U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES
Administration for Children and Families
Administration on Children, Youth and Families
Family and Youth Services Bureau

THE EXCHANGE
News from FYSB and the Youth Services Field

July 2006

AFTERCARE: STAYING IN TOUCH WITH YOUTH AFTER THEY HAVE LEFT THE SYSTEM

Elizabeth*, 16, resented having to look after her younger siblings while her mother worked two jobs and struggled as a single mother with three small children. One day, Elizabeth refused and her mother snapped, and Elizabeth ran away. She ended up at a safe house at the YMCA Safe Place Services—a basic center and Family and Youth Services Bureau (FYSB) grantee in Louisville, Kentucky—which she had learned about in her high school.

"We called Mom right away," says Dennis Enix, executive director of YMCA Safe Place Services. "It was a wake-up call to both of them that they were both suppressing a lot of their feelings and holding on to a ton of anger and frustration."

During a respite process that lasted 10 days, Elizabeth stayed at the YMCA and she and her mom were able to open up and talk about their relationship. With mediation by staff, Mom and Elizabeth developed a written plan on what they needed from each other that they could both agree upon.

But staff at the YMCA didn't stop there. They continued to follow up with the family through phone conversations and meetings for a year. Now, Elizabeth regularly comes to their drop-in program and participates on the youth advisory board. Mom has spoken to other parents about how the program has helped her.

FYSB has three programs to benefit runaway and homeless youth—the Basic Center Program (BCP), Transitional Living Program (TLP), and Street Outreach Program (SOP). BCPs and TLPs are programs that offer temporary shelter. Most BCPs can provide 15 days of shelter, food, clothing, counseling, and referrals for health care for up to 20 youth through 18 years of age. TLPs provide longer term residential services to homeless youth ages 16–21—usually up to 18 months, and an additional 180 days is allowed for youth less than 18 years old. TLPs are designed to help youth who are homeless make a successful transition to self-sufficient living.

FYSB standards require each grantee to have an aftercare program that may consist of directing youth to other community-based housing or government assistance services, and providing counseling before they exit the temporary shelter program. Many programs go one step further and maintain contact with youth long after they have "graduated."

Keeping in touch with youth is increasingly a priority for service providers. With fluctuations in the job market, and with the housing boom causing affordable housing to become scarce, young people are finding it harder than ever to transition to successful independent living.

Most FYSB grantees agree that aftercare planning should begin while the youth is still in care. But aftercare can take many forms. Aftercare at shelter discharge—for example, when the youth is leaving a short-term basic center—may include care such as referring youth to affordable housing services, to ongoing counseling, and to other agencies and community services.

Aftercare at final disposition—when the youth has graduated from basic center or transitional living programs—could include things such as client and family evaluations, referrals to other agencies and community services, and followup procedures. Service providers agree that services can vary depending on the length of time the youth has been sheltered, the resources the provider has, and other factors, including the cost of living in the area.

"Some people may think when we talk about aftercare we are talking about a scheduled series of appointments for the next 5 months—follow up visits, treatment—but it can also be a counseling session on the day the youth decides to leave or graduates," says Stan Chappell, director of evaluation and research for FYSB. "It could be followup contact with their parents if they return to their home. If a youth decides to leave before counseling and other interventions have been successfully completed, it could also be just saying, 'Okay, let's see where you're going and how to stay safe, and by the way, here's a sandwich and a fare card.'"

Some FYSB grantees at the basic center programs say that they struggle with aftercare because they only have a short period of time to connect with youth. Providers say that having a substantive relationship with youth is essential to staying in touch with them. Staff retention is also important to grantees because if youth return several years later, they will want to connect with the staff member they knew when they were in the program. Lifeworks, a FYSB grantee in Austin, Texas, has a basic center, a street outreach program, and a transitional living component, and staff rotate throughout all three so that youth get to know all of the staff members.

Many FYSB grantees have developed innovative approaches to stay in touch with youth. Some approaches have included having youth develop their own long-term plans, matching youth with life coaches who will provide them support for as long as they need it, and developing creative ways to tackle the problem of finding affordable housing.

Grantees realize that like most young people, youth that successfully complete their programs will continue to struggle with their transition to adulthood. That's why staying in touch with youth, even after they have left the system, has increasingly become a top priority for youth workers.

*Names of clients have been changed.

LETTING YOUTH MAKE THE CHOICES

Within the last 10 years, researchers and policymakers have learned that key elements of successful youth development include providing youth with caring adults, safe places, marketable skills, and opportunities to serve. With this understanding, the term Positive Youth Development was coined. This approach recognizes that empowered young people need support, guidance, and opportunities during adolescence. Positive Youth Development emphasizes youth creating their own future goals and plans and implementing them with the support of caring adults.

Youth workers can use the Positive Youth Development approach in arranging aftercare by encouraging youth to develop their own plans as soon as they begin a program and to build their own connections to their community through community service, community mapping, or cultural activities. According to data from the Runaway and Homeless Youth Management Information System (RHYMIS), youth in basic center programs who participate in community service are more likely to have a safe exit—an exit to a home or shelter rather than back to the street or to an unknown location.

"Opportunities to participate in an acting troupe, sports team, or artistic endeavors attract and retain youth because they build on their strengths and interests," states an October 2005 research and policy report from the National Conference of State Legislatures, entitled Strengthening Youth Policy. "They provide them with an opportunity to develop deep relationships that can change their lives." Programs that focus solely on fixing or preventing problems often have little appeal to young people, according to the report.

At Lifeworks youth decide on their aftercare plan as soon as they enter one of the programs. Director Steve Bewsey offers ways that their program has created a Positive Youth Development approach to aftercare:

• Youth choose counselors or therapists from different people in the community employed by Lifeworks and decide where they want to meet with the counselor—for example, in their own apartments or in group facilities. "It's to let them feel a little control in establishing these relationships. When they have more control they are more interested, it seems, in having those kinds of relationships," says Bewsey.


• When youth come to the emergency shelter, staff ask, "What can we do for you?" Bewsey explains. "This is about forming a relationship based on what they want, not what we want."


• Staff encourage youth to establish relationships with people in the community as much as possible. "Why pay my staff to take youth out to the movies? I am more interested in them going to the movies with other people they are going to be with in the community," Bewsey says. "I will pay them to take their neighbor to the movies."


• A resource center at Lifeworks helps youth who need additional services. "We have immediate access to all of their information that they had with us. I had a 28-year-old call and I was able to say, 'Come over to the resource center and we can go back and look and see examples of how you solved these problems before—how you got rent paid, how you used this service to get utility money,'" Bewsey recalls.


• Lifeworks has a long-term goal of making it possible for youth to access important personal records, such as birth certificates and social security cards, online.


• Lifeworks provides opportunities for graduates to come back and share life lessons with current program participants.

CULTURAL CONNECTIONS AND COMMUNITY SERVICE

The Ain Dah Yung Center—a FYSB grantee that operates a basic center, a transitional living program, and a street outreach program in St. Paul, Minnesota—creates cultural connections for youth by introducing them to Tribal traditions that, in turn, help anchor them to their communities.

"We wanted to be a part of the process of keeping kids in their placement by providing cultural activities for them in groups. We thought hopefully we could retain contact with kids and their families and minimize their risk of coming back to shelter because we are keeping them busy and supporting their families," says Yvonne Barrett, executive director of Ain Dah Yung.

"Our Home" in the Ojibwe language, created a locally funded aftercare program to support their basic center in the early 1990s. Called Ninijanisag ("our children") because many youth returned to the shelter after they had graduated, the program was created to bridge the connection to the community, and to culture and identity, so youth would want to stay where they were placed. Now the program, which features traditional ceremonies and cultural activities, is available to youth who have left the shelter and also to the broader community.

Barrett says that having youth participate in cultural activities like tanning deer hides, making drums, and learning indigenous languages helps to build their self-esteem.

In the spring, Shawnee Hunt, Ninijanisag director, took the youth ice fishing one weekend on a traditional Indian campsite where ice fishing has been protected for hundreds of years by Tribes in northern Minnesota.

"Time slowed down and they had time to reflect and talk," Hunt says. "By Sunday they started to open up, and they felt they could trust the people they were with. One of the kids said this was something that he would have never been able to do, and he would remember it for the rest of his life."

"It helps them build their identity to see and be around those kinds of things," Hunt adds. "It helps them feel unique, knowing that there are people out there that care about them, that they have an extended family."

Having the youth participate in these cultural traditions also helps the staff in tangible ways. Youth come back for annual cultural events like the powwow or Elders Lodge—where they participate in a talking circle at a senior living facility. This provides a good time for staff to check in with the youth and see how they are faring in their placements.

Some youth have received Indian names from elders in the program—a tradition that means the adult has dedicated his or her life to being the youth's teacher.

"It's different from the mainstream where you work with a therapist, you see the family for eight sessions, and they are cured," says Richard Garland, associate director. "The relationships are much more long lasting. We are community based people; we are going to see each other down the line at some kind of ceremony or event."

Though the program doesn't have hard data on how a cultural approach helps them to stay in contact with youth, they can personally attest to its success.

"I can say with confidence that we are helping kids to stay in their long-term placements," says Barrett. "We are helping the parent to almost coparent in a way. For kids, it gives them something to look forward to. They have come to rely on these positive activities."

TIES THAT BIND: A LIFE COACH

By the time John was 17 years old, he had bounced around between semi-independent living programs and foster homes for years. In one of his foster homes, another foster youth destroyed paintings John had created. Then his entire wardrobe was stolen. John spent many winter nights outside because the owner of the house wouldn't provide him with a key.

So, he didn't know what to expect when his caseworker assigned him to Lighthouse Youth Services, a transitional living program in Cincinnati, Ohio. He received a caseworker and a life coach. The caseworker successfully handled the minutiae that enabled his transition and helped him with his basic needs. The life coach provided him with emotional support and became his "mother figure" long after he graduated from the program.

"My role is to give an extra set of ears and hands to help with issues like budgeting, cooking, relationships, apartment issues, job issues," says Merry Paul, 54, an administrative assistant at Lighthouse and John's life coach. John is now 21 years old and Paul continues to talk with him by telephone once or twice a week.

Life coaches are paid mentors matched to support youth after they leave care.

Though Lighthouse has a formal aftercare program that works with youth as they leave care and after leaving care—particularly with financial hardships after they have graduated from care—more informal approaches to aftercare like life coaches have also been very successful. Life coaches have been particularly helpful for high risk youth, like those with mental health issues or substance abuse problems, who need ongoing emotional support along with assistance with their basic needs.

Lighthouse began using the life coach approach 9 years ago, according to Lighthouse director Mark Kroner, when the Hamilton County Children's Services Department kept approaching them with youth, but were unsure about whether the youth were able to live in an independent setting without acting out or running away. Lighthouse came up with the idea of hiring a part-time person outside of the program to visit with the youth. In most cases that worked, and now when a youth is assigned to Lighthouse, he or she is routinely assigned a caseworker and a life coach.

"We have used it for all different types of situations," says Kroner, for example, for youth who were going through a suicidal phase. "If a youth is acting out in school, the coach can go to school with the youth. It has given us a lot of flexibility."

Kroner sees life coaches as an extension of aftercare, not as a replacement for their standard aftercare program. And, he says, the expenses of having a life coach are minimal.

"Group homes average $170 a day. Our independent living program is $62 a day, plus a life coach at $24 an hour for an hour a day. It is actually cheaper," says Kroner, adding that youth often fare better as a result of the individualized attention.

Having a life coach eased Eric's transition to independent living. Because social services had removed him from his home when he was 15 years old, after his mother couldn't handle struggling to raise five children in a lowincome apartment, having a nice place to live was important for him. When it came time for him to look for an apartment, he chose one in a nice area near a university, with plenty of other young people around. His life coach helped him with his budget to make sure he could afford the place.

"We looked at several different scenarios based upon how much money he made. I said, 'If you only got a job making $8.50, this is what you have.' I am a very visual person, so I made a lot of lists and visual reminders," Paul says.

More importantly, she prepared him for the unexpected. She told him to budget and save enough money to pay his rent and other expenses for 2 months, in case he ever loses his job.

But she also helped him with intangibles like learning boundaries at his job at Home Depot. Paul explained to him appropriate ways to voice his opinion.

John says he is motivated to keep working and saving because he knows what it's like to live in low-income housing. Now he doesn't have to compete for the bathroom with his siblings, and he knows that his belongings will still be there when he gets home. And if things don't go according to his plan, he knows that he can always call his life coach and talk with her about his problems.

"She helped me believe in myself. She taught me that I can do whatever I want to do," he says.

While John benefited from having a paid mentor or life coach, other youth reject the fact that everyone in their lives—teachers, social workers—are people who are paid to help them. Some programs, like Panhandle Community Services, a transitional living program and FYSB grantee in Garing, Nebraska, have utilized nearby faith-based programs to find lifelong mentors or life coaches.

Seventeen-year-old Rhonda came to Panhandle Community Services to escape an abusive boyfriend and begin regaining custody of her young son, who had been taken out of the home by social services because of the violence. Director Vicky Lawton teamed Rhonda with a "mentoring mom" from a nearby faith-based organization that routinely volunteers to mentor youth in their program.

"The mentoring mom would just come and pick her up in a van and they would go out and just sit and talk," says Lawton. "They spent a lot of time just breaking through that trust thing."

Rhonda has since regained custody of her son, married, and given birth to a new baby, but she and the mentoring mom stay in touch and talk once or twice a week. This helps staff at Panhandle because the mentoring mom then keeps them informed on how Rhonda is doing.

"Whichever staff is assigned as the caregiving staff will call and try to follow up on things that the mentoring mom has told us," Lawton says.

Having a life coach or mentor helps the staff to follow up on youth long after they have graduated from the program. At the same time it gives youth the feeling that their connections are more "like a family."

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

FYSB grantees that are operating transitional living programs say that directing youth to safe, appropriate, and affordable housing after they exit their programs is the single most important issue affecting aftercare. If youth are unable to secure stable housing, they may end up back on the street. Finding appropriate housing also helps service providers maintain contact with youth after they have left programs. Grantees say they are more likely to lose contact with youth who are forced, because of limited housing, to return to unstable neighborhoods or situations.

The Dream Tree Project in Taos, New Mexico, a 6-year-old FYSB grantee and transitional living program, has found that community connections make it easier to gain access to affordable housing for youth.

Dream Tree has created an innovative program. Casitas ("little houses" in Spanish) were designed as a series of four apartments located on the same property, 100 feet away from their current transitional living program. The houses are attached to a large community room that will allow residents to participate in the community while maintaining individual space.

Onyx Construction, a local company, provided much of the construction work pro bono, and YouthBuild and Rocky Mountain Youth Corps—programs that employ young people to rebuild their communities and their lives—are providing some of the labor. Many of the youth who will be living in the casitas are helping to build them.

The casitas will provide a structured living environment for those youth who need extra support after they graduate from the transitional living program.

Larkin Street Youth Services in San Francisco, California, a FYSB grantee that operates several transitional living programs, also developed a collaborative community approach to finding affordable housing for youth. Together with the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation, they launched Ellis Street Apartments, which consists of 24 studio units. Subsidies that go towards lowering rent for Ellis Street come from the Housing Authority and allow residents to pay 30 percent of their income, or if they are unemployed, a smaller amount compared to market rate.

Motivating young people to move from a supportive environment to a truly independent living situation sometimes proves difficult, says Eliza Gibson, chief of programs for Larkin Street.

"There are people who need it, and then there are people who need it for awhile and then they can be quite successful on their own," Gibson says. "How can we motivate them and say, 'Hey guys, you don't really need this program anymore, but how can we support you?'"

The reality is that in San Francisco, market rate rent is sometimes too high even for adults. In addition, many youth that need extended care have health issues.

Gibson says one way they are trying to meet this challenge is by becoming more familiar with adult resources and adult housing and developing stronger linkages with adult housing providers.

BEFORE YOUTH WALK OUT THE DOOR

• Talk to youth and provide exit counseling that includes possible followup treatments (e.g., family reunification or counseling) that have been prescribed or scheduled.


• Make sure written transitional, aftercare, or followup plans or agreements have been worked out with youth, understood, and agreed to.


• During intake, place belongings of youth in a locked storage area where the lock will be changed after nights of unexcused absences. Youth will mostly likely come back to discuss the situation.


• As a preventative approach, post notices by the exit that say, "Talk to us before you leave us."


• Provide referrals for assistance, such as Housing and Urban Development Section 8 programs or other permanent housing assistance, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Medicaid, etc.


• Verify that youth have safe places to go prior to release.


• Provide youth with transportation tokens, food, information about local shelters and resources, phone cards, and other necessities.


• Tell youth that they are always welcome to come back in and talk—even if they have broken the rules.


• Upon intake, collect contact information for people other than relatives from youth—close friends, significant others, teachers, mentors.


• Give youth mementos (e.g., toothbrushes, pencils, wallets) inscribed with the program's phone number or a runaway hotline number.


• Make sure youth know how to use and find post offices, libraries, employment and education services, laundromats, public transportation, supermarkets, pharmacies and recreation centers.


• Connect youth with mentors.


• Remind youth of traditional activities that may bring them back, such as holiday events or dinners.

RESOURCE LIST FOR AFTERCARE

Giving Back to the Community: African American Inner-City Teens and Civic Engagement. Author: M. Charles. No. 38 in CIRCLE Working Paper series. 2005. Available at www.civicyouth.org/research/areas/race_gender.htm.

Homeless Young Adults Ages 18–24: Examining Service Delivery Adaptations. Authors: S. Ammerman, et al. 2004. Available at www.nhchc.org/Publications/younghomelessadult1.pdf#.

Implementation of the Intensive Community Based Aftercare Program. Authors: R. Wiebush, B. McNulty, and T. Le. 2000. Available from the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Deliquency Prevention, at www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/181464.pdf#.

Innovative Housing Programs for Homeless Young Adults Leaving TLPs. Where to Now? Author: New England Network for Child, Youth and Family Services. 2004. Available at www.nenetwork.org/publications/deep-report.html.

Midwest Evaluation of the Adult Functioning of Former Foster Youth: Outcomes at Age 19. Authors: N. Bost, et al. 2005. Available at www.chapinhall.org.

Out of School and Unemployed: Principles for More Effective Policy and Programs. Author: G. Walker. 1997. Available at www.icesa.org.

People Need Affordable Housing (fact sheet). Author: National Coalition for the Homeless. Available at www.nationalhomeless.org.

Preparing for Independence: Counseling Issues for Maltreated Youth. Authors: M. Beyer and B. Jaklitsch. 1991. Available at www.nrcys.ou.edu/catalog/product.php?productid=39.

Returning Home: A Look at Aftercare Services Provided to Delinquent Youth. Author: Citizens' Committee for Children of New York, Inc. 2000. Available at www.cccnewyork.org/publications/report-returninghome.pdf#.

John H. Chafee Foster Care Independence Program: Aftercare Services. Author: B. Jaklitsch. National Resource Center for Youth Development. Available at www.nrcys.ou.edu/nrcyd/publications/monographs/aftercare.pdf.

The Exchange is developed for the Family and Youth Services Bureau by Johnson, Bassin & Shaw (JBS), Inc., under Contract #GS10F0205K from the Administration on Children, Youth and Families; Administration for Children and Families; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, to manage the National Clearinghouse on Families & Youth.

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Staff writers: Ericka Blount Danois

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