Integrated Youth Services Project
In today’s fast pace money driven society our children often times are forgotten, left to fend for themselves, and tend to have to go up in a hurry. Gone are the days of one income families, most families have to have both parents working full time just to scrap by. Many of America’s youths come from troubled homes, are abused, or forgotten. In this paper we are going to examine the Integrated Youth Services Project (IYSP) in Philadelphia.
Children from broken homes, low income areas, homeless, or any other situation can feel lost, forgotten, have no hope, and believe that no one cares. There are human service programs out there to give these children and adolescents help and encouragement. Help can come from after school programs, counseling, local church groups, and other locations. One major obstacle is getting all the information about help available to the children. Philadelphia created a program to help connect all these services and make them easily accessible to their children.
The IYSP, which was created in 2007, is a program for children and young adults. IYSP engaged more than two dozen youth service agencies in the city of Philadelphia. With no current plan of action for the collaboration of youth prevention services the IYSP looked to change that. Youth prevention services are defined as ““those that protect children and youth from exposure to harmful conditions or engagement in risky behaviors, and those that promote their healthy development” (Fels Institute of Government, 2008, pg. 6). These services or programs included risk youth prevention, violence prevention, out of school programs, and teen pregnancy prevention.
Once of the programs called Adolescent & Young Adult Health Program helps adolescents between 10-19 years of age and young adults between 20-24 years of age. This program focuses on the health of children and young adults. They are committed to the wellbeing, health, the safety, and most of all positive living condition and development. This is not only for children and young adults, but also to help families. The program offers education in general, oral, and mental health along with the prevention of substance abuse and treatment help. Another delivery program is the Early Childhood Program. This program helps with maternal, infant, and early childhood health, safety and development. It also tries to help build a strong relationship between parent and child. Early Childhood Program teaches pregnant women, mothers and their families. Some examples of what is taught are:
* How to develop and maintenance of quality health
* Safety standards
* How to access Medical insurance
The program also offers group counseling with groups of people who are in the same situation. The counseling gives families the opportunity to discuss their hardships and life lessons with other members of the community who are in similar situations.
There are programs that helps the “at risk youth”. “At risk youths” are youths that are at risk of youth crimes, violence, substance abuse, gangs, dropping out of school, and so on. What this delivery service does is helps youths and their family with different services. One of the delivery programs is called Children at Risk. This program is for the high risk youth who lives in high risk areas. With this program, even local law enforcement is involved to try and help these youths. There are a few smaller programs in this program and they are all connected. What they do is try to build educational and social skills. By doing this, the hope is to reduce the high risk, not only with youths but also with the area that they live in. This program offers activities, counseling and group meetings. These programs are not only for the youths but also for the families. They try to get the families involved so the parents can a better understanding of what their child is going through and the opportunity for the parents to become