New York Foundling

Near the end of his 19th year, when Marcus Diego rose up from life in 14 different foster homes and landed in the Summit Apartments at Queens College, he sang like he’d never sung before: “Through my lungs.

A team from the University of Chicago think-tank Chapin Hall is about to publish one of the first comprehensive surveys of a hard-to-track segment of homeless New Yorkers: Youth and young adults on the streets alone.

Dozens of human services agencies and foundations in New York City are asking Mayor Bill de Blasio for a $50 million boost to the budget for foster care next year. The funding would go toward full-time life coaches and tutors for current and former foster youth from middle school through age 26, a model that nonprofit foster care agencies say has shown promise for teens in their care.

Child welfare professionals strive every day to keep children safe, to keep families healthy and together and break multi-generational cycles of maltreatment. More than 3 million new cases of child abuse and neglect are reported every year in the United States and more than 400,000 children are in foster care at any given time.

The Tennessee-based Youth Villages, one of the largest nonprofits in the country, has awarded New York City and Pittsburgh major funding to implement a promising support program for young adults who have recently left foster care.

Bill Baccaglini spent 20 years working in New York’s state government before taking the helm in 2003 at the New York Foundling, a 147-year-old nonprofit and one of the city’s longest-running providers of youth and family services.

Understandably, but sometimes incorrectly, families of mentally ill patients think that because serious medical conditions are best treated at a hospital, serious mental health issues are also best treated in the same fashion, at residential facilities or in an out-patient clinical setting.