Our education and career coaching support helps individuals pursue their passions and enter living-wage career paths.
Graham SLAM Education and Career Coaching
Graham SLAM (Support, Lead, Achieve, and Model) is an innovative initiative we developed to support the education and career goals of young adults across New York City. We provide youth in the foster care system with long-term, consistent, and comprehensive support from high school, through college or vocational school, and all the way to a living-wage career.
Scholars of Service Internships
Scholars of Service (SOS) engages youth in career-connected learning and internships, preparing them for leadership through impactful projects and experiences.
Taking Care of Business
We offer entrepreneurial training, coaching and small business microgrants at O.U.R. Place Family Enrichment Center to support the Hunts Point/Longwood community in building generational wealth. Offerings include O.U.R. Business, O.U.R. Design, O.U.R. Kitchen, and O.U.R. Barbers.
We provide enriching opportunities for community members to participate in offerings, learn new skills, and connect to local resources.
O.U.R. Place Family Enrichment Center
The O.U.R. Place Family Enrichment Center fosters relationships among community members in Hunts Point/Longwood through offerings like career coaching, small business incubation, and family-centered activities.
Manhattanville Cornerstone Community Center
The Manhattanville Cornerstone Community Center provides a safe, enriching environment for community members, offering tutoring, arts, sports, afterschool activities, and summer camp for youth, as well as ESL classes for adults.
Hunts Point & Harlem Beacon Community Centers
Our Beacon Community Centers provide academic and extracurricular enrichment activities for youth, including afterschool programs, tutoring, and summer camp. We also host offerings for community members to gather and connect.
Family-Focused School Support
Our Community Schools at PS/MS123 in Harlem and MS424 in Hunts Point engage families, improve school attendance, support an extended learning day, and provide school-based mental health therapy.
Our Partner: Greenburgh-Graham School District
The Greenburgh-Graham Union Free School District, a New York State Special Act School District, is an intensive elementary, middle, and high school (K-12) serving approximately 300 day-students referred by local school districts across the New York Metropolitan area.
We support families that are facing life challenges and need extra resources to provide for their children’s wellbeing.
School-Based Support
Currently, we partner with seven schools within the Bronx and Harlem providing support to improve school attendance, support an extended learning day and provide school-based mental health therapy.
Family Support
Through Family Support and Empowerment, we actively work with parents to set goals, build on their strengths, and develop skills to achieve personal growth and overcome challenges.
Foster Care
Graham provides foster care to children and youth in the Bronx, Harlem, and Brooklyn. Foster parents play a crucial role in their lives and can help these children thrive in the world.
We offer trauma-informed services that help children, youth and their parents meet their mental, behavioral and physical health needs.
Trauma-Informed Mental Health Care
Graham Mental Health uses evidence-based therapy to help children, youth and their parents heal from trauma and accomplish their life goals. These treatments include Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT), Motivational Interviewing (MI), and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy as it applies to depression, anxiety, and behavioral challenges.
Health Homes Care Management
Our Health Care Coordination team provides support to parents and foster parents to meet the medical, mental health, behavioral health, dental, and specialty needs of children and youth in foster care.
Support for Families with Complex Challenges
Family Treatment and Rehabilitation provides in-home support for families facing substance abuse and mental health challenges.
Our innovative initiatives have been replicated across New York City and nationwide.
Graham SLAM Expands to Fair Futures
The proven success of Graham SLAM led to the creation of Fair Futures, a coalition of 100+ organizations and youth that advocated expanding the SLAM model to all young adults in foster care across NYC.
First Family Enrichment Center in NYC
Graham partnered with city government to research practices that led to this model and launched the first NYC Center in 2017. We are now supporting the scale up to 30 similar centers across NYC.
Solution-Based Casework
Graham introduced Solution-Based Casework (SBC) to NYC in 2011, and it has since been scaled across NYC to thousands of families receiving Family Support services. SBC is an evidence-based model that empowers parents by identifying goals, building on strengths, and creating actionable plans to ensure children's safety and well-being.
Graham Family Success Scaled City-Wide
Our Family Success model, which pairs Family Advocates with parents whose children are in foster care, has been scaled across all 26 foster care organizations in NYC—called Parents Empowering Parents.
Career Coaching and Small Business Incubation
We offer career coaching and support at O.U.R. Place Family Enrichment Center, working with community members to start their own businesses, pass the NY food handler’s licensing test, and learn the tailoring trade.
Community Leadership Development
We coach and support community members around civic engagement opportunities and how to advocate for positive change in their communities.
Alternatives to Foster Care
We strive to keep families together by partnering with organizations that create community-based alternatives to the foster care system.
We engage in advocacy work to drive systemic change and reckon with harm caused by the family regulation system.
Reckoning with the Child Welfare System
Through The Reckoning, we have helped start a conversation across NYC’s foster care organizations about the harmful impact of family surveillance and separation, as well as how to move forward in transforming systems to achieve family justice.
Just Pay
We have joined the Just Pay movement, joining our fellow nonprofit human services workers, leaders, policy experts, community members, and elected officials in fighting for livable wages for human services workers.
