The Enhanced Adolescent Services / Independent Living Program AS / IL Program

The Enhanced Adolescent Services Unit at Edwin Gould Services for Children and Families specializes in outreach to adolescents, who are in need of additional services that will prepare our youths for integration and to be productive members of society. Our continuing goal is to help adolescents develop and maintain meaningful and productive lives, when they venture out into society. The Adolescent Services Unit offers services in housing advocacy, community reintegration, cultural enrichment, educational/vocational development and life skills.

This year we are offering workshops on cultural awareness, money management, food management and nutrition, household management, housing, substance abuse awareness, human sexuality, employment planning and vocational training, legal rights and responsibilities, personal appearance and hygiene, educational exploration and planning in several recreational activities. Youth also get the opportunity to participate. AS/IL Team at Edwin Gould Services for Children and Families continues to enjoy growth and development

The team continues to aggressively pursue mentoring and vocational / job-training opportunities for IL youth.

Moving to the Future:

With Edwin Gould ranked as the number one children and family Foster Boarding Home services agency in the city, its AS / IL Program must move in tandem with this positioning and establish and maintain a competitive and innovative edge as a leading service provider for youth in foster care. In achieving this objective, we will adopt the following four-point operational program plan:

1. Identify, re-emphasize and enhance the strengths and practices that assisted in our success in 2004. expand diversity of Life Skills Training locations to include venues in the Bronx and Brooklyn enhance creative and fun programming to make sessions more adolescent friendly improve collaboration and cooperation with other service units in order to achieve a more comprehensive approach and holistic outcome for our youth

2. Intensify services to adolescents exiting care or those at risk who are ‘aging’ out develop a job-training and job-readiness referral resource, in-house, for these youth maintain and establish a data base of employers who will consider employing our youth identify new sources of housing in light of the freeze of Section 8 program

3. Create a new Life Skills Training methodology that fits within the framework of the NYS/OCFS soon to be enacted practice paper. cross-reference the 17 Life Skills Subjects into the six domain model set forth in the practice paper intensify involvement of foster parents as reliable resources for helping adolescents learn Life Skills and evaluating their development

4. The AS / IL will dedicate year 2005/2006 to strengthening its mentoring program work towards the goal of 25 youth being paired with a big brother/big sister - either community-based or site-based. rely on its own resources- Edwin Gould staff will be offered the opportunity to mentor a young person collaborate with ACS Central Mentoring Office and other community mentoring partners to ensure our youth access the opportunity of this important resource

Additionally;

• build upon our strengths in educational and housing services
• emphasize the merits of both the academic and vocational paths of education
• explore and identify new resources in subsidized housing.
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Among fourteen of our educational achievers, eleven youth are attending college, one successfully completed her GED and two are pursuing vocational training.

The Enhanced Adolescent Services Unit will utilize every opportunity to make a positive difference in the lives of the youth it serves and enhance their chances at becoming self-sufficient.