home-based early intervention, preschool special education, home-based Head Start and Universal Pre-Kindergarten. ABC’s model has for decades promoted inclusionary early childhood education which integrates, in the same classrooms, children with special needs and typically developing children, providing settings that encourage the fullest development of every child’s natural abilities. ABC’s impact goes far beyond the classroom recognizing that to fully support a child and effect real and lasting change, the entire family must be engaged every step of the way.

School-aged children gain skills and make safe, healthy choices in year-round Youth Services programs, all designed to ensure the academic, social and emotional success of each child both in school and in life. ABC provides crucial therapeutic after school and summer day camp programs, weekend mentoring, teen support groups and evening and weekend recreational and therapeutic services for children with severe medical, developmental, emotional and behavioral problems.

ABC’s mobile mental health clinic, Fast Break,treats emotionally distressed children living in poverty who have not had ready access to more traditional therapeutic settings. ABC's team of psychiatrists, psychologists and psychiatric social workers can be summoned by parents, mental health workers, police officers, school personnel, any caring adults or the children themselves to come where the child is to provide immediate treatment as well as substantial and long-term relief. Fast Break also screens and treats children in Head Start and day care centers throughout Manhattan to identify very young children in need of therapeutic intervention.

The Jamie Rose is ABC's replicable model for permanent, supportive housing for formerly homeless families who have HIV/AIDS. Each family member is provided all the services necessary to sustain and strengthen families weakened by chronic illness and crushing poverty.

Family Support, Preservation and Preventive Services are offered to fragile families in danger of loosing their children to foster care. Comprehensive support services strengthen at-risk families by empowering parents with the knowledge and tools to nurture their children successfully, regardless of the special needs faced by each child and family member, all the while keeping the safety of the child as the paramount priority. Family stability is fostered through intensive home-based counseling and case management as well as housing and entitlement assistance, parent support groups, parent workshops, crisis intervention services, English as a Second Language classes and parent/child play groups.

On Saturdays throughout the school year, ABC opens Echo Park as a drop-in center for families who are already participating in ABC’s programs as well as for vulnerable and needy community families not yet connected to any services. Families are welcomed through the doors of ABC’s Family Resource Center, an inviting space designed to provide family and community support and education, and advocacy and empowerment. Parents can either drop off their infants, preschoolers or older children for four hours of safe, enriching activities or they are welcome to participate in parent training programming including English as a Second Language and computer classes. While their parents enjoy these activities, skilled, bilingual staff members and volunteers engage the youngest children in infant care, preschool story time and themed classroom activities. Older children participate in drama, soccer and cooking classes, chorus, dance lessons, yoga, theater games and improvisational classes, and arts and crafts projects. On certain weekends, the school-age children take field trips.

Contact person: Volunteer Department, (212) 831-1322, (email)

Address:

419 East 86th Street New York, NY 10028 (See a map)