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Persevering through the recession
13th of November 2011
Sasha Bruce Youthwork’s strength remains our broad spectrum of programs that meet low-income youth’s multiple needs. Since our founding in 1974 providing street outreach and shelter to runaways, programs have been carefully added to address additional needs and to promote transition to adulthood and self-sufficiency.
Our residential programs provided safe housing for 345 youth last year from several distinct populations: a short term emergency shelter for homeless street youth, supervised apartment living for 16 – 18 year olds, a teen mothers group home for minors and another house for mothers aged 18 – 21 with their children, transitional apartments for 18 – 21 year olds, and supervised housing for court mandated youth as an alternative to incarceration.
We believe that a strong family contributes to young people’s development and our Community Services Programs work to strengthen families. Programs such as Family Preservation allow families to weather a crisis with the support of counselors and parenting training; court appointed youth receive academic support, intensive case management, and re-connection to families as an alternative to incarceration; health education is provided in the community and with street outreach to prevent HIV, substance abuse, and other diseases; home-based counseling and family stabilization is provided through our Zocalo Outreach Program while Kindred Connections provides a family-focused drop in counseling center east of the Anacostia River, close to our YouthBuild workforce development program.
Sasha Bruce Youthwork (SBY) added four new programs in the past year: the Youth-Led Community Learning Center at Ballou High School; a federally-funded, evidence-based pregnancy prevention program (also serving Ballou’s students); a Transitional Living Program for young families exiting District shelters; and a youth drop-in center at Richardson Dwellings in Ward 7.
Our Youth-Led Community Learning Center (CLC) has been designed to remedy the myriad risk factors of high school aged youth living in the geographic catchment of Ballou Senior High School. We are honored to have been selected by the DC Office of the State Superintendent of Education to be the designated nonprofit coordinator of afterschool-time activities at this very troubled school. Our CLC this year will serve 225 9th-12th graders and their family members. It will be grounded in each of the nine nationally recognized components of a high-quality afterschool program. It will utilize one-to-one mentoring relationships, groups, tutoring and experiential learning focusing on areas of interest to high-school aged youth and which have demonstrated efficacy in improving students’ academic achievements, among other objectives. Postsecondary education preparation and career readiness training will be important elements of this CLC. The number of community-based service partners for this CLC is noteworthy and will ensure a comprehensive approach to positive youth development and learning which complements school-time activities.
Our selection as the afterschool-time provider at Ballou was followed by a federal, multi-year award to deliver and evaluate comprehensive pregnancy prevention services at the school using a proven curriculum which focuses on community service. Specifically, SBY will deliver the evidence-based Teen Outreach Program (TOP) for students of Ballou. The purpose of this project is to demonstrate the effectiveness of replicating TOP in reducing rates of teen pregnancy and births. Our first year is devoted to planning, training, needs assessment, capacity-building and piloting TOP. During each subsequent service implementation year, 500 9th to 12th graders will be served through school-day, in-class sessions and through afterschool programming at Ballou. As noted previously, the TOP model incorporates community service learning and this project’s Community Service Manager will work closely with City Year Washington DC to offer a wide range of service learning opportunities.
Another recent accomplishment was the initiation this summer of a Transitional Living Program for young families exiting city shelters through a new grant from the Community Partnership for the Prevention of Homelessness. 10 homeless families (in which the head of household is 24 years old or younger) will receive intensive case management, life skills education, parenting education and other proven supports towards the goal of self-sufficiency and graduation to permanent, independent housing.
Finally, we were honored to have been asked by the Resident Council of the impoverished and violence-plagued Richardson Dwellings public housing complex (at 54th Street off East Capitol in Ward 7) to provide our trust-building counseling approach to ameliorate conditions there. Though we had no dedicated source of revenue identified, we felt compelled to respond to this request, and this past Fall we opened the doors to our Richardson Youth Center. The Richardson Dwellings community, in particular, is in dire need of practical, family strengthening activities and positive development activities for youth due to the dearth of services and high incidence of poverty and violence therein. Currently our Youth Drop-in Center maintains consistent contact with 45 low-income youth daily. We are happy to report a new partnership with the United Planning Organization to fund part of these operations. We are excited to examine the effects of our work on youth and families who have been isolated and disenfranchised for too long – we will keep you up-to-date on our progress with that.
Despite these successes, the impact of the economic downturn on our agency has been severe. As a primary “safety net” provider for homeless teenagers, SBY relies heavily on District contracts for the fundamental costs associated with shelter, transitional and group living. Last year’s cuts to our contracts with the District’s Child & Family Services Agency of 33% were severe, and of course, no increases from that amount were allotted in this year’s budget. Coupled with the high—and increasing—cost of doing business in Washington, SBY is challenged to offer the comprehensive mix of counseling and positive youth development activities which we know are crucial to achieving successful outcomes among the young people in our shelters.
As evidenced through several local and national periodicals, the number of homeless youth is increasing. It also is clear to us that the number of young people who are outside of the system of care, or are “aging-out” of the foster care and juvenile justice systems is increasing. These vulnerable teens will be at highest risk for homelessness without significant, community-based interventions. A typical year at the Bruce House includes shelter and family reunification for roughly 250 kids. This past year, we offered emergency respite for 290 young people – a 16% increase. Though we never turn away a young person, this increase in demand for our shelter has compromised our ability to offer crucial one-to-one counseling and tutoring aimed at stabilizing situations of crisis, engaging youth back into school, and providing ongoing home-based family counseling and parenting instruction.
On top of these cuts and the increasing demand for our services, SBY was unsuccessful in its highly competitive bid to sustain federal Department of Labor (DOL) funds for our proven workforce development program, YouthBuild. In essence, due to federal budget pressures, DOL determined to award only one contract for our area in this grant round, which represents a loss of over $500,000 per year for our agency. This decision jeopardizes the intensive job training which we offer to roughly 45 high school drop-outs annually. We are hopeful to have success in this coming year’s YouthBuild competition, and we have recently submitted excellent proposals to alternate funding sources for our workforce training programming.
Our Board of Directors is dedicated to building private sector partnerships which will allow us to sustain our all-important, “wrap-around” services, including workforce training. We are asking our partners to renew their commitments to our mission through support for educational remediation and work readiness training at our YouthBuild Program. SBY’s YouthBuild workforce development program is a national model that we have adapted to fit the needs of young adults living in Wards 7 and 8. Concurrent to classroom-based instruction, participants receive construction trade training at affordable housing development sites. 130 young adults have completed the SBY YouthBuild workforce development program over the past eight years. We are proud to report that over 50% of trainees received a GED. Following program completion, 76% of trainees to-date were accepted to post-secondary schools or landed a living-wage job. 100% of those completing the program received nationally recognized certification related to the construction industry. Though we were not offered a contract from DOL for our YouthBuild Program this year, we were fortunate to have been selected by the District’s Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services (DYRS) to offer YouthBuild-model services to older teens committed to the juvenile justice system. This contract with DYRS also represents an expansion of our work training beyond construction trades to include fields such as “green” maintenance, barbering, and customer service.
Helping disconnected youth and young adults to develop the skills they need to be self-sufficient has always been a priority for SBY, and our agency’s YouthBuild Program has a strong track record of providing classroom and worksite-based education and apprenticeships which result in ready-to-work workers. While we take great pride in our comprehensive network of “safety net” programs, we are determined to expand and enhance our career preparation and job placement efforts so that residents of our shelters and disconnected young adults reached through outreach will be offered the intensive work-readiness training and employment opportunities that they need to live self-sufficiently. Renewed partnerships with supporters will also help us to complete this continuum of care and to ensure access for a greater number of severely disconnected young people to our proven workforce development model.
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