Welcome,

The Department for Children, Youth and Families was created in 2001 from a vision of a seamless, integrated and coordinated approach to serving the families and children of Albany County.  We are working hard to deepen our capacity to respond to the needs of our families and as such we are seeing many exciting changes in the services we offer and the better coordinated approach to delivering those services.

All that hard work is starting to pay off.  A record number of children have been placed in adoptive homes and the number of children in Foster Care is down.  One of our focuses has been to empower families to become more involved in their child's welfare and two new programs are doing just that.  Family Team Conferencing and Parent Partners engage parents in the development of their own service plans more deeply than ever before.  Family Team Conferencing is empowering families by placing them at the center of decision-making regarding their child's safety and well being.  Parent Partners, who have personal experience dealing with children suffering from serious emotional disturbances, are paired with other parents who are facing the same challenges, providing support, information and advocacy.  

We are especially excited by the addition of the Children's Mental Health Unit to our department.  This group of nearly two dozen professionals, staff our newly-formed Children's Mental Health Clinic and the Mental Health Case Management Unit.  Coupled with our existing Preventive Services unit, we can now offer a streamlined, family-focused system of care to families with children suffering from emotional or behavioral problems or mental illness. 

• We continued collaborative initiatives with Family Court, the Probation Department and the Department of Social Services as the JRUS program has helped reduce the number of youth placed in Detention.
• The family treatment court continues to graduate parents who are able to parent drug/alcohol free.
• The permanency mediation project continues to empower families to mediate solutions to return their kids from foster care safely.
• And we'll be issuing an RFP to bring Multi-Dimensional Treatment Foster Care, an evidenced based foster care program for PINS/JD youth, to Albany County.

We have been most fortunate to have a staff rich in expertise and resources who are greeting the challenges in our daily operations with tremendous strength and compassion. We are also grateful for our strong community links -- this critical network encompasses a wide array of support beginning with our many provider agencies, as well as, the individuals who open their homes and hearts to foster the children who enter our care. Thank you for visiting with us, if you would like further information regarding our services, please contact us.

Uluss (Gus) Thompson
Interim Commissioner