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 Far Rockaway, 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. The community of Far Rockaway, Queens is home to half of the NYC public housing (NYCHA) in the borough of Queens, where the average income for a family is just over $25,000 a year, and the median household income is 20% lower than NYC as a whole. Far Rockaway’s poverty rate is around 20%, and more than a quarter rely on food stamps to feed their families (SNAP). Forty-one percent of residents identify as Black or African American, and 31% identify as Hispanic or Latino. More than 32% of residents are foreign born.