Nikita Stewart

The city welcomes poor immigrants, but its housing does not. Most rents are far beyond the means of people like Amado, who arrive looking for a better life or to make money to send back home.

So they turn to the basements of Queens.

Underneath the borough lives a shadow city of illegal apartments, shielded from the light.

Owners of one- and two-family homes have carved up their basements into makeshift dorms, illicitly constructed with narrow hallways, windowless bedrooms, shaky walls and electrical wiring strung together like knotted shoelaces. There is no accurate count of how many exist, but estimates are in the tens of thousands.

An open secret, the basements are a haven for thousands of people who work in restaurant kitchens, on delivery bikes, in small factories or on construction sites.

They live in tiny rooms alone, or share tight spaces with strangers, or even sleep in shifts. The apartments are unquestionably dangerous. But there is also a kind of safety there. Immigrants from all over the world, in the country illegally and legally, have found sanctuary in Queens among people who share their language, food and culture.

The small, dark room where Amado stays costs $650 a month. His share is $325. His roommate is in the country illegally, and so is his roommate’s brother, who earlier this year frequently stayed over and shared a twin bed. The brothers slept head to toe, back to back, while Amado lay on his twin bed, quietly reading the Old Testament.

In his corner of the room, the glow of a small television set played the news and telenovelas, offering some brightness.

An Open Secret

Queens is the city’s most diverse borough, with 800 languages spoken among its residents. Vendors work long into the night because people are always on their way to or from work.

All over, “FOR RENT” signs dot windows in homes and cover electrical poles. There is no explanation of the rules and no warning of danger. The basement apartments differ considerably in size, quality and legality.

The threat of raids by immigration authorities had residents on edge during the summer. But immigrants said they still feel a great deal of protection in Queens, where there is more access to free legal help to assist them with their cases.

They can also find housing that is less expensive than in other places, even if it does not meet city building standards. Eight areas in Queens are consistently among the top 10 places in the city with the most complaints for illegal home conversions.

Those conversions can lead to tragedies, including cases in which residents could not escape fast-moving fires that enveloped basements where they lived.

Pushed by advocacy groups like Chhaya, which focuses on the housing needs of South Asian residents, the city recently started a pilot program that will provide homeowners with loans to install windows, carbon monoxide and smoke detectors, and separate exits. But it will benefit just 40 homeowners in Brooklyn.

City law says a basement’s ceilings must be at least 7 feet high. Living spaces must have a window. The city must approve apartments with a certificate of occupancy before they can be rented.

Such rules make practically all of the basement housing stock in Queens illegal, including Amado’s home. The ceilings where he lives are just under 7 feet high, and the space has no visible smoke detectors. More than half of the apartment sits underground, which technically makes the home a cellar. In New York, all cellars are illegal dwellings.

Amado’s room shares a window with the room next to his. He cannot use it as an exit in case of an emergency. It is too small. And if he opens or closes the window, it affects the other room, like a window that sits between two rows on an airplane.

The home had been cited years earlier for illegal conversion and illegal occupancy. But according to city records, an inspector had not visited since November 2003, when he could not get inside. When he returned three weeks later, he did not find any boarders.

But the basement apartment was eventually filled again. Amado moved in a few years ago after spotting a sign in a window. Most of the time he and his roommates stay quiet. The only visible sign of life is the light coming through the slots under the men’s closed bedroom doors.

Underground Lives

At the entrance of the home of Sosimo and Dalilia, there is a tangle of wires, like a messy plate of spaghetti that stuck after being thrown on the wall.

The married couple work in dry cleaning and live with two men in a wood-paneled basement deep underground.

They moved there when their daughter, Jessica, now 27, went to college so they could help with tuition. They had previously paid $1,600 a month for an apartment. They now pay $500 a month for their room.

The narrow kitchen is taken up by a stove attached to a propane tank that was designed for outdoor cooking. But they cannot use the setup in the summer because it heats up the apartment to uncomfortable temperatures.

In a common room, Sosimo records his amateur radio show that draws listeners from New York, Los Angeles and his native San Andrés Solaga in Oaxaca, Mexico. Sosimo took up radio hosting about two years ago.

Some residents have been able to find basements that are structurally sound, including Itamar Bispo, a 76-year-old guitarist, who lives in an apartment that has windows in every room and two easy exits.

But he must walk through the landlord’s office to get to his apartment, which is labeled “OFFICE” on the door.

His bathroom is outside his apartment in the real office, and he has no stove. His refrigerator sits next to a chest of drawers.

In a corner of the room that serves as both the kitchen and living room, he makes music, setting up his microphone and singing tunes. “You only need one song,” he says, still hoping to make the hit record that eluded him in his youth.

For now, his retirement benefits and an occasional recording gig are just enough to afford the $850-a-month apartment.

There are other homes that are legal and bright. Oksoon Son, 65, moved about two years ago into the basement of the house her daughter and son-in-law rent, wanting to help raise her grandchildren.

It’s the kind of place the city would like to develop through the pilot program. Her apartment is immaculate with nary a speck of dust. Two helium balloons left over from the prekindergarten graduation of her grandson float on the ceiling.

Son, a retired nail technician, first arrived in Queens from South Korea in 1980. After hard times, including living in a homeless shelter for more than a year, Son raised her daughter and son in the Queensbridge public housing development.

She achieved a dream of a better life for her children, and she relishes babysitting her three grandchildren.

“I like this place,” she said in Korean one afternoon as light from the windows filled it up. “The sun.”

Light

That’s what Amado wants. A little sun, which he gets briefly when he walks to work, six days a week at the restaurant where he’s worked for 11 years.

Amado, who is in his 50s, has lived in the United States for nearly 29 years, coming by way of a smuggler through California, on a bus, first to Brooklyn with a brother and eventually finding the room in the basement in Queens. He is now in the country legally and able to travel back and forth to Mexico.

“I was the first one in the family that arrived here,” he said in Spanish. “It was very difficult for me to be in this city. I was very afraid of, like, the escalators.” Amado laughed at himself.

He doesn’t have much of a social life in New York. On Wednesdays, he heads to Make the Road New York, a nonprofit organization that operates out of a storefront on Roosevelt Avenue. He owes them, he says, for legal assistance they provided two years ago when he had problems with his green card. He shows up to nearly every protest to lend his body and voice to whatever cause.

Otherwise he’s in his basement, where the glow from his phone, his lifeline to his family in Mexico, provides a little extra light.

A wall in Amado’s room reflects the sacrifice he’s made: Receipts tacked to the wall show bank deposits and money orders sent back to his wife in Coatzingo, Mexico.

Amado longs for Coatzingo, the village where he’s from, and where his family lives. He’s able to make the trip there only twice a year.

Life is different there. In Coatzingo, Amado switches his baseball cap for a cowboy hat, and an entirely different man emerges.

He is a well-regarded man in his village, a man with a wife, two stepdaughters, an extended family, friends. Some might even call him rich. He has a piece of land to call his own.

He basks in the sun. He swims in a cool, natural pool. He tends to the family cornfields and a few lime trees.

He caresses his wife, Justina, able to touch her and not just hear her voice in the dark in the basement.

He runs errands; he pays bills, takes care of his family, mundane tasks that bring him pride.

With the money he saves living frugally in the basement in New York, he is patron to both his family and the town, doling out his earnings to pay for small luxuries, like a large flat-screen television.

This is why he’s in New York. If Amado had stayed in Coatzingo, he most likely would not have a job that could support his family. The crops of the family farm bear fruit but earn little money.

He plans to stay in New York for at least another five years, when he thinks he will have saved enough money to live a secure life in Mexico and can give his daughters the option of living in the United States to pursue whatever dreams they might have.

Until then, he will stay in the dark.

This article originally appeared in

Underground Lives: The Sunless World of Immigrants in Queens

NEW YORK — In New York, hope sometimes comes at the price of the sun.

But that is where their similarities end. The women are on opposing sides in an emotionally charged battle over a potential change in New York state adoption law that is awaiting Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s signature.

The legislation, called Preserving Family Bonds, would fundamentally shift the relationship that birth parents can have with their children after a court has taken the children away permanently and another family steps in to adopt them.

The proposed change has touched off a wide debate, some of it informed by the wrenching personal experiences of people who have not only gone through the foster care system but, like Joyner and VanVleck, now have the power to shape it.

Under the law, judges would be able to order that an adopted child stay in contact with a biological parent, including supervised visitation, if it helps the child. The order would apply even if an adoptive parent does not agree. Judges are currently banned from allowing any contact after ending a parent’s rights.

Only eight other states allow judges similar leeway. The New York Legislature passed the measure, but the governor’s office is still reviewing it, said Caitlin Girouard, a spokeswoman for Cuomo.

Joyner, a Democrat who was the lead sponsor of the bill, said completely severing ties meant she missed out on valuable time with her birth mother. They were reunited when Joyner reached adulthood, but her mother died just six years later.

“When she went into the hospital, I was the first person she called,” said Joyner, 32. “We had a better relationship, but it was relatively short.”

On the other side are many child welfare workers, including those with their own stories, such as VanVleck. She recalled being tugged between her biological family and her foster family for six confusing years before she was adopted. Her childhood, she believed, would have been better without that contact.

“There’s the ‘I love you’s.’ The ‘I want you back.’ There’s the trauma of people not showing up,” said VanVleck, 43.

A major report on adoption in 2012 showed that about 95% of infant adoptions are now open, meaning that children stay in some contact with their biological parents. Studies show the approach is largely beneficial. Children are less inclined to blame themselves, or to idolize their birthparents and demonize their adoptive parents. There is also the advantage of knowing family and medical histories.

But that trend has not reached cases in which the rights of parents are ended by a court, usually because the court has found evidence of abuse or neglect.

These cases, called terminations, usually occur after months or even years of legal wrangling and regular visits between birth parents and children while they are in foster care.

“The child grows up fully aware, knowing their parent. You go through this process,” Joyner said. “You don’t want to cut that contact off. That’s very traumatic.”

If parents voluntarily surrender their rights, they can often see their children after an adoption. Advocates for parents said the current law essentially punishes parents who fight to keep their children.

About 1,100 terminations were completed in the state in 2016, the last year for which numbers were available, according to the New York State Office of Court Administration. It is not known how many of those terminations were done over the objections of the parents.

Bill Baccaglini, president of The New York Foundling, a nonprofit foster care agency, said there was some merit to the arguments being made by the supporters of the bill, but he argued for a more measured approach.

“We’re going to go from zero to 360 in two minutes,” Baccaglini said.

The proposed law is not clear on what rights adoptive parents have during what could be a emotionally tumultuous or even a potentially unsafe situation, opponents argue. Adoptive parents are not simply caretakers for other people’s children, they said.

“Once they are adoptive parents, they are parents,” said David A. Hansell, commissioner of the New York City Administration for Children’s Services, which administers the city’s child welfare system.

Hansell said several changes might improve the bill: providing court-appointed lawyers to adoptive parents; allowing contact only if the adoptive parents and children, if over 14, agreed; and prohibiting contact if a parent’s rights were terminated because of severe and repeated abuse.

Hansell and other commissioners who oversee foster care and adoption throughout the state said court intervention could hamper the recruitment of potential adoptive parents, leaving children lingering in foster care for longer periods.

But Joyner, a lawyer who took office in 2015, said the bill was part of a larger progressive agenda that swept through this year’s legislative session in Albany. There is no reason to start over, she said.

There had been a push for change since the state Court of Appeals decided in 2012 that the current law prohibited judges from ordering contact between children and birth parents after adoption. A handful of judges had been doing that before the higher court made its decision.

Jeremy C. Kohomban, president and chief executive of the Children’s Village, a nonprofit foster care agency based in Dobbs Ferry, New York, said he sympathizes with the concerns of foster care and adoptive parents. But he said the biological parents whose rights have been ended are overwhelmingly black, and the family court system must consider the impact of its actions on black families.

There is no overall database that tracks visitation agreements statewide. But in a recent one-year period, The New York Foundling finalized 35 adoptions after biological parents surrendered custody, and 24 adoptions after those rights were terminated by a court. None of the parents whose rights were terminated were allowed contact, while most of those who agreed to relinquish rights had some contact with their children.

VanVleck said she understands biological parents love their children and want to fight to keep them. But love, she argued, could also mean letting go. When children grow up, they can understand that their birth parents were not able to adequately provide for them, she said.

Supporters of the bill countered that severing ties carries a finality that ignores the ability of parents to change and improve.

Tatianna, a 17-year-old girl who lives in the Bronx, said she has not seen her mother in 14 years. She blamed the pain of that separation for behavioral and social troubles she has had since then.

Tatianna, whose last name is being withheld because she is not an adult, said she is a high school dropout, pregnant and living in a group home after a relative who had adopted her voluntarily placed her back into foster care last month.

Meanwhile, she said, her mother was able to conquer an addiction and receive custody of one of Tatianna’s siblings. “She’s clean. I would have loved to go on that journey with her to help her get clean faster,” Tatianna said.

Her mother did not respond to a request for comment.

Tatianna said she is now counting down the days to her 18th birthday. “I was told if I communicated with her, she and I can both get in trouble,” she said. “She wants me back, but we all know how that goes in New York.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/nyregion/adoption-laws-new-york.html" id="1253b629-b6aa-3fd4-aa51-f00b1ff7487a">The New York Times</a>.

They Lost Custody. Should They Still Be Able to See Their Children?

Latoya Joyner, a New York state assemblywoman from the Bronx, said she was raised by a loving adoptive family after her biological parents lost custody of her. The same was true for Tracy L. VanVleck, the commissioner of human services in Seneca County.

“I am very afraid for my child’s safety and mental development with her deranged father,” Cherone Coleman wrote to Family Court in Queens in late April. “Father is losing a grip on reality and I honestly feel my child is in danger while in his care.”

Coleman and her fiancé, Martin Pereira, had recently broken up, and he had weekend visitation rights with their 3-year-old daughter, Autumn. But his behavior had grown erratic and frightening, and Coleman was hoping the judicial referee would stop the visits.

The referee declined to intervene. Less than two weeks later, on May 5, firefighters were called to a gruesome scene not far from Coleman’s co-op apartment in Queens. Pereira’s Audi had been set ablaze, with Autumn strapped in a car seat in the back. Chains had been looped through the rear doors to keep the toddler from getting out, or firefighters from getting in.

The 3-year-old girl, who had wanted to be a princess-doctor when she grew up, had died of burns and smoke inhalation.

Pereira, 39, was found nearby and charged with murder; he remains in the burn unit at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan. His family did not respond to requests for comment.

A medical assistant who has worked in the same office for nearly two decades, Coleman had waited until she was in her 30s to become a mother. After miscarrying four years ago, she was elated to be pregnant with Autumn.

In their one-bedroom apartment, Autumn slept in a large crib next to Coleman’s bed, where the mother would hold hands with her only child as they fell asleep.

Now, Autumn’s memory remains everywhere in the apartment. Her rain boots are next to the door. Her bunny slippers are a few feet away. Her name is monogrammed in green letters on a bulging toy box sitting near a toy stove and a bright pink vanity.

“She was too perfect for this world,” Coleman, 36, said one recent evening.

In interviews, Coleman could barely talk about Autumn’s death without lacing every sentence with an expletive. She was angry and numb.

Family Court is full of emotional quicksand. Judges in custody disputes are charged with balancing the best interests of children with the rights of parents while trying to sort through allegations made by desperate or angry ex-partners.

But Coleman said she had tried to tell the court that her daughter was in danger. No one would listen.

‘He’s freaking me out’

Coleman was outside with friends when she met Pereira, who was walking by. After they had been together about a year, Coleman became pregnant. Her sister, Nicole, planned the baby shower, an elaborate affair in an event hall bathed in pink-colored lights.

Pereira proposed to Coleman at the party, but the celebration turned mournful when her father had a fatal heart attack that night. His death put wedding plans on indefinite hold and strained the couple, who were already having problems. They could not even agree on Autumn’s name. Pereira called the girl Zoey and gave her his last name.

Years of tension escalated inside Pereira’s car on March 13, when Coleman returned the engagement ring. Two days later, Coleman’s mother, Denise, was alarmed to see that he was wearing the ring on his pinkie finger when he picked Autumn up for a visit.

“He kept twisting that ring,” she said. “I called my daughter and told her, ‘He’s freaking me out.’ ”

Coleman did not know that before she had met Pereira, he had been arrested in October 2013. He was charged with aggravated assault against his ex-girlfriend, a 21-year-old woman who said she feared for her life, said a law enforcement official familiar with the case.

“These are things I’m finding out now,” Coleman said.

Coleman and Pereira fought for custody. Two judges from Family Court in Nassau County, where Pereira had relatives, and a judicial referee from Queens were involved in a flurry of court appearances and petitions.

After the breakup, Pereira repeatedly used New York’s child protection safety net against Coleman, suggesting she was capable of harming their daughter, records showed.

Based on Pereira’s allegations, a child welfare investigator arrived at her home to make sure it was clean, that she had enough food and that she was not on drugs. At a hospital, Autumn’s tiny body was inspected for bruises. They found nothing wrong.

After the case was transferred from Nassau County to Queens, Margaret Mulrooney, the judicial referee, ordered Coleman to take a drug test based on Pereira’s claims. When the test came back negative, Pereira demanded a hair follicle test, which Mulrooney declined to order, records show.

Which was why, Coleman said, it was all the more enraging that when she turned to the same system for help, she was spurned.

The credibility battle

Increasingly worried about Pereira’s aggressive behavior, Coleman took a day off from work on April 23 to try to persuade Mulrooney to end the weekend visits.

Her lawyer was on vacation, so Coleman wrote out the plea herself, making sure to use black ink because she thought it would look more professional than blue. She waited for hours, she said. But Mulrooney adjourned the issue until June. Mulrooney declined to comment for this article, citing the pending criminal case.

Some advocates calling for changes in Family Court said judges tend to distrust the abuse claims of mothers, which they sometimes view as a tactic to alienate fathers from their children.

“When women lose on the credibility battle, they lose the custody battle,” said Joan S. Meier, a professor of clinical law at George Washington Law School in Washington, D.C.

The wrong decision can have disastrous consequences. About 700 children have been killed by their parents during a divorce or separation since 2008, according to the Center for Judicial Excellence, a California-based nonprofit that wants to hold courts more accountable for decisions that can have fatal outcomes.

John J. Romero Jr., president of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges who is a judge in New Mexico and was involved in custody disputes for 18 years as a lawyer, disagreed that judges are biased against the abuse claims of mothers.

“We are human. We’re not computers. We make mistakes sometimes,” he said. “The good decisions that are made regularly and routinely, those never stir controversy or end up reported by the media.”

Coleman said she let the weekend visit go on as scheduled, worried that otherwise, she could harm her pending custody case.

On that final weekend with the girl he called Zoey, Pereira seemed to be acting strangely. He repeatedly called and texted Coleman, she said. Early Saturday morning, he visited the same salon where Coleman was getting her hair done and demanded that Autumn’s braids be taken down and her hair changed to a different style. Hours later, he took his daughter to a hospital with the unfounded claim that she had been punched in the stomach.

Coleman stopped responding to his calls and texts, until Sunday evening, when a cousin from California told her that Pereira had contacted him and threatened to kill Autumn.

The next moments still remain a jumble of confusion and disbelief. Coleman reached Pereira on the phone. “I bet I have your attention now,” he said, adding an expletive.

She and her mother and sister did not know what to do, but ended up at the hospital, where they were told that Autumn had died. Coleman shook in disbelief.

No way to comfort

On a recent Saturday, Coleman laughed a handful of times, when her sister shared an inside joke or when she remembered how much of a prankster Autumn could be. She smiled when she unveiled her new license plates personalized with Autumn’s name.

Coleman has turned Autumn’s crib into a shrine, mixing her stuffed animals with tributes from family and friends: a white rose from her funeral service, a blanket emblazoned with mother-and-daughter photos, a jersey from a local team bearing the number three.

Whenever Coleman became overwhelmed, she excused herself to another room. She would return, her face dewy from tears she had wiped away with one of Autumn’s burp cloths.

At one point, she came back into the room and began to feed the fish in a tank atop a wooden cabinet that Pereira had made. As Coleman sprinkled flakes into the water, watching clown fish dance toward it, Nicole Coleman began to sob. She had no way to comfort her sister, she said.

“He tortured his own daughter just to make a point to my sister,” Nicole Coleman said.

Stoic, Cherone Coleman excused herself from the room again. When she returned, a burp cloth was flung over her shoulder.

It was decorated with a mother bear and her cub, both in pink bows.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/nyregion/queens-car-fire-toddler-death.html" id="8c839c80-4859-32b5-aa5d-824b7ed7aade">The New York Times</a>.

She Went to Court to Save Her Daughter. Days Later, the 3-Year-Old Was Dead

NEW YORK — The words were desperate and pleading.

“He kept twisting that ring,” she said. “I called my daughter and told her, ‘He’s freaking me out.’”

She Went to Court to Save Her Daughter. Days Later, the 3-Year-Old Was Dead.

The nonprofit is credited with pushing for changes that helped to steer the precipitous drop in the number of children in city foster care, now at about 9,000 from about 50,000 in the early 1990s.

Parents staged protests and made their presence felt at hearings in Albany and at City Hall. Two of the group’s proposals were approved this year by the New York state Legislature. And two former employees now hold key positions in the Administration for Children’s Services, the city’s child welfare agency.

But now the group is on the brink of collapse.

The New York City Council declined to fund the nonprofit this year. A city investigation is looking into the group’s expenditures, including a trip to Fiji taken by the former acting executive director, Ayo Haynes, to see motivational speaker Tony Robbins.

Board members say the nonprofit, once heralded as a national model, is regrouping; former employees say it is only a few thousand dollars away from disappearing altogether.

The collapse of the organization has sparked a larger discussion and an examination of race, gender and class within the close-knit world of child welfare agencies.

It also underscored how difficult it can be to maintain continuity, let alone accomplish growth, in a group in which parents with little to no managerial experience were entrusted with making policy decisions and had to collaborate with the larger child welfare universe.

At the heart of the group’s demise were internal disputes about the nonprofit’s mission and how best to achieve it. The tension peaked in August 2018, when Haynes changed the locks at the office in Harlem and prepared a letter to employees to let them know they would be furloughed.

Joyce McMillan, then the director of programming, showed up on a Sunday and got a locksmith to let her in. After McMillan called Haynes from inside the office, Haynes notified police. McMillan said she was frightened by the experience. She soon resigned.

“I’m not sorry they are closing,” said McMillan, 53. “I will deliver the eulogy at their funeral.”

The nonprofit’s origins began in 1994, when David Tobis, then the executive director of the Child Welfare Fund, decided to try to increase parental involvement in the child welfare system.

With the financial help of a wealthy friend who wanted to remain anonymous, Tobis helped to create the Child Welfare Organizing Project. Recruiting parents was, at first, slow going, said Terry Mizrahi, a professor of social work at Hunter College, who was asked by Tobis to find parents.

But the climate changed drastically in November 1995, after the horrendous case of Elisa Izquierdo, a 6-year-old girl killed by her mother; child welfare workers had failed to intervene despite repeated reports of severe beatings. Suddenly, low-income parents were given more scrutiny, and there was a rise in the number of children placed in foster care.

The nonprofit organizers held a child welfare summit in Harlem in January 1996, on a day when snow blanketed the city. Parents nonetheless packed the venue.

“Three hundred people on a snowy — a blizzard — day,” Mizrahi said. “That was really the start of knowing there was a constituency for us.”

Through their advocacy to keep families together, the group “proved to the child welfare community that parents not only could be heard but they could organize to bring about a coherent message,” said Jeremy Kohomban, the former treasurer of the nonprofit’s board and executive director of the Children’s Village, a foster care agency in Westchester County.

The nonprofit initially tapped activists like Mabel Paulino, whose family had been affected by child welfare, to take the helm, Mizrahi said. Then the organization turned to Michael Arsham, then a 40-something social worker. Arsham, who would go on to serve as executive director for 15 years, said the group was at its best when it acted as a friendly foe of the city Administration for Children’s Services.

“Not just to stand outside their house and throw rocks at them, but to be at the table,” he said.

Arsham left the nonprofit in 2013 to join the city child welfare agency as director of the Office of Advocacy, which serves as a sort of ombudsman fielding concerns and complaints.

With his departure, there was an opportunity to reset the nonprofit as a parent-led organization, and the board hired Sandra Killett, 57, who was the board’s chairwoman and a parent advocate at Children’s Village.

Killett stood apart from her predecessors; she had a long personal history with the city’s child welfare system: Her sons had been removed from her care years earlier. She is also black; Tobis, Arsham and Mizrahi are white.

In New York City, black children make up about 23% of the child population but more than 53% of the children in foster care. Still, the power structure remains mostly white and male. Four of the six commissioners who have led the Administration for Children’s Services since it was created in 1996 have been white men. Few women or people of color lead the foster care agencies with the largest contracts in the city.

The power imbalance was one more strain for women who were already going through the worst periods of their lives, former employees said.

“There were these women of color and all of these men with so-called stature,” Killett said. “The women would do what the men said. I had to tell them, ‘Don’t tell me he knows better. No, you’re the expert.’”

But she said she got pushback when she wanted parents to be more aggressive with the city. “They thought I would come in and fall in line,” she said, adding later, “I started thinking this is not for me. Every day I wanted to quit.”

The nonprofit lost a bid for a city contract, beginning a downward financial spiral. The board fired Killett in 2016.

“I’m not sure she got enough training or accepted enough advice,” Mizrahi said.

The organization once again had to reshuffle, and McMillan, a longtime parent volunteer, became director of programming. Eventually, Haynes, a board chairwoman and a mentor to McMillan’s adult daughter, became acting executive director.

Haynes, a real estate broker and an actress, was an adoptive parent and had a master’s degree in business administration. “I was just coming from a place of someone who wanted to help,” Haynes, 51, said.

In some ways, Haynes was an unusual choice. She had no experience in child welfare, professionally or personally. And some of her ideas to boost morale raised concerns.

In 2017, she took the staff to Newark, New Jersey, see Robbins, the motivational speaker, in a session that cost the group about $2,600. She also took a trip to Fiji to see Robbins, for additional training for herself.

“It was team building,” Haynes said, adding she had accidentally used the group’s credit card instead of her own to pay for the Fiji trip. “The cards look incredibly the same.”

Records show that she repaid $2,134 for her overseas trip.

Haynes described an organization that could turn parents’ personal trauma into tangible gains in child welfare. She said McMillan, who is facing accusations that she harassed other employees, had “good ideas about policy.”

But she said that carrying that pain could also become a burden. The most effective parents are able to build some distance between their personal experiences and their professional lives, she said.

“They’ve worked through their trauma. They’ve had therapy. They don’t explode,” Haynes said.

McMillan and Killett are now working as child welfare consultants; Haynes is a broker with Halstead Manhattan.

The nonprofit is exploring merging with another group, Mizrahi said. But with the group sidelined for now, two bills passed by the Legislature earlier this year are in danger of dying if Gov. Andrew Cuomo does not sign them.

Tobis, 75, who wrote a book about the nonprofit’s influence called “From Pariahs to Partners,” allowed that perhaps the group had run its course.

“Movements start, they rise, they have influence, and then they abate,” he said. “Parents are parents. They are not administrators.”

Killett said parents are capable of both, but she said that leaders of child welfare agencies should not confuse a need for support with a relinquishing of autonomy. “You don’t have to follow their lead,” she said.

Silencing Voices of Parents in the City's Child Welfare System

NEW YORK — For 25 years, the Child Welfare Organizing Project, a group of mostly low-income black and Hispanic mothers in New York City whose children had been taken away from them, managed to turn their pain into policy.

At the time, Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit that produces “Sesame Street,” wanted to create a Muppet that could help illustrate the food insecurity that was affecting nearly 17 million households with children.

Now, Lily is reappearing for the first time, as someone who is homeless. In the story line, her family is going back and forth between shelters, crashing with relatives and staying with Sofia, a person who works at the local community center.

Lily’s dramatic return was unveiled Wednesday on YouTube.

Sesame Workshop realized that the issue — 2.5 million children nationally are homeless — needed attention, said Jeanette Betancourt, senior vice president for U.S. Social Impact at Sesame Workshop. In New York City, where Sesame Street is set, one out of every 10 students was homeless during the past school year.

On “Sesame Street,” “homeless” is never uttered because of the stigma surrounding the word; on the show, “H” stands for hope, help, healing and home.

— What You Will See

Sesame Workshop has produced several segments involving Lily’s story arc, including one where Elmo and Rosita interact with real-life children who are homeless.

The videos can be seen on YouTube and on a show-related website that has resource materials to help parents, teachers, social workers and others learn how to help children cope with homelessness.

A storybook, penned by children’s author Kama Einhorn, shows Lily in a shelter comparing her situation to that of a baby bird whose nest has been destroyed.

Lily has not appeared on the show since her debut in the 2011 special that aired on PBS. Her recent plight is rooted in a realistic trajectory for many families who end up homeless: Food insecurity signaled instability, which led to homelessness.

Three videos follow Lily’s plight, from the revelation of her homelessness to getting an apartment. Leslie Carrara-Rudolph, the puppeteer behind Abby Cadabby, a regular on “Sesame Street,” brings Lily to life. Sofia is played by actress Jasmine Romero.

—Segment 1: Talking About It

Sesame Workshop created an educational program called Sesame Street in Communities, which aims to help parents, caregivers and others to improve the lives of children. The program has addressed topics like the incarceration of a parent, the death of a parent, nutrition and school preparedness.

But various people told Sesame Workshop that it needed to address childhood homelessness.

“Homelessness carries such a unique set of challenges and is such a unique circumstance of trauma for kids, affecting them in so many ways that other traumas do not. Their sense of physical safety, their sleeping, their access to school,” Einhorn said. “It’s such a pervasive trauma and it’s sustained.”

In one part of the segment, “A Rainbow Kind of Day,” Lily and Elmo are painting a mural of a rainbow. Suddenly, Lily, appearing sullen, walks away. Elmo asks Lily why she looks so sad, and then encourages her to open up.

Lily, a fuchsia Muppet with a mop of hair, green eyelids and a lavender nose, debuted on “Sesame Street” seven years ago. She was shy and soft-spoken. Her family, she explained to Elmo, did not have enough to eat.

Nikita Stewart

Articles written by the author

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