Rising Ground

Rising Ground is one of the largesthuman services organizations in New York City, supporting more than 25,000 children, adults, and family members each year. Founded in 1831 as the Leake and Watts Orphan House, Rising Ground focused on providing child welfare services for much of its existence. Today, Rising Ground offers a broad range of services that include child welfare, juvenile justice services, services for people with developmental and intellectual disabilities, special education school programs, early childhood services, and services for unaccompanied minor children, among others. Services are provided by more than 50 programs at more than three dozen sites in New York City and Westchester County, New York. In April 2018, the organization changed its name from Leake and Watts to Rising Ground.

Rising Ground won the New York Community Trust Non-Profit Excellence Awards 2014 Gold Winner, and is the recipient of the Strategy Counts! Award from the national organization, Alliance for Children and Families.

Contents:

1.     History

2.     Rising Ground Today

3.     Programs

4.     References

5. External links

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1. History

The Leake and Watts Orphan House was founded in 1831, and was named after its founder, John Watts, Jr., and his friend John George Leake, a wealthy attorney whose estate provided the funds to build the orphanage. Watts, a former Congressman and Westchester County’s first judge, had often discussed with Leake the need for a private non-sectarian institution to assist children in need.

Watts’ dream did not come to fruition until after Leake’s death in 1827 when Watts inherited the estate. Watts used the money to found the Leake and Watts Orphan House. Because Watts was an active parishioner of Trinity Church (where he is buried), the Rector of Trinity Church was named the president of the orphanage’s Board of Trustees. The relationship between Leake and Watts (now Rising Ground) and the Church has been maintained over the decades, and the Rector of Trinity Church retains the option of naming a member to Rising Ground’s board. That position is currently held by Dr. Joyce Coppin Mondesire.

At first, the organization was located on the grounds of Trinity Church. The trustees chose to relocate from the density of lower Manhattan to more open country in northern Manhattan. They chose the architect Ithiel Town to design an orphanage for boys at West 112th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Upper Manhattan. The building was finished and opened in 1843. The structure resembled a classic Greek temple with space for classrooms and dormitories. In 1850, girls were admitted into the orphanage. At the time of the Civil War, the cost of provisions per child was 10 cents per day.

In 1884, Andrew Peck, who had lived at the home, formed the Leake & Watts Association of New York City as a fraternal group for men who had been supported by the organization. The association maintained a beneficiary fund for members at a time of sickness or death, as well as to pay for the burial of former Leake and Watts residents whether they were members or not. In 1886, the Leake and Watts Orphan House in the City of New York was described as "A free home for full orphans in destitute circumstances, between the ages of three and twelve; must be bodily and mentally sound; indentured or returned to relatives at the age of 14; unsectarian [sic]; receives children of any nationality or religion; disorderly children not received." In 1886, there there 1,374 children receiving care, of whom 942 were male and 432 were female.

In 1887, the Board of Trustees agreed to sell the site to the Episcopal Church, which planned to build what is now the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. The former orphanage building, now known as the Ithiel Town Building, still stands next to the Cathedral. In 1888, the trustees purchased 33 acres in Yonkers, New York and opened a new home with space for 200 children. Designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the grounds stood high above the Hudson River. The move to Yonkers was completed in 1890.

A little more than a decade after moving to Yonkers, Leake and Watts became the beneficiary of a 100-acre estate belonging to General John Watts de Peyster, a grandson of John Watts, in 1906. De Peyster named the estate at Tivoli, New York, "Rose Hill Farm." It was used as a summer camp for for the 350 boys at Leake and Watts. It was also used year-round as a school for 60 boys who learned about farming.

Leake and Watts' 1918 Annual Report described the toll taken by WW I and the Spanish Flu pandemic on New Yorkers. " The Leake and Watts Orphan House during the year 1918 has cared for the largest family in its history.  So many are the children who have been bereft of father or mother, or both, by the war and its consequences or by the influenza epidemic, that like other institutions, we have been almost compelled to stretch our capacity to its utmost limit. To do this, in the face of war conditions, has been, as every one will readily understand, a heavy strain upon our resources."

In Yonkers, orphans continued to sleep in dormitories as they had in Manhattan. But that began to change in 1921, when the organization introduced a "cottage system" to provide a home-like setting in which groups of eight to twelve children could live. The first residents were all girls. A donation by philanthropists Edwin and Sarah Gould paid for two of the cottages that Leake and Watts built. One cottage was named for Edwin Gould and the other named for his mother-in-law Hester Shrady. The cottages retain those names today. Edwin Gould was a generous benefactor to Leake & Watts who also funded the construction of Leake and Watts' first swimming pool.

The Andrew Peck Memorial Fund was established in1927 by his widow with an endowment of $100,762. The income is used to help people go to college and technical school after they leave Leake and Watts,..

In 1925, the orphanage made the switch from gaslight fixtures to electrical wiring. By 1931, on the 100th anniversary of its founding, the organization had cared for 4,300 orphans. The population had grown to nearly 500 children, two-thirds of which were boys. In 1937, Leake and Watts opened a Social Service Department and added professionally trained social workers to its staff. That was followed by opening a Foster Home Department in 1944 so that children could be placed in the community.

A number of Leake and Watts alumni served in WW II, although the exact number is not known, What is know is that 14 of the alumni were killed in action and three were reported missing. Their photos hang in the lobby of Rising Ground's administrative building on the Leake & Watts Campus in Yonkers.

In 1947, the organization merged with two residential human services organizations: the Orphans' Home and Asylum of the Protestant Episcopal Church and the Sevilla-Hopewell Society of Brooklyn, which operated homes for girls. The merger helped to strenghten resources and broaden services. In 1948, fire destroyed the two top floors of the main building on the Yonkers campus.

Leake and Watts fundraisers were frequently mentioned in The New York Times society pages in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1956, the Gilbert and Sullivan Opera Company of New York put on three performances of "The Gondoliers" at the Master Theatre on Riverside Drive and 103rd Street in Manhattan to benefit the home. In an article announcing an October 1958 benefit at Yonkers Raceway, we learned that Leake and Watts was raising money to accommodate more children. At that time, the nonprofit supported about 400 children, of whom 280 lived in foster homes. In a 1965 New York Times article announcing a dinner-dance benefit on the lawn of Gracie Mansion, it was. noted that the children's home was supporting 500 children and that then-Mayor Robert Wagner was an ex-officio member of the Leake & Watts' Board of Directors.

Mayor Wagner was one of several well-known names on the board. Others included John Jacob Astor; William R. Grace, who founded W.R.Grace and twice held office as Mayor of New York. .

By 2018, Leake and Watts had evolved from an institution to house orphan children to a large organization with more than 3 dozen programs at XXX sites. That year, the organization changed its name to Rising Ground to reflect the wide scope of its programs, from helping children in foster care or experiencing special educational needs, to teaching fathers to be better fathers, and sheltering unaccompanied migrant children and finding them a supportive, nurturing home. That same year, Rising Ground also reached an agreement with Edwin Gould Services for Children and Families under which Rising Ground assumed all administrative functions for the two organizations. Edwin Gould became a subsidiary of Rising Ground.  

In January 2020, Rising Ground announced that it was moving its administrative hub to Downtown Brooklyn to have closer proximity to its many New York City programs.

2. Rising Ground Today

While Rising Ground continues to be heavily involved in child welfare, the organization has expanded its portfolio to include a broad range of programs, which are organized into four areas of services:

A. Children and Family Services

This group includes foster care and adoption services. Rising Ground is the first human service agency in New York City to introduce a co-parenting approach in which the birth parent and foster parent jointly support the child who is in placement. This approach is expected to reunite families more quickly and help prevent child removal in the future.

Rising Ground provides Family Stabilization Services to support families in crisis before children need to be removed from the home. The organization claims it keeps 98% of families together.

STEPS to End Family Violence supports survivors of intimate partner violence and advocates on behalf of criminalized survivors of domestic violence in which survivors are convicted of crimes related to their partner’s abuse.

Relationship Abuse Prevention Program (RAPP) is the nation’s largest teen dating violence prevention program. It sends social workers into New York City middle and high schools to train the school community on healthy dating relationships.

Passage of Hope provides shelter and education to unaccompanied minors who cross the border into the United States and connects them to family in the United States.

Rising Ground’s Justice for Youth & Families operates several Close-to-Home residences for court-involved youth, where the youth continue their education and receive therapeutic supports. The program’s success is recognized nationally.

Other Children & Family Services include Homeless & Runaway Youth Services, which gives youth a place to stay in transitional independent living programs; Mother & Child Program for teenage mothers in foster care and their babies; Parent Child Home Program that sends home visitors to parents with very young children to bring educational toys and books for parents to use and interact with their children; and the Soundview Family Resource Center for families with children under the age of five in the Bronx.

B. Education Services

Rising Ground runs a variety of educational programs, including Early Head Start and Universal Pre-K classes. It operates the Biondi School, an 853 Special Education School approved by the New York State Education Department for grades K-12. The Biondi School is recognized as a National Association of Special Education Teachers School of Excellence and is accredited by the Middle States Association Commissions on Elementary and Secondary Schools.

Rising Ground offers special preschool education services through three programs: the Marion & George Ames Early Childhood Learning Center; Dr. Katherine Dodge Brownell School; and Children’s Learning Center.

3. Intellectual/Developmental Disabilities Services

The organization’s IDD services are for children and adults on the autism spectrum, with a traumatic brain injury, cerebral palsy, or other cognitive disabilities. Rising Ground offers Community Services for adults, which consist of Adult Day Habilitation, Pre-Vocational Training, and Supportive Employment. Children’s Recreation Programs provide weekend support for children.

Rising Ground provides Residential Services for individuals with IDD. Residents who live in small groups in homes, where they receive 24-hour support, assistance with household chores, clinical support, and recreational activities as well as life-skills and transportation training.

4. Health & Wellness

Rising Ground offers Care Management Services to families with Medicaid-eligible children faced by serious medical or emotional/behavioral challenges. Rising Ground helps coordinate medical visits, transportation, insurance, and connecting families to providers of social services, among other things.

In the 1980s, as AIDS spread and infected children, Leake and Watts established a foster program for HIV-positive children. In 1988, Leake and Watts was granted three-year funding for a demonstration program to train other New York City child welfare agencies how to recruit foster families to care for HIV-positive children. Leake and Watts became nationally known for successfully placing and retaining more than 135 HIV-positive chidden in foster homes.