For Love of Children was founded in 1965 by a consortium of churches and concerned citizens to act on behalf of 900 abandoned and abused children who were warehoused in the District's over crowded, understaffed "Junior Village." Due to the efforts of FLOC and sister agencies in establishing viable alternatives to institutionalizaton, Junior Village was closed in 1973.

FLOC founded the District's first Child Advocacy Center and co-founded the Consortium for Child Welfare, a city-wide collaborative of 16 foster care and adoption agencies. In 1999, For Love of Children designed the Family Intervention Program (FIP) in collaboration with the Casey Family Programs of Seattle Washington and the DC Child and Family Services Agency. FLOC has served over 10,000 children and families since 1965.

FLOC was a birth child of the civil rights movement in the 1960's. It grew directly from participation by several Washington clergy in the watershed event of that movement, the demonstration at Selma, Alabama in March, 1965. Reverend Gordon Cosby, Minister of the Church of the Saviour, likened the Selma experience to a modern day Pentecost.

He had a sense of God's spirit descending on the black church in the south as it threw off shackles of fear, to claim for its people the American promise of equality and justice. The civil rights movement generated hope for change far beyond desegregation - hope that myriad places of social neglect could be reversed, city-by-city, and that there was sufficient imagination, commitment, and leadership in communities of faith to energize a "coalition of conscience" that would compel substantial social change.

Upon his return from Selma, Cosby made the connection between the exclusion of black Americans from opportunity, and the exclusion of institutionalized District of Columbia children from the irreplaceable nurturing and belonging of the family setting. As he developed this connection in a series of sermons, a cadre of people was called together and the direction of FLOC was set.