Our Mission - Children's Home Of Pittsburgh

The Children’s Home & Lemieux Family Center, established in 1893, is an independent, nonprofit organization with a mission to promote the health and well-being of infants and children through services that establish and strengthen the family.

Our programs include Adoption & Permanency Services, Child’s Way®, the Pediatric Specialty Hospital, the Pediatric VIEW Program, and Counseling. In addition to these programs, we offer free housing for patients and families in our on-site Lemieux Family Center.

What We Strive For

Our staff works hard to ensure we provide caregiver education to families in our Pediatric Specialty Hospital, find permanent homes for infants and children through our Adoption & Permanency Services work, and provide a safe and happy educational space for the children we serve at our Child’s Way daycare. We provide unique services and specialized programming that children and families in our region rely on every day.

Our History

The work of The Children’s Home began in 1893 as The Pennsylvania Children’s Home Society. The organization was founded to care and place homeless children in permanent homes, at the time an early adoption model meant to substitute institutional orphanages.

The Adoption Program still thrives today after 127 years of operation. In the 1980s and 1990s, The Children’s Home added two distinct, innovative medical programs with the purpose of furthering the continuum of care for children. The Pediatric Specialty Hospital (formerly Transitional Infant Care) opened in 1984 to provide a new model of sub-acute care for infants and their families; in 2007, this model was expanded to include patients up to age twenty-one with a wide variety of diagnoses. In 1998, Child’s Way® was established as a daycare for medically fragile children, becoming the first licensed Pediatric Extended Care Center in Pennsylvania. In 2012, The Children’s Home successfully advocated on behalf of families to the Pennsylvania legislature to raise the age of those eligible for Child’s Way to 21 years of age. Also, in 2012, The Children’s Home became a Statewide Adoption and Permanency Network affiliate as part of a patchwork of government and nonprofit agencies helping children in foster care achieve permanency.

Today, Child’s Way, the Pediatric Specialty Hospital and Adoption services are more established than ever before; helping nearly 400 families per year. In addition to these services, we’ve also added counseling and the Pediatric VIEW Program. To learn more, please visit our services.

Without our Child’s Way daycare, families with medically fragile children would struggle to find a child care center that provides dedicated medical care alongside key opportunities to learn, grow, and socialize with peers.

Without our Pediatric Specialty Hospital and the free care and training that patients and families receive there, caregivers would struggle to learn the complex medical treatments needed to safely care for their child at home. This could leave families vulnerable to medical emergencies, high medical bills, and gaps in the availability of in-home nurses.

Without our Adoption & Permanency Services, our founding program, children might stay in the foster care system longer with less hope of finding a permanent home. Beyond this issue, we would not be available to provide free birthparent counseling and general support within the adoption community.