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NYC Family Policy Project (FPP)

We are a research and policy analysis organization that works from the perspective that child welfare involvement emerges as a symptom when communities are under stress and duress.

While child welfare frameworks treat individual parents as the problem targeted for improvement, FPP recognizes that targeting community conditions and investing in community health can better serve the majority of families as well as improve the overall health of our city. FPP works from the policy visions of parents and youth impacted by the NYC child welfare system and collaborates with researchers, impacted parents and youth, advocates, allies and disruptors working on the ground in impacted communities to develop research-driven transformative policy solutions for NYC families.

Recent Work

Featured
Interview with Dr. Kelley Fong, author of Investigating Families: Motherhood in the Shadow of Child Protective Services
‘By relying on CPS to respond to issues of poverty and adversity, we’re creating a heightened sense of insecurity for families that’s counterproductive to everything... Read More
Deep Dive
Where to Find Data on Investigations in NYC
In New York City, 44% of Black children, 43% of Latino children and 19% of white children can expect to experience an investigation in childhood.... Read More
Featured
Research Summary: The Role of Economic Setbacks and Hardships in Child Welfare Involvement
New research has found that family economic setbacks and lack of access to basic economic needs predict child welfare involvement—and that economic policies that soften financial... Read More
Featured
Extreme Family Stress, Extraordinary Family Investment: Lessons from a pandemic that upended the New York City child welfare system
This paper was originally published on the website of the Narrowing the Front Door of NYC’s Child Welfare System Work Group. What would happen if... Read More
Featured
Guaranteed Income: Melody Webb, Mother’s Outreach Network and D.C. UBI Coalition
“If you really want families to stay together or to reunify, material needs should not be part of the equation. Otherwise you’re just penalizing people... Read More
Featured
A Healing Agenda for NYC: Talib Hudson, The New Hood
‘I think a new hood is possible if people have the space to dream it and the tools to achieve it. So the first step... Read More
Featured
Community Policymaking: Cameryn Okeke, Vera Institute for Justice, and Saadiq Bey, Kings County DA’s Office
‘If we are trying to transform public life, we have to transform the process of making policy. Equitable and just policy has to have a... Read More
Deep Dive
How NYC’s child welfare system is currently funded and how funding can shift
The majority of federal, state and local dollars now spent on child welfare in NYC are flexible funds that do not need to be spent... Read More

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Data on NYC Child Welfare Impacts

We are sharing new data from the city’s child welfare agency, ACS, to help neighborhood leaders, community groups, families and elected officials address conditions that stress families and build community networks, resources and infrastructure to support families.
See the Data

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We acknowledge that before we look ahead to what comes next for New York City’s families who have experienced extensive disinvestment, we must take an accounting of the harm done to families and communities and will seek to understand how families believe the systems responsible for that harm should be held to account.