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Children’s Village: A Haven for Kids Who Need One

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July 11, 2022

The Children’s Village (CV) founded its 180-acre residential campus in Dobbs Ferry in 1901, and today it is a nationally recognized provider of services to those who have been denied what all children deserve: safety, education and opportunity, and people who believe in them.

The young people who live on the residential campus are mostly boys in foster care or those involved in the Juvenile Justice system. Since 2004, CV has also served immigrant children who arrived in this country alone, often in search of parents or other family members. Residents live and eat in cottages of 10, staffed by experienced caregivers, and attend a public school – Greenburgh 11 – on the campus. They receive medical and dental care in a modern health center and attend a number of programs that include trauma-informed models of care. For some who need more intensive short-term psychiatric care, CV has pioneered the Jackson Rapid Intervention Center, a 21-day substitute for the trauma of hospitalization. The only service of its kind in the metropolitan New York area, the Center is open not only to children from the campus but to boys and girls on referral from other mental health and child welfare programs.

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Campus residents use the Lanza Recreation Center with full size gymnasium, fitness room and swimming pool. They are also provided paid work experience at the Center’s kitchen and café, barber shop, recording studio, greenhouse, dog training program, and more. These programs provide opportunities for growth, and the ability to leave with job-readiness skills and certifications that open doors.

CV’s service of Westchester County is not just limited to Dobbs Ferry. The agency now operates Woodfield Cottage in Valhalla, the County’s juvenile detention center. CV also offers a shelter for homeless and runaway boys and girls aged 12-17, the only shelter in the County specifically for teens. CV also addresses the issue of affordable housing, which is so crucial to keeping families together. CV runs Bay House in Yonkers in collaboration with Westhab, Westchester’s biggest developer of affordable housing. In New York City, CV built the beautiful Harlem Dowling building, which includes space for community services, 60 affordable apartments for residents of Harlem, and 12 studios of transitional housing for young adults aging out of foster care. Looking forward, CV is engaged with others in the development of the Eliza, a new building in the Inwood section of Manhattan which will provide the community with a new public library, 175 deeply affordable apartments and a wide offering of community services.

CV believes that residential treatment should be temporary and children are best served by keeping them with family or those who love them unconditionally. CV’s extensive adoption and foster care services are designed for those situations where placement in the birth family is not possible. Just recently, CV opened its foster care program to Westchester County to identify, train, and support more caregiver families, adding to their already expansive foster care services throughout NYC.

Moreover, the work of The Children’s Village has expanded beyond its historic activities to a vast array of prevention services and programs to help young people succeed when they leave residential care or prevent residential care altogether. Some of these include in-home counseling services, programs for both boys and girls in 26 middle and high schools designed to develop healthy relationships and leadership skills and prevent pregnancy, residences for teen mothers and their babies, and much more. Last year CV supported over 17,000 children and families.

The range of CV’s services is astounding – but one theme threads everything together: “continue to build…based on the understanding that our role is to lift up, empower and support children, families, communities, as we have for over a century.”

To learn more, visit https://childrensvillage.org

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