Children Youth & Families

Encouraging Positive Development

Volunteers of America provides high quality, innovative services for disadvantaged and disconnected children and youth. Through our caring staff and dedicated volunteers we ensure the social, emotional and academic development of young children, and empower older youth to be physically, emotionally and mentally healthy and ready to enter adulthood. Our programs provide a continuum of care and support for young people through prevention, early intervention, crisis intervention, and long-term services.

Read about our runaway and homeless youth service
Read about our mentoring children of prisoners programs

View Wilder Research’s 2009 report, Strengthening Families Impacted by Incarceration: A Review of Current Research and Practice.

Authors: Jessica Meyerson, Christa Otteson, Wilder Research

The full report includes:

A brief review of the service needs of families affected by incarceration
A review of the most widely agreed upon research-based “practices” related to families af fected by incarceration.
An inventory of specific evidence-based programs, service models, and curricula that have been used to provide supportive services to incarcerated parents, their children, and their children’s caregivers.

The full report is also available at http://www.wilderresearch.org.

Volunteers of America Greater New York Opens the Bronx Early Learning Center

The Bronx Early Learning Center is a vibrant and nurturing preschool community for children ages 3 to 5 years. This exceptional school serves children with a range of developmental delays as well as typically developing children. The Bronx Early Learning Center serves 320 children in 22 classrooms and in their homes. A typical student-to-staff ratio per classroom is 1 teacher to 12 students, with 2 teaching assistants. This ratio allows for an enhanced learning experience for the students. In addition to classroom teachers, social workers, a psychologist, full-time nurse and speech, physical and occupational therapists are on-site.

Students are provided with developmentally-appropriate experiences in a culturally and linguistically diverse environment that focuses on social/emotional skills, academic readiness skills, gross and fine motor skills, language and creative arts. The school uses a nationally renowned curriculum, the Creative Curriculum for Preschool, which balances both teacher-directed and child-initiated learning, with an emphasis on responding to children’s various learning styles, and building on their strengths and interests.

Students are provided with developmentally-appropriate experiences in a culturally and linguistically diverse environment that focuses on social/emotional skills, academic readiness skills, gross and fine motor skills, language and creative arts. The school uses a nationally renowned curriculum, the Creative Curriculum for Preschool, which balances both teacher-directed and child-initiated learning, with an emphasis on responding to children’s various learning styles, and building on their strengths and interests.