Company Profile

Company Description:

The Friends of Crown Heights Educational Centers Inc., (FOCH), is a New York State registered 501(C)3 not-for-profit, community-based organization, with headquarters located at 671 Prospect Place, Brooklyn, NY 11216.

In more than 40 years of continuous and exemplary public service, Friends of Crown Heights has been a leading provider of high-quality child care and early childhood education services in the City of New York. Founded amid the progressive social transformations of the mid-1970s, FOCH was one of  the first such multicultural community-based organizations established in the predominantly working-class neighborhoods of Central Brooklyn. Today, the organization is New York’s largest and most comprehensive provider of subsidized child care and early childhood education; we are also a contracted provider of Universal Pre-K, 3-K and After-school programs in 20 full-service centers serving children and families in the boroughs of Brooklyn, Manhattan and Staten Island. FOCH also administers the highly popular Summer in the City program for children aged 5 to 12 years old, as well as the critical Child and Adult Care Food Program – CACFP --  a nutrition education and meal reimbursement program helping providers serve nutritious and safely prepared meals and snacks to children in licensed day care settings.

At Friends of Crown Heights, we are committed to fostering the healthy development of every child in our care. To accomplish this, our dedicated staff of fully licensed and professional  educators and caregivers have developed a comprehensive curriculum that nurtures the emotional, social, cognitive and physical development of each child. We also offer a richly  multicultural learning environment that reflects the diverse cultural heritage of the families we serve. In addition to our African American and Latinx children, more than half of the families we serve are first-generation immigrants from the Anglophone Caribbean, Haiti, Africa and Asia. At our Coney Island Center in South Brooklyn, more than 95 percent of our children are Chinese.

Reflecting this amazing diversity, our professional staff at Friends of Crown Heights work closely with our families to incorporate into the curriculum many of the cultural traditions of the surrounding community, including such celebrations as Kwanzaa, Juneteenth, the Chinese Lunar New Year, Caribbean Labor Day Carnival and of course, our many American national holidays. At our Coney Island Center, where the population is primarily Mandarin Chinese, Chinese foster grandparents provide daily classroom support by reading to the children, suggesting native menu selections, encouraging the children to try unfamiliar foods and serving as interpreters for parent-teacher conferences. Our multilingual, multicultural professional staff are also able to provide these critical functions throughout the FOCH network.

Although most of our group centers are located in working-class communities and areas of moderate need, FOCH serves children and families across the economic spectrum; we accept a variety of payment plans including vouchers, subsidies and private reimbursements.