Our Story

Association to Benefit Children has always been a relentless champion for children. Unflinching in its commitment to protect every child over the last 50 years, it has changed the landscape for children across the nation.  

Inclusionary Education

ABC's national advocacy began with Merricat's Castle School - the national inclusionary model for preschool education. Through a hard-fought victory in the courts, ABC helped establish the right to integrated classrooms for young children with disabilities, which subsequently became policy nationwide. 

Anti-Hunger

During the 1980s, ABC publicly exposed the growing hunger crisis among children while developing a model for a cost-effective emergency food program with the Church of the Holy Trinity and other local churches, synagogues, and schools. In 1982, ABC established a hot meal program called the Yorkville Soup Kitchen at PS 151 and promoted the replication of the program by utilizing existing facilities and personnel in schools. In 1996, ABC established Baked in the Hood, a culinary arts program for homeless adults. Today, ABC continues to fight hunger by providing hot, nutritious meals to children and families, and through Bunny’s Garden, an urban oasis on East 124th Street where children and families can grow their own food.

Family Rights and Model Housing

In 1985, ABC filed a class action lawsuit to compel the state to provide preventive services such as housing and day care to vulnerable families without opening child-protective cases. Continuing this critical work, ABC’s Preventive Services program, All Children’s House, brings these essential services to families with children birth to age five who are at the highest risk for morbidity and mortality resulting from abuse and neglect. 

In the mid-1980s, as neighborhoods gentrified and vacancies in low-income housing disappeared, ABC also exposed the deplorable conditions homeless families faced living in abandoned buildings or dangerous and expensive “welfare hotels.” ABC set the standard for decent transitional housing by using the same funding the government had squandered to transform a dilapidated building in East Harlem into Rosie and Harry’s Place into transitional temporary housing with support services for large homeless families who had been warehoused in shelters. This cost-effective housing program became a replicable model throughout the state and the country.  

In 1987, thanks to litigation by the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, joined by ABC, the McKinney-Vento Act, which remains the only major federal legislation designed to prevent and end homelessness in the United States, now includes a guarantee that all homeless children are able to continue attending the schools were they were originally enrolled.

An End to "Boarding" Babies at Hospitals

In the late 1980s, cheap street cocaine and HIV/AIDS swept through urban neighborhoods, leaving those living in poverty especially hard-hit. Women were routinely incarcerated and lost their parental rights, and an unprecedented number of their infants were warehoused in hospital wards for months on end, often tethered to their cribs. To end this cruel and expensive practice, ABC brought two class-action lawsuits in 1987 and 1991 against the city and state. This landmark litigation, coupled with ABC’s efforts to educate the public, helped rescue “boarder babies” across the nation. ABC simultaneously created Cody Gifford House as a replicable model program, which demonstrated that medically-fragile infants could live safely and happily at home. 

Healthcare Advocacy

In the mid-1990s, when crucial progress had been made in the prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS, ABC focused its efforts on the critical need for early identification, counseling, and treatment. ABC’s class action lawsuits in 1994 secured these rights for children in foster care and another lawsuit in 1995 ensured routine HIV testing for all newborns in New York and the provision of treatment and counseling for HIV positive infants and their family members. Hospitals were also mandated to counsel pregnant women on the benefits of HIV testing. Thanks to these efforts, maternal transmission of HIV/AIDS has been effectively eliminated in New York State since 2015.

After a decade of offering crucial mental health services to New York City's most vulnerable children and families, ABC officially launched Fast Break in 1994. Fast Break was New York City’s first children’s mobile mental health crisis and disaster team designed to provide children living in poverty access to treatment. Now, Fast Break provides clinic-, school- and home-based care to approximately 1500 children annually.

In 2002, ABC won an important victory in federal court that guaranteed early and free periodic health screenings, a primary care provider, diagnosis and corrective treatment, and educational counseling for all homeless children suffering from asthma. ABC’s focus on asthma and pediatric healthcare extends into the present, with the Jerry Loughlin Childhood Asthma Initiative and the Little Clinic, the first Article 28 pediatric health clinic embedded in an early childhood program in New York State.

A Beacon of Hope

In the aftermath of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, ABC set up safe spaces specifically designed for children where they could play, be supported, and process trauma. During the pandemic, ABC was an essential first responder, staying open to provide emergency care for the children of EMS, doctors, nurses, and firefighters for 11 hours a day, distributing food, and offering mental health support in partnership with New York Project Hope. In response to the city’s most recent crisis, ABC continues to provide support to asylum seekers across Manhattan.