Cultivating/Building Organizational Resilience

We are in the middle of the worst recession since the crash of the 1920's, so historians tell us. The Washington Post wrote that 100,000 non-profit organizations will close down this year. Like millions of vulnerable families across the nation, organizations must be resilient to survive and to flourish. What is it that makes a person, a family or an organization resilient? Research tells us that there are 3 main themes: 1) a staunch acceptance of reality, 2) a deep belief that life is meaningful, and 3) an uncanny ability to improvise. Indeed we see these characteristics within the families we meet and work with. But it is also true of our organization. Our leaders across the agency accepted the reality of the recession as we experienced funding cuts, mostly due to our state funding sources experiencing cuts due to tremendous budget deficits. Our leaders also believed strongly that we had to preserve our programs on behalf of our most vulnerable families and that economic crisis can mean a time for positive change. And our leaders improvised and made something good come from the scarcity in funds.

There are many examples of resiliency across the agency. In Chicago, Staff took a small successful program and parlayed it into one of our largest programs funded by the Chicago Public Schools. Hundreds of students had been shot, wounded and killed over the last few years so the Chicago School System identified the 250 highest-risk students and referred them to YAP for our intensive, in-home, neighborhood-based services. In Mobile, AL, Staff worked with a local Judge to fund a program to work with young people who were the "shooters" in the community, in an effort to reduce community violence. Staff were able to get two additional counties to begin similar programs based on our early success in Mobile. We began a new program in Orlando, working with multi-system kids in an effort to return them from institutions. The same happened in Randall and Potter Counties in the rural panhandle of Northern Texas.

In Newburgh, NY, Staff worked with the local County leadership to begin a program to work with homeless adults residing in unsafe, sub-standard motels, redirecting the motel fee to obtain private sector housing in the community. Our leaders in Wayne County began a program to work with high-risk prisoners re-entering the community after serving time in state prison. We won a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Grant to work with young offenders in Atlantic City, by partnering with the casinos and the local community college. In Pittsburgh, a local school expanded our successful truancy program to save dollars by keeping potential dropouts and truants in school. In Oswego, our leaders worked with the County and School district to begin an alternative learning class.

We established relationships with 30 legislators in Congress this year as we worked to obtain Federal Earmarks. And we are in discussion with Wyoming, Georgia and West Virginia who currently spend more dollars on institutions than community services for their highest risk young people. We hope to help redirect funds to begin intensive, in-home services to prevent out-of-home placements. Our Behavioral Health leaders are devising new ways to carve innovative clinical services to keep kids out of placement. Our Autism Program leaders are conducting conferences and workshops to present our relationship-based model and we are gaining allies and interest for providing our intensive service to prevent placement in institutions. Our leaders are courting foundations, improving our training and measuring our outcomes up to one year after discharge, all to improve the quality of our services when our families need us the most.

As Diane L. Coutu wrote recently in the Harvard Business Review, "Resilience is a reflex, a way of facing and understanding the world. Resilient people and companies face reality with staunchness, make meaning of hardship instead of crying out in despair, and improvise solutions from thin air." YAP is a resilient organization because our leaders and staff are resilient and this is how we will move forward on behalf of youth and families and thrive during the next few very hard years.

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