Youth Workforce Development staff also partner with BAM and WOW on the model, a specially-designed job readiness curriculum that blends core values from BAM and WOW with a year-long series of workshops that support job readiness skills and career exposure. Programs are led by career specialists who work individually with youth to help them meet their goals. Both programs provide participants with job readiness and career exploration workshops transferrable 21st Century job skills and linkages to colleges and career opportunities. Veronica Resa: Youth Guidance’s Youth Workforce Development program targets young people who are in high school (Project Prepare) as well as those students who are post-graduation (Project Prepare Blue). Kars4Kids: What sort of life skills do participants learn in your Youth Workforce Development program? These are all skills critical to having healthy relationships in school, within families, and in communities. Each area (Counseling and Prevention, Community and After School Programs, and Youth Workforce Development) includes a counseling component that is designed to help students increase their developmental skills related to collaboration, time management, coping with adversity, and communication. Veronica Resa: Youth Guidance’s program delivery model is counseling-based across all its program areas. Kars4Kids: How many children receive your school-based counseling services? What sort of issues are they dealing with? STRIVE is the result of a partnership between Youth Guidance and the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services. Through STRIVE, Youth Guidance matches students with counselors who work with them and their caregivers individually to ensure that they are successful in school and have the resources they need beyond high school graduation. Veronica Resa: STRIVE addresses the unique challenges of young people who are in the care of the state of Illinois. “WOW is a dynamic counseling and mentoring program that helps young women heal from trauma, realize their potential, and know they are enough,” said Director of WOW Gail Day. Currently, WOW serves more than 2,500 young women in 40 Chicago schools with plans to keep expanding. WOW also follows a group counseling and mentoring model and is completing its first formal evaluation through the University of Chicago, which has shown proven benefits in reducing levels of trauma, depression, and social anxiety. Working On Womanhood SM (WOW) was developed in 2011 as a counterpart to BAM for young women who are experiencing trauma due to the challenging nature of their communities. BAM currently serves about 7,000 young men in Chicago and two years ago expanded to Boston. BAM has been externally evaluated several times by the University of Chicago Urban Lab, which found that BAM participants experienced a 50% reduction in violent crime, a 35% reduction in overall arrests, and a 19% increase in graduation rates. With the support of their BAM counselor, students utilize a two-year curriculum that is aligned with six core values: integrity accountability visionary goal-setting respect for womanhood positive anger expression and self-determination. Veronica Resa: Becoming A Man® (BAM) is a group counseling and mentoring intervention that targets young men in 7 th -12 th grade who have risk factors for dropout, delinquency, or poor school performance. Kars4Kids: What is BAM®? Why is this program necessary? Over the last year, we served over 13,700 students throughout Chicago. We provide them with the social-emotional and life skills they need to meet and overcome the challenges in their life – supporting them throughout their journey and ensuring that they are on a pathway to success beyond high school. Veronica Resa: Youth Guidance, founded in 1924, serves young people in Chicago who are growing up in some of the country’s most under-resourced communities. Kars4Kids: Tell us about the population you serve. We went to Director of Marketing and Communications Veronica Resa to find out more about the work of Youth Guidance: We felt confident in awarding Youth Guidance one of our small grants, because they have a winning formula: one that works. But at the heart of it all is mentoring and counseling, and helping parents to become actively engaged with their children’s schools. Youth Guidance is using many tools to strengthen underserved youth in the Chicago area, so they will graduate and succeed in life, beyond graduation.
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