Forestdale Executive Director Lorraine Stephens speaks with NY1's Cheryl Wills on "In Focus" about her organization's mission — to break cycles of poverty and trauma in foster care.

Forestdale has locations in Forest Hills and Jamaica and serves over 6,400 children in foster care in New York City.

Click the link below to read an opinion piece from the Commissioner of ACS, Rebecca Jones Gaston.

The Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) in New York City has a decades-long history of providing a broad array of supports aimed at keeping families safely together. Since the early 1990s, ACS has contracted with a network of nonprofit providers for case management services, which were expanded in 2011 to include 11 evidence-based prevention models. ACS first implemented these models as part of its reform efforts in serving justice-involved youth and their families, resulting in far fewer placements among those youth. Leveraging that success and responding to feedback from service providers that some families needed more intensive support to prevent foster care, ACS expanded implementation of the evidence-based models to child welfare services. While the models were impactful, parents, service providers, and partners called for families to be able to access services more easily via pathways outside the child protection hotline.

Mayor Mamdani has proposed cuts to programs that New Yorkers rely on. Amongst them is a $7 million reduction to an essential component of New York City’s social services network: the system designed to keep families safely together and reduce foster care entry. The Mayor’s proposal would eliminate 360 prevention service slots, meaning hundreds of families each year could lose access to critical support.

NEW YORK, NY — Today, Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani announced that the NYC Health Department would receive a $20 million investment over three years for the groundbreaking Strong Foundations initiative as part of the Fiscal Year 2026 Budget. Strong Foundations will expand eligibility for the NYC Nurse-Family Partnership (NYC-NFP) to include parents with more than one child and allow enrollment later in pregnancy.

The Ridgewood Savings Bank (RSB) Forest Hills Branch partnered with several local organizations this holiday season to collect donations for a toy drive and fund several community potlucks for those in need of a meal around the holidays. Forestdale, Commonpoint and Queens Community House (QCH) coordinated with RSB for the yule-tide charity drive and successfully garnered over 100 toys and fed over 200 people in the week leading up to Christmas.

This spotlight report examines how COVID-era parental job loss affected children’s behavioral health development, using data from the Early Childhood Poverty Tracker (ECPT), a representative, longitudinal study of families with young children born in New York City. The report draws on three ECPT surveys that followed families from before the pandemic in 2019 to the early and middle phases of COVID-19 in 2020 and 2021.

After the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020, New York City experienced a historic decline in employment, losing nearly a million jobs. This massive job loss exposed many children to the economic insecurity associated with parental job loss, which could have harmful effects on children’s development.

Rosemarie Ewing-James ’80 dedicated her career to improving the lives of children. Retirement hasn’t stopped her.

When Rosemarie Ewing-James ’80 appears on a video call for our interview, she is sitting in a nondescript office overlooking a busy highway — a surprising backdrop given that she retired last year.

Since 1854, Forestdale has stood as a pillar of support for families in Queens and Brooklyn. We were founded to serve families in crisis, and today, we continue that mission providing trauma-informed care, parenting support, and stability to thousands of families each year. But now, we face a crisis that threatens the very foundation of our community: the disruption of SNAP benefits.

Forestdale Appoints Lorraine Stephens as Executive Director

The Forestdale Inc. Board of Trustees is pleased to announce Lorraine Stephens, MSW, as the new Executive Director (E.D.), effective May 19th, 2025. As E.D., Ms. Stephens will leverage her considerable expertise in government services and nonprofit management to guide Forestdale's growth and improve services for underserved communities in Queens and Brooklyn.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams and New York City Administration for Children’s Services Commissioner (ACS) Jess Dannhauser today announced plans to expand a number of key programs aimed at helping youth in foster care connect to college and future career opportunities, fulfilling another commitment in Mayor Adams’ 2025 State of the City address.

The NYC Department of Youth and Community Development is proud to announce the expansion of DYCD’s Fatherhood Initiative, adding 17 new programs across the five boroughs and doubling the number of fathers we serve from 1,500 to 3,000.

NEW YORK — New York City Department of Youth and Community Development (DYCD) Commissioner Keith Howard today announced the awarding of 17 new contracts as part of the expansion of the Fatherhood Initiative.