Friends of Crown Heights Educational Center

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.

For more than four decades, Friends of Crown Heights has been a premier provider of exemplary 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 among New York’s largest and most comprehensive providers of group day care, Universal Pre-Kindergarten and after-school programs in some 15 full-service centers across the borough of Brooklyn and beyond. In addition, FOCH also administers the highly popular Summer in the City program for children aged 5 to 12, 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 and adults in 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 Latino children, more than half of the families we serve are first-generation immigrants from the Anglophone Caribbean, Haiti and Africa. 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 festivals as Kwanzaa and 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 and subsidies from the New York City Administration for Children’s Services, as well as private imbursements. 

To locate and visit a Fiends of Crown Heights Center near you, use the locator tool on this web site or call us at (718) 638-8686. We look forward to seeing you soon!