(Editor’s note: This is the fifth installment in a weekly series featuring Rhode Island’s oldest companies as the nation approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The other stories from this series can be found here.)
PROVIDENCE – For almost 200 years, Children's Friend has adapted to the times – from housing abandoned orphans on Providence's streets to delivering groceries during a pandemic. Today, the state's oldest child welfare nonprofit is navigating federal funding uncertainty while still serving thousands of Rhode Island's youngest and most at-risk children each day.
Founded in 1834 as an orphanage at a time when no formal child welfare system existed, Children's Friend has grown into a 12-site operation employing educators, social workers, nurses, nutritionists and physical therapists – all under one roof.
CEO David Caprio, who has led the organization for the past several years and has been with the agency for 26 years, said the mission has evolved dramatically but its core purpose has not.
"That part of taking care of children who don't have permanence in their lives, that is still there," Caprio said. "But our work has evolved to be much more community-based prevention."
Today, roughly 85% of Children's Friend's work is aimed at keeping children in their homes and with their families, rather than adoption, Caprio said. The organization closed its residential facilities in the 1970s and 1980s, a deliberate shift toward preventative care. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the agency was serving approximately 1,000 children a day across its classrooms.
"We don't need institutions taking care of kids," Caprio said. "We need families taking care of kids."
Children's Friend traces its origins to a group of Providence industrialists – or their wives – who hired Massachusetts schoolteacher Harriet Ware to run the original orphanage. Ware's instinct to educate and skill-build for the children in her care, rather than simply shelter them, set an early precedent. Children's Friend was among the founding members of the Child Welfare League of America in 1920, one of the nation's foremost child welfare advocacy organizations.
Caprio said what distinguishes Children's Friend from other providers is that it does not outsource family services through referrals. Every specialist – nurses, physical therapists, licensed clinical social workers, nutritionists – is on staff.
"A family in crisis doesn't have the time, resources or ability to travel to different appointments," he said.
The agency also embeds its classroom-based early education programs with home visiting and social work services – an integrated model Caprio called one of his proudest achievements. When he joined the organization in the late 1990s, this type of connection did not exist. Building the internal trust between teachers and social workers to trust each other, let alone collaborate, took years.
"The internal culture – social worker versus teacher, who takes point? Creating that ability for people to trust and work with each other took about five or six years before we had evidence that it was catching on," he said.
The COVID-19 pandemic tested the agency in ways Caprio said the organization is still processing. For the first six weeks of the outbreak, Children's Friend's primary function became food delivery – getting meals to the families it serves when everything else shut down. Classroom enrollment dropped below 50% of pre-pandemic levels and did not recover fully until roughly mid-2022.
The children filling those classrooms today – ages three to five – were born during or just after the height of the pandemic. Caprio said the developmental effects are clear. "They can't express how they feel so they have to act it out," he said, noting significant increases in nonverbal children and delays in social skills such as sharing and following instructions.
Despite avoiding direct federal cuts so far, Caprio described the past year as deeply unsettling. Approximately 50% of Children's Friend's funding comes from federal sources, including Head Start, the federally funded early childhood education program. In January 2025, a temporary shutdown of the federal payment management system – through which staff salaries are processed – forced the agency to borrow money for a week before being reimbursed.
The closure of the Boston regional Head Start office also severed the agency's primary federal contacts. And while a White House proposal last spring to eliminate Head Start funding did not ultimately move forward, Caprio said the threat was alarming.
"Even if we're not getting direct cuts, there's no increase in funding to keep up with inflation and cost of living," he said. "So we are getting cuts in a sense" – estimating the effective reduction at 3 to 5% annually.
Beyond funding, Caprio identified staffing as the agency's most pressing operational challenge. Children's Friend is short on substitute and part-time teachers, nursing staff – currently eight or nine nurses when the agency needs 12 to 15 – and licensed clinical social workers. Bilingual staff represent about 50 percent of the workforce, well short of the 70% Caprio says is needed to serve a population that has grown increasingly Hispanic.
Immigration enforcement activity has also affected attendance. Caprio said visible Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in the community last year triggered sharp drops at some sites, as families, particularly immigrant families, kept children home. Home visiting programs have seen similar hesitancy. Children's Friend does not collect immigration status information from the families it serves.
Caprio said the agency is pressing forward on expanding bilingual staffing and deepening its integrated service model, even as federal budget negotiations for the next fiscal year keep leadership on alert. Head Start reauthorization and continued pressure on domestic discretionary spending will be closely watched by the agency in the months ahead.
“We never work with a child in isolation, it’s always with the family,” he said. “We want to protect kids but also help families build strength to protect kids - that’s how you make a lasting difference.”
(UPDATE: Corrects name to Harriet Ware in 7th paragraph.)
Veer Mudambi is the special projects editor for Providence Business News. He can be reached at mudambi@pbn.com.
