NYC Civic Service Design Studio – Pathways to Prevention

Introducing family-centered design to NYC's child welfare system.

Work done as the first Service Design Fellow at NYC Opportunity's Civic Service Design Studio.

About the Civic Service Design Studio

As part of the Mayor's Office for Economic Opportunity, the Service Design Studio brings design methods to government with the goal of making city services more responsive, accessible and useful to New Yorkers.

About Pathways to Prevention

This project was a partnership with the Community Based Strategies team at the Administration for Children's Services (ACS). The project aimed to improve family and staff experience of connecting to family support services.

Intro to Family Support

Defining the problem space

Pathways to Prevention aimed to improve family and staff experience of connecting to family support services from child welfare investigations.

ACS investigates families for suspected abuse or neglect
There are almost 60,000 ACS investigations a year, including over 80,000 children. 36-42% of these investigations uncover evidence of abuse or neglect.

ACS refers to family support from these investigations
Families are referred to services by ACS as an alternative to removing children from the home.

Community providers run family support services
54 providers are contracted to provide services at 200 programs across NYC. More than 25,000 children and their families are served daily. 98.5% of families that complete services stay together.

Many cases are symptoms of living in poverty

“...while serious child abuse does occur, it’s rare, and many issues that fall under the broad umbrella of “neglect”—which alone accounts for 73 percent of all allegations of child maltreatment made to ACS—are simply the everyday struggles of low-income families.”

– The New Republic, The Crime of Parenting while Poor

Parents often feel judgment or stigma being involved with ACS

“Manasha Mompoint helps her daughter, Denise, get ready for school. She said the city's child welfare workers did not look for any of the positives in her parenting. ‘They make you look like the worst person on earth.’”

– WNYC, Family Separations in our Midst

Key Outcomes

Change in government isn't linear. Here's how this project will inspire progress.

Building a collaborative, family-centered culture

This project showed a process for engaging with staff and residents in ways that reduce power dynamics, connect people who normally don't interact and create ideas that can be acted on. We engaged 80+ parents and over 100 staff throught this project, showing an alternative process to decisions being made from top-down.

Empowering design champions (like Daniel)

Through our partnership, our team grew in their ability and confidence to do design work. Before our project even ended, we saw our methods being applied to other projects at ACS. For example, ACS is implementing a family survey to get feedback on programs. Daniel, one of our teammates pictured above, used our design methods to collect and act on family and staff feedback to the survey.

See our teammate Daniel's design champion post

Bringing plain language to a complex service

When we started this project, family support services were confusing to both staff and families. By using language directly from parents, we were able to create explanations for services that explain what services will mean to a family's day to day life. Our library of plain language explanations and visuals can be used in materials, trainings and workflows across the system.

See our plain language talking points about family support

Further Reading

Learn even more about this project

Field Logs documenting the day to day of the project