For 25 years, the Child Welfare Organizing Project, a group of mostly low-income black and Hispanic mothers in New York City whose children had been taken away from them, managed to turn their pain into policy.

The nonprofit is credited with pushing for changes that helped to steer the steep drop in the number of children in city foster care, now at about 9,000 from about 50,000 in the early 1990s.

Parents staged protests and made their presence felt at hearings in Albany and at City Hall. Two of the group’s proposals were approved this year by the New York State Legislature. And two former employees now hold key positions in the Administration for Children’s Services, the city’s child welfare agency.

But now the group is on the brink of collapse.

The New York City Council declined to fund the nonprofit this year. A city investigation is looking into the group’s expenditures, including a trip to Fiji taken by the former acting executive director, Ayo Haynes , to see the motivational speaker Tony Robbins.