In 1832, a church group of “benevolent women” recruited Harriet Ware to teach Sunday school in the India Point neighborhood of Providence. India Point, at the northernmost tip of the Narragansett Bay, was one of the most destitute places in New England — an unincorporated jumble of shanties for oystermen. Disease and homicide were rampant.

Many people urged Ware not to pursue such an insanity. But in the letters collected by her biographer, Frances Wayland, the fourth president of Brown University, Ware writes that to her, India Point was a “field of usefulness” where she could commit her life to “wretched little children.” Her Sunday school soon became a five-day school. Within a year after establishing the school, she felt her ability to teach these children was entirely “overwhelmed by the language and manners of the home and street.”

It could be today, couldn’t it? Ask any urban teacher.

In 1834, Ware decided to switch strategies and look for a large home in Providence, where she would house, educate and train “indigent children,” before placing them in good homes. To make this move, Ware and her benefactors organized themselves into the Children’s Friend Society, now the oldest family-service organization in Rhode Island, and one of the oldest in the nation. The benefactors had names famous to Rhode Islanders: Lippitt, Chafee, Brown, Tillinghast, Ives, Goddard.

To celebrate its 175th birthday, Children’s Friend opened its rich archives to local scholars to mine their story. As part of their celebration, the professors presented a series of five lectures on the history of caring for vulnerable children. They also contributed to a documentary movie, illustrated with haunting photographs of their client children. The movie tells the plucky story of Children’s Friend’s in the historical context of our nation’s begrudging relationship to orphans and other unlucky children.

In Ware’s day, the machines in the factories, especially Providence’s 116 textile mills, needed children’s small hands and fingers. Fully 55 percent of the factory labor was made up of children under 18, many starting as young as 7 years old. They worked 14-hour days, six days a week.

Sandra Enos, a Bryant University sociology professor, presented her findings at the last lecture, which I attended. “Ware was, according to the current jargon, a social entrepreneur, or someone who makes changes before the resources are in place.” Ware used practices that were highly unusual in her day, such as housing boys and girls together, and taking in not only orphans, but also children of “intemperate parents,” who abused or neglected them. The house was soon overflowing.

Also unusual was Ware’s habit of keeping scrupulous records on each child who came to her, how that child progressed, where he or she was placed, and even how the child fared after leaving Ware’s care. Otis Barlow, the first child in her new home, became a seaman. A deacon took two sisters rescued from abusive parents. Some children died in her care.

Ware herself died of cancer in 1847, but Children’s Friend vowed to soldier on. They built a much larger house to meet growing demand, and they joined other groups in the fight for children’s rights.

The years between 1880 and 1920 were the high-water mark for reforming the treatment of children. New laws provided for universal education, child protection, and limits to child labor. In 1882, by the way, Rhode Island was the last state in the nation to pass a law prohibiting cruelty to children — 12 years after passing its law prohibiting cruelty to animals.

Harriet Ware’s organization is far more complicated now. In general, family-service agencies help vulnerable families become strong enough to stand on their own two feet, by helping them find stable housing, employment, training, parenting skills. Many distressed families need substance-abuse treatment, or psychological and psychiatric services. And when the parents are beyond saving — too substance-ridden, mentally ill or just low-functioning — family services help children find adoptive parents or support them directly in group or foster homes.

As one family-service agency among several in Rhode Island, Children’s Friend is especially known for its work with little kids. In order to offer a comprehensive array of services for people of all ages, they partner with other organizations — such as Family Service of Rhode Island, on whose board I proudly sit.

Surely what’s most impressive about the history of Children’s Friend is how faithfully it stayed true to the original mission of Harriet Ware throughout 175 years. I love the warm, human, un-bureaucratic use of the word “friend.”

Even before the economic collapse, Providence had the third highest rate of urban childhood poverty in the nation, after Brownsville, Texas, and Hartford. The recession has been especially brutal to those families who were scraping by in the first place. The agencies soldier on, quietly preventing as many domestic tragedies as they can.

The holidays would be a good time to say thank you with a check to the family-service agencies who labor invisibly in distressed homes and communities.

Julia Steiny, a former member of the Providence School Board, consults for government agencies and schools; she is co-director of Information Works!, Rhode Island’s school-accountability project. She can be reached at juliasteiny@gmail.com, or c/o EdWatch, The Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, RI 02902