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Mayor de Blasio Appoints Benita Miller as Executive Director of The New York City Children's Cabinet

July 23, 2015

NEW YORK— Mayor Bill de Blasio today appointed Benita Miller as Executive Director of the New York City Children’s Cabinet, an initiative driving cross-agency policy to support children’s health and wellbeing.

“The NYC Children’s Cabinet was formed to address our most vulnerable children’s needs, recognizing that the responsibility of ensuring the safety and well-being of children does not fall on one City agency, but the entire City,” said Mayor de Blasio. “I am pleased to have Benita Miller on board today. She is someone who has dedicated her entire career to strengthening New York City’s children and their families. Her experience and leadership will deepen the connection between agencies and ensure we are meeting the needs of our children.”

“Through the NYC Children’s Cabinet, we’ve begun to identify ways in which all City agencies serving newborns to young adults can work more effectively together, so that New York City can establish itself as the best big city in America to raise children,” said Deputy Mayor for Strategic Policy Initiatives Richard Buery, Chair of the NYC Children’s Cabinet. “Our new framework will benefit greatly from Benita Miller’s service and vision, from policy to practice. I look forward to working with her.”

“I am honored to be given this opportunity to serve our city’s children and families,” said Benita Miller, Executive Director of the NYC Children’s Cabinet. “As Deputy Commissioner of the Administration for Children’s Services and throughout my career, I developed and implemented tools and programs to help address the needs of children in underserved communities with proven results. I bring with me decades of experience in bringing people together for the good of our children and I am excited to get to work on this new challenge.”

In her role as Executive Director, Benita Miller will manage the planning and management of the NYC Children’s Cabinet’s operations, with a focus on prioritizing policies and regulations that agencies will jointly review and revise in order to create an alignment that benefits the city’s children. The NYC Children’s Cabinet will continue to be a space for leaders of City agencies to identify and analyze individual and common areas of work that impact children safety and create an action plan to become child-safety focused.

Most recently, First Lady Chirlane McCray and the NYC Children’s Cabinet launched “Love Is,” an original hardboard baby book published by Scholastic, Inc. to encourage early childhood language development as part of the Talk to Your Baby campaign.

About Benita Miller

Benita Miller formerly served as Deputy Commissioner of the Division of Family Permanency Services in the Administration for Children’s Services, where she led initiatives and operations related to ensuring the safety, wellbeing and permanency of all children receiving foster care services as well as caseload reductions and trauma assessment tools in family foster care. Miller developed the Housing Academy Collaborative to better prepare youth transitioning from foster care to supportive housing and NYCHA residences. She also strengthened services being provided to expectant and parenting youth and secured support from the Center for the Study of Social Policy to develop policies and programming for young fathers who are in foster care.

She created the Office of Older Youth Services and Residential Care Monitoring and oversaw the third phase of residential care reduction for ACS and also facilitated the co-location of ACS staff at Riker’s Island to ensure that youth who are in foster care were being appropriately served while awaiting the disposition of criminal matters. Miller also developed the Case Monitoring and Compliance Unit to enhance safety and risk assessments of children and youth being reunified with their families.

Before joining ACS, Miller served as Director of Scholarships at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, where among other responsibilities she implemented programs for undergraduate and law student scholars. Benita previously represented children and young people in child protective, delinquency, and PINS proceedings in Brooklyn Family Court as a staff lawyer with the Legal Aid Society. Miller earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Print Journalism from Wayne State University where she was a Rosa Parks Scholar at The Detroit News, and a law degree from Syracuse University.

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