Child Welfare Watch: The Innovation Issue

New Initiatives in New York Child Welfare 

This issue of Child Welfare Watch highlights some of the new initiatives that are improving parental visits for children in foster care, providing homes where families can reunify after children have been removed from the home, and creating much-needed pilot mental health clinics in foster care agencies.

Perhaps most important, new efforts at preventing the placement of children in foster care have helped reduce the number of children in the system to a new low: for the first time in decades, fewer than 5,000 children were placed in New York City foster care in the fiscal year ending in June.