About Us

NYC Family Policy Project brings together researchers, parents and youth with lived expertise and advocates/allies and disruptors working on the ground in impacted communities to develop research-driven transformative policy solutions for NYC families.

Founded in September 2021, it offers credible, deeply researched and accessible policy briefs, original research and data analysis to support the work of activists, government, philanthropists and media to reduce the scope and harm of our current child welfare system and improve conditions for families. FPP contributes to ending NYC’s 40-year over-investment in child welfare and under-investment in communities, which has had devastating impacts on low-income families of color, particularly Black families, which are disproportionately investigated, monitored and separated.

FPP consists of the following program areas:

Information – Provide credible and accessible information that illuminates the immense impact of NYC’s child welfare system as well as concrete examples of solutions so that advocates, journalists and public officials have more tools for understanding and 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 – Child welfare in NYC is highly localized to a few communities, and some solutions need to be hyper-local and involve parents, youth and key community members with deep community ties.

Collective efforts to generate the ideas needed to re-envision NYC family policy – Bring together researchers, policymakers, people with lived expertise and community leaders through roundtables, workgroups, position papers, community arts and performance events and other forums in order to work toward a city without a considerable regulatory child welfare system. Specifically, we will:

• Affirmatively build principles and practices of a “Family Development Field”;
• Support the capacity of people impacted as policymakers;
• Build stronger community for researchers on child welfare across disciplines;
• Connect researchers and policymakers with those working on the ground;
• Co-develop language and norms around community health with community members that will replace the pathology-based language around families currently used throughout child welfare- impacted neighborhoods.

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.