Sasha Bruce Youthwork

Councilmember Graham and members of the Committee:

Thank you for the opportunity to testify before you today. I am Deborah Shore, Executive Director of Sasha Bruce Youthwork, a multi-service agency which serves 1800 young people in the city with positive youth development services, family strengthening, work force training, afterschool programming and emergency and transitional housing. We partner with CFSA but also with DYRS, CYITC and DHS. I will therefore provide my thoughts about each of these systems and their intereactions. As I had the pleasure of participating on the Health and Human Services transition team, I also feel I bring the benefit of the thinking of the many wonderful providers and advocates who participated in that effort.

There are large issues that cut across agency lines because we do not have a coherent youth development vision and strategy in the city to reach young people who are disconnected, who are at risk of disconnection and those who are leaving public agency care without the skills and resources they need. Such a plan would include a greater investment in prevention of family dissolution and would be aimed at keeping youth out of the child welfare and juvenile justice system’s care, preventing chronic homelessness, ill effects of community violence and would provide better pathways for at-risk youth to navigate their way to adulthood. It would inevitably lead to breaking down the silos that exist within the public systems which limit everyone’s effectiveness and bring needed investments to communities that are bereft of such resources like many of our public housing projects.
CFSA is an agency that has invested in a program to provide primary prevention. Sasha Bruce is the partner in this and the program has very positive outcomes thus far. However, there is the need for this effort to be brought to a larger scale and for other parts of a prevention strategy to be put into place. The jurisdictions with the best outcomes are those who have invested heavily in prevention services. A dramatic example of how we may be missing opportunities to improve care is that 1/5 to 1/3 of the children that CFSA removes from their family’s, return home within four months and many within 1 month. I would suggest that with proper resourcing, these children/youth would not need to be removed and suffer the trauma that is always a factor when removing children from their family. Also, the large number of older youth who are in the care of CFSA are often not getting what they need as evidenced by the grave difficulty they are having transitioning to adulthood. I know that the youth we serve who are in our Teen Mothers residence and in our aging out population tell of the numerous placements they have often had, limited efforts at creating permanent connections and many traumas while in care. There is much more that can be done to prepare youth who are aging out. I think it would be wise to look at ways to enhance transitional services to youth in care and how well youth who are dual jacketed youth are being handled. We received support recently to provide transitional housing to young homeless familys. 9 out of ten of the parents in these family’s have previously been in the child welfare system.

There have been huge cuts to the private agency providers who partner with CFSA over the last year. The manner in which these cuts were made and the depth of them has frayed relationships between the public and private sector. The irony is that CFSA could be generating significant dollars through Medicaid and Title 4E which would allow for much more well resourced services to be in place.
Sasha Bruce has been an important partner to DYRS also. We provide services to committed youth through the Lead Entities as well as to young people who are detained. We believe that the Lead Entity model and the reform generally needs to be supported and expanded. There is some creative work happening through these means that point to much better outcomes for youth. The issues that need to improve at DYRS are the role definitions between the leads and the social workers at DYRS as well as assurance that good assessments are being made as to who should be in the community. The Lead entities need more funding to assure that if a youth is not doing well, for instance, there is a clear way to pull them into a structured program.
DYRS has made great improvements in the care youth receive at New Beginnings and the school there is high functioning. There needs to be alternatives for youth who are awaiting placement out there and/or to expand placement options as it is disruptive to have youth placed if there is not programming geared to their needs.
The juvenile justice system also needs a city wide investment in prevention which would include strategies to reduce violence and gang and crew activity. We have the GIP model which has been very successful both in Columbia Heights and in SE but there is now limited funding for these efforts. Sasha Bruce got funding to provide extensive services in Ward 6 using the GIP model with intense case management services. We have a final evaluation of this project which I will share under separate cover but which shows significant impact in those communities. This funding was for one year and has now sended. Sometimes I think we do more damage starting wonderful programs and after a short time having them end unceremoniously. Sasha Bruce and other community partners have been looking to find a way to keep some of these services alive but as of this point, all funding ended December 31st.

The other system which I want to tie in here is homelessness but particularly homeless youth. We recently lost a significant piece of our funding for the only shelter for under 18 year old in the city which has strained our capacity to respond to growing needs. There are some hopeful signs with the decision by HUD to include youth as a category that jurisdictions must include in their 10 year plans and our local ICH is working with our Homeless Youth Committee of DCAYA to develop this plan locally. I applaud the Community Partnership both for their leadership in designing some specialized services for family’s headed by young adults and for creating a contracting process that was the fastest I have ever experienced. It is imperative that homeless youth are provided housing. Increasingly it is clear that youth who are not housed and helped toward completing the tasks to become a self-sufficient adults, will continue to tax our social services systems for decades. Fifty percent of all chronically homeless adults report being homeless as teenagers. Homeless teenagers are more likely to have significant trauma occur to them, they are more likely to develop health problems including HIV/AIDS and are less likely to complete school and/or develop a trade. I know that Sasha Bruce and others have proven models for providing services to help young people go home if at all possible and/or have developmentally appropriate transitional living supports which show wonderful outcomes, if they cannot. But, there must be a mandate to care for and house these youth and young adults as part of a robust youth development strategy.

DC has a large number of young people who are disconnected from home, school and community. Estimates are as high as 12,000 youth. One critical area that we need to improve is to keep young people from dropping out of school. Estimates are that over 50% of all of youth who enter 9th grade do not graduate in DC. One known successful effort is to offer afterschool programming aimed at helping youth maintain and practice their basic skills, provide positive youth development experiences and safe spaces for youth in the afterschool hours. CYITC incubates many of these programs in the city but with their funding is so small, these critical services are in a precarious way. It is important to support CYITC and to encourage its expansion to be a voice and force for creative responses to youth issues.

Other important pieces to mention are the need for services aimed at drug and alcohol abuse within family’s and youth. Substance abuse underlies a significant number of the family problems which bring youth into all of the public agency services. Also, the efforts to minimize teen pregnancy are an important piece. I applaud that there is still a significant effort at the Income Maintenance Administration to support evidence based pregnancy prevention programs which are working.
But the recent effort to develop a program for PINS youth in the city within the DHS bureaucracy is less well thought out as it did not increase capacity for services but was designed as a referral system. We need more capacity for working with PINS/runaway youth and truanting youth and it needs to be a strong public/private partnership to use limited resources wisely.
We are entering a new era with a new Mayor and new leadership. I believe we are fortunate to have a Mayor who understands the problems and challenges and also understands the needs of our most vulnerable youth and family’s. I hope that a youth development vision and strategy will be forged which will create a more coherent system and which recognizes that the non-profit community is an important partner and needs to not be the first place to cut. It goes without saying that we are also in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression so the need for creative thinking is particularly important. Enhancing the ability of the city to receive more federal support along with leadership to bring business and our philanthropic partners into the conversation about how to assure the safety net remains in these next years, is the job we all need to work towards.

Thank you.