水果派AV has gotten around to the incredible 173-year-old Auburn agency, Cayuga Centers. Even Harriet Tubman worked with it. But it would be hypocritical for me to complain since I was 30 years in publishing myself, eight as 水果派AV鈥檚 editor. I too overlooked the good-news stories, jumping into the bad news.
Yes, Cayuga Centers is going through a rough patch. As you say, it faces 鈥渃ritical underfunding鈥 and is laying off hundreds.
Here鈥檚 the belated good news about Cayuga Centers. During my 25 years as a Cayuga Centers trustee until 2022, six as its chair, I watched it grow from $2 million in revenues to $150 million, from a single location on Hamilton Avenue to offices nationwide, especially New York City and Florida.
Good news? For troubled children, indeed. Thirty years ago, they were helped institutionally, in a 鈥渞esidential鈥 setting, a so-called 鈥渉ome.鈥 All services were centralized. It was called Cayuga Home for Children. Still is, actually; its name Cayuga Centers is a not-for-profit corporation DBA, a Doing-Business-As.
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Trouble is, most institutionalized children tend not to get better, studies show. Many, in fact, get worse, ending up imprisoned for much of the rest of their lives.
The new Cayuga Home for Children CEO, Edward Hayes, read the researchers and what they were finding that works. What works? Housing troubled children with families. Not just families, but families that are strong, trained, supervised, and compensated.
Hayes did a fantastic job revising its system here in Auburn. At great risk, expense, complexity, and learning curve, he led Cayuga Home for Children to drop its institutional 鈥渉ome鈥 setting and focus instead on 鈥渢herapeutic foster care.鈥 Calling itself Cayuga Centers, it operates almost invisibly and effectively in Cayuga, Onondaga, Monroe, and many counties in several states.
Then, the federal government, with its humanitarian crisis of thousands of children arriving unaccompanied at our southern borders, noticed Cayuga Centers鈥 methods. It contracted with Ed Hayes and the agency to place many of those children into New York City families. That contract became, by far, the agency鈥檚 largest. Now the agency faces the cuts everyone is facing.
David Connelly, of Auburn, is a former member and chair of the Cayuga Centers Board of Trustees.
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