Advocacy requires both the will to confront injustice and the commitment to transform it. ABC first championed the preservation of families when it developed the Luis Sanjurjo Day Care Center, a state-of-the-art early childhood program inside the most infamous, dangerous and squalid shelter, a “welfare” hotel called the Martinique. There, ABC’s daily “rescue missions” for children and families engaged it in the fight for daycare and housing for overwhelmed homeless families and ultimately led to the class action lawsuit, Grant v. Cuomo, which sought to provide preventive services to fragile families.

By the late 1980's, when the crack epidemic had swept through poor neighborhoods, leaving in its wake unprecedented numbers of haunted and abandoned children, thousands of cocaine-exposed infants were left to languish in the lonely wards of hospitals where they were warehoused in cribs with tops on them, like cages. At this same time, the AIDS epidemic left thousands of children orphaned, and frequently sick themselves. Babies lived out their long days and nights in hospitals, ravaged and alone, often tethered to the sides of their cribs, eventually no longer yearning for any familiar voice, for someone to rock them. Many of them died. Burials in little shoebox size coffins in mass graves on Hart Island became a routine fact of life.

Thus, in 1987, ABC brought two more class action lawsuits against the city and state on behalf of these “boarder babies,” which successfully ended the policy and practice of storing babies in the expensive and cold wards of hospitals. This landmark litigation helped rescue boarder babies across the nation with the exception of New Jersey, where ABC subsequently brought a separate, successful class action lawsuit.

To demonstrate that medically fragile infants, entitled to - and especially in need of - stable loving caregivers could live at home with nurturing families, ABC created Variety Cody Gifford House as a replicable model program. Its success was stunning in reuniting children with their families and finding permanent adoptive homes for some of the City’s most fragile children. ABC has remodeled Variety Cody Gifford House as an early intervention program for infants with special needs.

ABC has been at the forefront of the battle to change public policies that affect children who have HIV infection and AIDS. Its 1995 class action lawsuit which secured maternal counseling and newborn testing and treatment has had a profound and lasting impact. A dozen years ago, pediatric AIDS was pandemic in communities like East Harlem. In 2002, ABC won an important victory in federal court for all homeless children who suffer from asthma and who are now guaranteed outreach, early and free periodic screening and diagnosis and corrective treatment, eliminating needless suffering and making certain that a potentially debilitating condition is diagnosed before it becomes medically more complex, costlier to treat and permanently disabling.

By creating replicable, cost-effective and humane model programs that influence public policy, by speaking out in public forums, by widely circulating its special reports, and by bringing class action lawsuits on behalf of children in need, ABC has achieved the following essential reforms: ensuring inclusionary education for disabled preschoolers, securing HIV counseling, testing and treatment for all children including those in foster care, diagnosis and treatment for homeless children with asthma, and eliminating the cruel and expensive practice of "boarding" babies. And in so doing, ABC has permanently altered the public debate, improving the lives of children who, otherwise, might have waited unnoticed, vulnerable and suffering, with no advocate to witness their pain and give voice to their needs.

Evaluation

ABC is dedicated to an ongoing evaluation process in order to provide the highest quality of services to needy children and families. With the professional assistance of Philliber Research Associates, underwritten by the Robin Hood Foundation, ABC has developed, and continually refines, assessment protocols tailored to the specific services, goals and outcomes for each of its direct services programs. ABC gathers qualitative and quantitative data using a comprehensive set of evaluation instruments, including standardized assessment tools. In this way, ABC measures the progress of each child and family member throughout its programs. By rigorously incorporating and analyzing periodic evaluations, ABC is able to determine the extent to which its early education, early intervention, housing, mental health, youth and prevention programs have successfully strengthened families and
helped them to triumph and thrive. To ensure that ABC’s programs are able to rapidly identify and respond to emerging crises, ABC’s families participate in community needs assessments that are conducted semiannually.

 

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