Center for Family Representation, Inc.

The Center for Family Representation Inc. (CFR) is an award-winning, innovative law and policy organization that serves primarily Black and Brown families and youth in Queens, Manhattan, and the Bronx with an interdisciplinary legal defense model that serves more than 2400 clients every year. CFR was originally founded in 2002 to dramatically change the trajectory of indigent parents being prosecuted by the City’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) and our goal is to reduce the harm of family separation and prevent or minimize the time any child spends in foster care. CFR provides interdisciplinary family defense to parents charged by ACS with a model that was unique at our founding and that is now being replicated nationally: we assign every client an attorney and a social work staff member, and teams have the support of parent advocates, who are parents with direct personal experience losing children to foster care and safely reunifying their families. CFR was the first agency in the country to integrate parents with lived experience into legal teams. In 2015, CFR expanded its practice to provide legal and social work services to parents in immigration, civil legal services and criminal defense matters.  

In addition, CFR’s Juvenile Justice Practice represents youth in Queens and Manhattan in Supreme Court Youth Parts, during Probation Adjustment and in Delinquency proceedings in Family Court.  CFR’s Community Advocacy Project represents parents during a child protective investigation (prior to court involvement) and assists parents in clearing their names from state maltreatment records. We annually train over 500 practitioners in the city, state and around the country on strategies to promote family preservation and interdisciplinary representation and we provide community based “Know Your Rights” presentations to parents, youth and service providers. We advocate at the city, state and national level for policies that promote parent engagement and justice for youth and families.

In the Summer 2022 CFR opened an office in the Bronx and became a conflict provider for family defense respondents in the Bronx.