115 Years of Meeting the Moment

Since 1908, we have provided a safety net to generations of New Yorkers and your support has been instrumental in empowering us to meet the needs of the moment and respond to some of New York City’s greatest challenges.

Today, our work focuses on the mental health needs of our young people. We place licensed clinical social workers, youth development specialists, and teaching artists in schools to provide young people growing up in poverty with trauma-informed mental health counseling, community-based programming, and healing-based arts education. Through this approach, our students build the skills necessary to break cycles of poverty and become advocates for their communities.

Thank you for joining us on this 115-year journey as a champion for our young people.

PWC staff are embedded in school buildings across all five boroughs of NYC. Our programs provide a range of holistic support services for students, families, and entire communities that are most vulnerable to mental health distress.

Many of our students face the insidious effects of structural racism and intergenerational poverty—food scarcity, inadequate health care, unemployment, loss of a parent to incarceration or death, and homelessness. Studies show these hardships exacerbate existing stressful environments, resulting in harmful toxic stress–stress that is prolonged, severe, or chronic, which causes significant problems with health and development.

It is nearly impossible for students to focus on academics if they are experiencing a crisis or have unaddressed trauma.

After over a century of responding to crises and meeting the needs of the moment, Partnership with Children knows what works to help every child succeed in school, society, and life.

Our programs yield results, helping tens of thousands of students overcome systemic barriers to success. Over the past several years, the communities we serve have consistently reported that our work has enhanced student and family success.

In the 2023 school year, 90% of caseload students made progress on or achieved their counseling goals. Among all the students PWC served this year, we can report that:

In a survey of parents at PWC Community Schools, some highlights included:

Teachers regularly express deep gratitude for our work, especially the support we provide them, such as crisis intervention and classroom support, professional development, coaching, and even support groups. This year alone, our staff led :

With over 115 years of experience behind us, we know that students are at their best when the entire community is engaged and working together to guarantee their success. To that end, our priorities for the next 5 years include:

Build Cohorts of PWC Schools: Grow and consolidate our reach through the creation of school cohorts, empowering us to share resources and practices between schools to be more effective advocates for the children we serve Strengthen Ecosystems of Support within PWC Schools: Create a greater density of core services in our schools geared towards directly addressing the trauma that holds children back from succeeding on their own terms Amplify Trauma-Informed Interventions Across NYC Schools: Gain more support for trauma-informed, school-based interventions by formalizing the best practices of our intervention model

Cohorts are a new way forward for PWC. With this model, we will deepen our impact by connecting neighboring schools and communities with students who face the greatest systemic barriers to growth.

Schools that qualify to be part of our cohort model are ones that experience high absenteeism, high scores on the Economic Need Index, and low scores on the Community Health report.

The benefits of school cohorts include being able to increase services in schools through shared resources and building deeper relationships with district leaders to enhance our advocacy on behalf of students.

As our city emerges from a global pandemic, we find ourselves at another critical juncture. The lasting impacts of COVID-19 are exacerbating structural inequities and are having profound impacts of toxic stress on communities of color. Additionally, our city is facing drastic budget cuts that will directly impact our young people. There are critical challenges ahead, but we are once again prepared to meet the moment. We simply need your support. Will you help us bridge inequities today and for the next 115 years?

PWC was founded in 1908 as “Big Sisters” to support girls in New York City's court system. Despite the economic boom of the early 1900s, there was a stark divide between the opulence of the wealthy and the extreme deprivation of the poor. Among those who faced the greatest challenges were girls living in poverty. During a time when there were few child protection laws or social services, economic vulnerability made poor children, particularly girls, susceptible to exploitation and abuse. Since its founding, Partnership with Children has been ahead of its time in its response to New York City's most pressing crises.

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