The Child Center of NY, founded in 1953 as a children's counseling center in Queens, has become a powerful community presence in the city because of our work in the most underserved areas of the city.  

We’ve established Cash+Community Works (C+C) cohorts in Flushing, a program with a peer-driven change model centered on removing inequitable structural barriers and challenging top-down approaches to supporting low-income families on the path to self-sufficiency.  

Queens is one of the most ethnically diverse urban areas in the world, and out of the estimated 3.1 million immigrants in the five boroughs of NYC, an estimated 1.1 million live in Queens. Flushing has an immigrant population of 59%, is 82% employed, yet faces the lowest rate of health insured people in NYC. An overwhelming percentage of students (80%) in Flushing qualified for free lunch. Over the last two decades, the rate of wage growth in Flushing(46%) lagged behind the borough of Queens (79.1%) and citywide(53.7%), which helps illustrate the economic burden in this neighborhood. The COVID-19 was devastating to the economy in Flushing, with a quarter of private sector jobs being lost between the onset of the pandemic and June 2020.