Who are NYC’s Foster Agencies—and Do They Work in Families’ Best Interests?

Published June 3, 2025

Robyn Lyde, a mother of three who said ACS “took [her] daughter away,” had a question for the New York City foster care agencies who place children with foster parents: “Where’s the love?”

Lyde said that today, many ACS and foster agency workers advocate for keeping a child in foster care instead of doing more to reunite a family, especially when foster parents can offer foster children more luxuries and material goods. A birth parent may have a one bedroom apartment while “the foster parent has a five bedroom house, and every child has their own room. Or there’s two children in each room, with a computer.”

But, “Where’s the bond?”, Lyde asked. “Parents voices are really kicked to the side.”

Over the past two years in city council meetings, foster agencies have received a steady barrage of criticism about letting children idle for too long in foster care. While some agencies may go the extra mile to reunite a family, many do not, yet face few consequences for their actions. New contracts between the Administration of Child Services (ACS) and the foster agencies may lead to a shake out of low performing foster agencies.

Poverty is a root cause of many family separations. Oftentimes a lack of resources can lead to other hardships.

Nora McCarthy, executive director of the Family Policy Project, a thinktank, said that a lack of food, clothing, or housing alone would rarely result in a child entering foster care.

McCarthy said that a family who is “having a housing crisis might become unreliable about sending their kids to school, partly because they feel like they need to take their kids with them to various appointments in order to resolve their housing crisis.” Poor school attendance, in turn, can result in educational neglect, a reason for foster care placement.

Foster Agencies

Foster agencies enter the picture after family court proceedings where ACS recommends that a child be placed into foster care. On average it takes foster agencies 20 months to reunite a family once the child is in foster care, city records show.

According to ACS’s Foster Care Scorecard, which ACS uses to evaluate foster agency performance,10 of the 22 foster agencies the city outsources work to, did not hit their reunification goal of reunifying families within one year’s time.

Delaying the safe return of a child to their parents can result in serious consequences. Under federal law, if a child is in foster care for 15 of the past 22 months, parents can have their parental rights terminated and their child can be legally adopted. Additionally, children may face mental health issues. Research finds that a child separation lasting for three months or longer increases the risk of depression, poor academic performance, and difficulties in establishing parent and peer relationships.

Parents who would like to reunite with their children must first draw up a service plan with a foster agency case worker and then adhere to its goals. A typical service plan may include a parenting class, an anger management class, and referrals for substance testing, drug testing, and a mental health evaluation and therapy.

Nila Natarajan, a supervising attorney for Brooklyn Defenders, a legal aid society, said that it is very common for a foster agency to just hand a piece of paper with a phone number to a parent and say, “Hey, this is your referral. The end!”

Lacking, said Natarajan, is a warm sendoff where the foster agency says, “I’m going to come with you” to this appointment, or “I’m going to make this call with you” so that “I can help you navigate” this insurance issue.

Oftentimes, there are wait lists for services. A parenting class, for example, might only occur on a quarterly schedule, so a parent may wait several weeks for a class to begin. Unless a parent is able to tell a family court that they have completed the course, “they face a real delay in being able to reunify with their children,” said Natarajan.

Visitations

Parent-child visitations, in contrast, help nurture family bonds. Foster agencies must arrange visitations as frequently and as safely as possible, and according to the ACS Parent’s Guide, more frequent parent-child visitations speed up reunification.

Lyde, who works as a Parent Advocate for The Center of Family Representation (CFR), a legal advocacy group, said foster agencies are under pressure from organizations like CFR who are fighting for immediate, unsupervised visits as much as possible.

Lyde said that CFR gets pushback from foster agencies stating that they “don’t have a worker to cover three days a week for visits.” At other times, foster agencies say no to more visitations because “the foster mom” is working and cannot bring the child to visit their parents.

Data from the Foster Care Scorecard show that 16 of the 22 city foster agencies scored below 65 when it came to “Frequency of Parent and Child Visits.” ACS suggests in its Parent Guide that if a parent has a question about their case, that they contact their lawyer and not the foster agency.

Right-sizing

Foster agencies in New York City, like most other agencies in the rest of the nation, are labor intensive, nonprofit organizations. Some have a religious presence, either past or present — such as Jewish Child Care Association and Catholic Guardian Services. Others have names that come from the heart: MercyFirst and Good Shepherd Services. Many of foster agencies started off as orphanages in the 1800s, including the Children’s Aid Society and Graham Windham.

In 2023, city records show they received approximately $1.22 billion in government funding to provide foster care, adoption, and preventive care services. Although the Parent’s Guide put out by ACS states that reunification “is the primary goal for nearly all children in foster care,” just under 30 percent of the $1.22 billion to foster agencies went to preventive services, which help families to reunite quicker.

ACS’s paymasters, the City of New York, is not challenging this allocation of funding. In the most recent council meeting for the Committee on Children and Youth, ACS Commissioner, Jess Dannhauser, fielded extensive questioning from council members about the foster care side of the equation but no inquiries relating to quicker family reunifications.

By having 25 separate foster agencies, agencies oftentimes duplicate the work of each other. No where is this more true than in finding new foster care parents where all agencies are responsible for their recruitment and training. This requires each agency to have their own budget, dedicated staff, and office space, even though the task is largely the same across the system.

Additionally, publicly available data on foster agency performance lacks transparency and meaningfulness. While the ACS Foster Care Scorecard reports that 54.5% of foster agencies are meeting ACS’s goal of reuniting families within one year’s time, data from the Local Department of Social Services shows that, on average, reunification is taking about 20 months — significantly longer than the benchmark.

ACS does not clarify what appears to be a statistical discrepancy nor do they release information whether they are holding low performing foster agencies accountable.

Dannhauser stated in his testimony that 15 years ago there used to be 50 foster agencies when ACS first introduced its scorecard, ranking each foster agencies on various outcomes such as safety, permanency, and well-being. After some “intentional right-sizing,” there are now 25.

“With performance-based contracting in place,” said Dannhauser, “we have the right to end contracts.”

Foster agencies have been put on notice. Whether families will be able to reunite quicker is another question.