Founded in 1975, YAP® is a nonpartisan national nonprofit organization. Our employees in urban, rural, and suburban communities in 33 states and the District of Columbia represent America politically and demographically.

YAP® is a change leader that for a half century in partnership with youth justice, child welfare, behavioral health, education, and other public systems, delivers community-based youth and family rehabilitative and behavioral health wraparound services that have been proven to reduce recidivism while keeping youth and families together, making communities safer, and saving taxpayer dollars.

YAP®’s unique wraparound services model, which guides all our work, reduces crime and recidivism by addressing society’s most complex challenges. Our neighborhood-based staff work directly and individually with youth and families, firming their foundation by connecting them with tools that address their individualized economic, educational, and emotional challenges -- with practices that incorporate accountability, restorative justice, respect for victims’ rights, and giving back -- so that our program participants are successful once our services end.

In our five decades of delivering services, we have served program participants from urban, suburban, and rural communities. With our "no reject, no eject" policy, we accept all referrals. With most of our participants living in poverty, we are in a unique position to give our youth justice, child welfare, education, behavioral health and other systems partners an opportunity to have great outcomes for all youth and families referred to us, despite their background, and thus, we're a change leader.

With the success of our work with systems-involved youth, more communities across the U.S. are engaging YAP® as a public safety partner where we are using principles of our evidence-based youth and family community-based services model to help reduce neighborhood violence. YAP® credible messengers, outreach workers and life coaches offer individualized educational, economic, and emotional tools that empower people to put lives on a positive course. While law enforcement puts its resources into policing, YAP® is a public safety support, delivering direct services that make neighborhoods safer by helping people redirect their lives, thus playing an important role in reducing homicides and shootings and decreasing recidivism.

YAP®’s neighborhood-based Advocates are paid staff members who are trained to advocate for our program participants by connecting them and their parents and guardians with individualized educational, economic, and emotional tools to put their lives on a positive course. Separately, we give current and former program participants an opportunity to share their success stories with the public so that policy makers and others understand and appreciate that with holistic wraparound services from YAP® Advocates and behavioral health professionals, biographies change. YAP®’s public policy work does not align with any political party or ideology but rather promotes youth justice/child welfare/behavioral health community-based programming and educational and employment and workforce development policies that promote great outcomes for system-involved youth and families and those at risk for system involvement.