About COYE
Advancing recognition, equity, and structured support for youth caregivers.
Who We Are
Caregivers Outreach: Youth Empowerment (COYE) was established to address a hidden and growing population: youth caregivers.
Across New York City and beyond, young people quietly provide emotional, physical, and household support to loved ones experiencing chronic illness, disability, mental health challenges, substance use disorders, or terminal diagnoses.
They are present in classrooms, clinics, and communities — yet most are never formally identified.
COYE exists to change that.
Many carry responsibility quietly, believing they are simply 'helping' — without realizing they are caregivers.
Our Mission
Caregivers Outreach: Youth Empowerment educates, equips, and empowers young caregivers and the communities that support them through research, policy advancement, coordinated service models, professional education, and public awareness.
Our mission is to advance equity by building understanding, increasing visibility, and expanding access to structured supports that honor and sustain youth caregivers while strengthening the families and systems they serve.
Our Vision
A coordinated ecosystem where no youth caregiver remains invisible — and where identification, support, research, and policy alignment operate together as standard practice across education, healthcare, and community systems.
COYE is a division of Caregivers Outreach, a Bronx-based nonprofit organization founded in 2006 and dedicated to caregiver education, workforce training, and cross-sector collaboration.
In 2015–2016, the SHARKS (Students Helping and Recognizing Caregivers’ Strength) school-based pilot launched structured peer support groups within educational settings. Its success revealed something larger:
Youth caregiving was not an isolated program need. It was a systems gap.
What began as a school-based initiative evolved into a broader response framework focused on structured identification, tiered support, and cross-sector coordination.
Today, COYE operates through coordinated community-based and school-based models designed to ensure youth caregivers are recognized and supported across environments.
Our Foundation
The Youth Caregiver Gap
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5.4 Million — Youth under age 18 in the United States provide unpaid caregiving support.
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72% — Care for a parent or grandparent.
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43% — Of surveyed Bronx middle and high school students in a 2015 pilot identified as youth caregivers.
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Yet most youth caregivers remain unidentified within the very systems designed to support them.
There is currently:
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No standardized screening pathway embedded within most schools
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No coordinated identification protocol across healthcare systems
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No shared classification framework distinguishing caregiving intensity
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No integrated cross-sector response model
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The absence is not resilience.
The absence is structure.
COYE was designed to address this structural gap.
Who We Serve
COYE supports youth ages 10–24 who provide care to:
- A parent or grandparent with chronic illness
- A loved one facing terminal diagnosis
- A family member experiencing mental health challenges
- A household affected by substance use disorder
- A sibling with high special needs
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These youth are students. They are siblings. They are leaders within their homes.
Support is matched to caregiving intensity and risk — not delivered as one-size-fits-all programming.
What COYE Builds
COYE builds coordinated systems of identification, support, research, and policy alignment designed to ensure youth caregivers are visible and sustained.
This work is operationalized through two core models and strengthened by research, professional education, and advocacy initiatives that advance youth caregiver recognition across New York State.
Understanding the gap is only the first step. COYE outlines how systems can respond.