| Friends of the Children New York |
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| Our mission is to help New York City’s most at-risk children develop the relationships and skills necessary to become productive, contributing members of their community. To accomplish this, we employ full-time, paid, professional mentors, called Friends, to work one-on-one with these children on a long-term basis, beginning in kindergarten or first grade and maintaining that relationship through high school graduation. By strategically teaching valuable life skills, instilling positive values, and nurturing interests and talents, Friends takes an active, preventative, highly committed approach to breaking the cycles of poverty, violence, and abuse.
With the help of teachers and other involved school personnel, we identify those children with the greatest number of risk factors impacting their lives. To select the children most severely affected by these factors, we observe the performance and behavior of kindergartners and first graders over a six-week period in the classroom, schoolyard and cafeteria, and in their interactions with adults and their peers. We then select only those children most in danger of school failure, abuse, neglect, juvenile delinquency, gang and drug involvement, and teen pregnancy. We take into account attitudes in school, behavioral patterns, peer interactions, and family situation and history.
Each Friend is gender matched with up to eight children, and spends three to four hours of quality one-on-one time with each child every week. This includes time spent in school, on outings, or at our Friends Place.
Friends of the Children New York’s program is comprehensive, community-based and preventive in nature. Our significance for New York is our focus on early prevention rather than costly rehabilitation. |
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