Throughout more than a century of service, FCS has responded to the changing needs of our community to help families move from surviving to thriving.

In 1889, the Pacific Rescue Mission, located at 520 Kearny Street, began serving the needs of women and girls facing childbearing alone. One year later, Charles Nelson Crittenton arrived in San Francisco after establishing a Florence Crittenton Mission in New York. In 1893, the Pacific Rescue Mission was reincorporated as the Florence Crittenton Home. In the ensuing years, the Home continued to serve pregnant girls and young women, while at the same time expanding its building and annex to incorporate a training school for nurses and a school for young children. Tragically, this building was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake, though the Home quickly reopened in temporary quarters and was able to purchase a new building again in 1914. By this time, the mission of the organization was grounded in serving young mothers exclusively.

In 1947, a fundraising drive got underway and two years later the agency moved the residence into a new building in San Francisco's Western Addition. The agency purchased an adjoining building in 1968 to enlarge its capacity for services to young mothers and the larger community, and in 1971, the Home opened the first of the Infant and Child Development Program centers in this building. In 1973, to reflect the more comprehensive scope of the agency's services, the name of the agency was officially changed from the Florence Crittenton Home to Florence Crittenton Services.

Over the last 20 years, Florence Crittenton Services has both expanded and altered services to meet the needs of the community. In 1984 the Infant and Child Development program expanded childcare services to families who could not afford care in the Bayview and Visitacion Valley neighborhoods through a network of licensed family childcare homes. In 1998, FCS began several new programs: teen pregnancy prevention and empowerment program, a fatherhood support program, job training and placement program for young mothers, and a quality training program for licensed family childcare. In early 2002, FCS again expanded childcare services this time to a center in Hayes Valley and later in the same year closed the residential program.

Today, FCS offers our youngest beneficiaries high quality nationally accredited child care and development services through our centers and family child care home network, offers youth an empowerment program that moves them toward graduation, offers both mothers and fathers support services and job training with placement through several employer partners, offers family child care providers culturally and linguistically specific mentorship, continuing our proud tradition of ending poverty one family at a time.