Tag Archives: mental health

Photo of the Month: Lights On Afterschool and Mental Health at Roosevelt Island Beacon

November 1, 2023 | Leave a reply

On October 26, two of The Child Center of NY’s founding principles came together in a beautiful way at our Roosevelt Island Beacon at P.S./I.S. 217 in Manhattan. Staff and students celebrated Lights On Afterschool to shine a spotlight on afterschool programs while participating in the “Kinder, Braver Together” campaign, a partnership between The Child Center and Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation to raise mental health awareness. This month’s Photo of the Month collage tells the story!

The Child Center began in 1953 as a single children’s counseling center, and a commitment to mental health remains at the heart of everything we do—from offering therapy at our wellness centers and at schools to embedding mental health in our early childhood education and afterschool programs.

That’s why we are so excited to announce that The Child Center is partnering with Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation and jack.org to make a profound impact on youth mental health. A key priority is to have as many people as possible obtain the Be There Certificate, which teaches the public to recognize when someone might be struggling with their mental health and how to safely support them while maintaining their own mental health. The Be There Certificate is a free, self-paced, interactive online course designed for young people but accessible to all.

The Child Center is committed to having all of our staff and community obtain the Be There Certificate. The Roosevelt Island Beacon team was among the first to earn their certificates, and we think they are rocking the “Kinder, Braver Together” hats they earned as a result!

The team proudly wore their hats during the program’s Lights On Afterschool event last Thursday (center photo in the collage above). Launched in 2000 by the Afterschool Alliance, Lights On Afterschool celebrates afterschool programs and their important role in the lives of children, families, and communities. The Child Center operates more than 20 such programs, and each year they join the national Lights On Afterschool effort to draw attention to the many ways they support students by offering them opportunities to learn new things—such as dance, robotics, and community service—and discover new skills. The events send a powerful message that millions more kids need quality afterschool programs.

This year’s Lights On event at Roosevelt Island Beacon was a collaboration between The Child Center and Youth Center, another afterschool program on the island.

“We came together to show the community the importance of afterschool programs and how integral they are to a young child. All the projects we showcased were created by the participants in both programs and featured the theme of lights,” Program Director Ricardo Turenne explains. “The students also spoke about how afterschool has helped them. They spoke eloquently and from the heart about how they have pursued their interests, formed friendships, got academic support to succeed in school, and discovered strengths they didn’t even know they had. It was inspiring. This is why we do what we do.”

Mental Health Awareness Month: The Crisis Among Our Children, Three Years After the COVID-19 Pandemic Began

May 1, 2023 | Leave a reply

By Linda Rodriguez, SVP, Behavioral Health, Early Childhood, and Community Partnerships

Governor Hochul at mental health plan announcement

A photo of Governor Kathy Hochul announcing her mental health plan, taken by the blog author

As a multiservice organization that provides mental health treatment and support to young New Yorkers, before March 2020 we were busy, serving more than 40,000 New Yorkers annually through our behavioral health, early childhood education, youth development, and other programs across the city. Since then, the intensity of our work has profoundly escalated. Continue reading →

Supporter Spotlight: Xun An Chia

February 4, 2022 | Leave a reply

Plush penguins from Singapore find a home in NYC

Thank you, Xun and WT Partnerships, for this special delivery all the way from Singapore!

Brently Winstead, Development Associate at The Child Center of NY, and Xun An Chia of WT Partnership at our Forest Hills office

At The Child Center of NY, we are fortunate to have generous donors who support our clients with various types of donations. Just last month, Xun An Chia of WT Partnership in Singapore reached out to The Child Center with a unique offer.

WT Partnership had a surplus of penguin plush toys from a charity event, and Xun wanted to find a home for them during a visit to New York. As a mental health advocate, Xun wanted to ensure the donation went to an organization that offers robust and comprehensive mental health services , particularly to children. When he learned about The Child Center and the families we serve, he got in touch with our Development Associate, Brently Winstead, who happily agreed to find homes for nearly 100 penguin plushies with children in our programs. And Xun, penguins in tow, traveled nearly 10,000 miles to place them in our hands.

Xun met with Brently at The Child Center’s headquarters in Forest Hills and, according to Xun, “One of the more thoughtful conversation topics that we had pertained to that of access to resources and help (support services, behavioral health services, etc.) and that sometimes the right to — and even knowledge of the existence of — such services may not trickle down to those who need it the most, sometimes simply due to the asymmetry of knowledge due to socioeconomic disparities.“

Another topic of conversation, Xun says, “was that surprisingly, the plushies were actually quite difficult to give away. Brently was one of the few individuals who responded positively… but it all worked out in the end.“ He continued, “Ultimately, seeing the box and its contents make it way to its intended destination made it all worth it — as was the journey tossing said boxes through various train station gantries from the airport, to carrying them close to a mile from the nearest train station to my place, which was truly an experience by itself.”

Thank you, Xun, for this extraordinarily special delivery all the way from Singapore! Continue reading →

The Child Center of NY Recognized for Its Contributions to Mental Health

September 4, 2020 | Leave a reply

The Child Center serves as one of the few providers of early childhood mental health services. Strengthening the parent-child bond, as pictured here, is a part of all our ECMH programs.

We are honored to share the news that the New York State’s Office of Mental Health recently awarded The Child Center of NY with the 2020 OMH Community Cares Award for the New York City region.

OMH’s Community Care Awards were created in 2019 to highlight OMH’s partners and stakeholders in local communities across the state that are helping to identify and eliminate gaps in services and are working to build strong community-based behavioral healthcare systems. The award recognizes the extraordinary achievements of organizations who have furthered the OMH mission and made a positive contribution to the mental health system in their communities. Continue reading →

When It Comes to Criminal Justice Reform, Why Aren’t We Mentioning Mothers?

January 19, 2017 | 2 Replies

With all the recent press surrounding criminal justice issues—including President Obama’s record number of sentence commutations and his substantial piece in Harvard Law Review about the need to replace a policy of ongoing punishment with a policy of second chances—where is the mention of incarcerated mothers? Barriers that prevent women from raising their children from prison and upon their release are having a profound impact on many communities and the nation as a whole; removing them should be at the top of any criminal justice agenda. Yet the issue receives nary a mention. Continue reading →

NYC Takes Action on Mental Health Care

April 11, 2016 | 1 Reply

We seem to talk about mental health only following a massive tragedy, like the community shootings we’ve all grown too accustomed to seeing—and even then, we only talk about it for a day or so. And doesn’t it seem like you never hear about any changes following the media frenzy about behavioral health needs? Yet for all this silence, around one in five Americans experiences a mental health problem in a given year. That’s a big number—more than 43 million people.