Jeff Fleischer: CEO of Youth Advocate Programs, Inc., Nov. 2007

Dear YAP Leaders,

I am writing to thank the leaders of YAP, Inc. for all you have accomplished this past year!

Each of you leaders in the field have served the young people and families at highest risk in each of your counties. You have recruited wonderful advocates from local neighbohoods and traveled great distances to support our families and staff in the field. You have developed relationships with our referring authorities, identified and organized community support people, developed creative individualized service plans, and worked tirelessly to return kids from far away residential and secure facilities, back home to family, school and neighorhood. You have supervised and trained staff, represented our families in court, worked early mornings, late at night, evening and weekends, and have been available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You have developed community linkages and work sites for our most needy families. You have developed trusting relationships in the community, kept up on documentation and record keeping, dealt with crises and overcome obstacles, went above and beyond and, at last, you have helped our kids achieve good outcomes, live productive and safe lives in the community and arranged for our kids and families to give back to their communities!

Each of you leaders at The Support Center have worked consistently to support staff and kids in the field, worked tirelessly to meet deadlines, written proposals, concept papers and brochures and developed contracts, ordered supplies and maintained a huge computer and equipment system, developed and maintained software, processed program packages, payroll checks, measured outcomes, developed reports, monitored families and audited programs, developed budgets, billed and collected millions of dollars, reviewed thousands of activity sheets and receipts and processed tons of data! You have provided human resource support, legal services and much technical assistance and expertise to support your colleagues in the field!

I want to congratulate you for developing relationships with referring authorities and convincing them to return kids from your states most secure facilities. You have developed real opportunities this year to help change county and state systems and to reduce reliance on out dated and inhumane kid jails and return kids from far away places.

You have been working with community stakeholders and partners to identify our kids' assets and to improve meaningful outcomes. You have run child welfare, juvenile justice, autism, anger management, substance abuse, supported work, behavioral health, family support, adult disability programs, and provided housing assistance. You have turned failing programs around and have begun new programs.

As leaders you have juggled and balanced the special tasks of developing relationships with referring authorities, recruiting talented and dedicated staff from the communities where our families live, engaging the communities' families with the most complex needs, supervising and supporting staff, managing level of service and program finances, being at the table to change your local human service systems, organizing communities to become empowered to right local injustices, and achieving good outcomes for families.

I think we can all be proud of the agency we are building together. YAP serves 10,000 families a year, employs 2100 staff, operates 120 programs across 15 states, supports programs in England, Ireland, Guatemala, Sierra Leone, Hawaii and Scotland and we are from done.

We have purchased and implemented a state of the art financial and human resource computer software system, launched an agency-wide Integrity Compliance Effort, measured the outcomes and family satisfaction of 10,000 families per year, improved our auditing and monitoring system, developed an on line Contract review system, have our Penn State certified training now on line, completed our Gold Standards of best practice, graduated our first leadership development class, conducted an agency-wide worker survey and appointed a Team Yap committee to address concerns and started a new department of program and staff development. We have centralized our Behavioral Health initiatives and launched new Autism programs. And our Communications Department have written proposals for almost $10 million in new or expanded contracts.

YAP is currently operating juvenile justice programs in over 25 of the largest cities in America including DC, Philadelphia, Jacksonville, Tampa, Charleston, New Orleans, Austin, Houston, Dallas, Chicago, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Pittsburgh, Toledo, Newark, Camden, and others. We are positioned to help our young people and families to have a voice to change policies and help build capacity in communities for kids who are more often marginalized.

We have already been invited to help develop the Governors Crime reduction plan in New Jersey and to help New York State to cut their youth correctional facilities population in half! We have launched South Carolina's first gang initiative, helped to close a girls detention wing in Nevada, built community capacity for young offenders returning from jails in Louisiana, begun our first adult re-entry program in Arizona, returning kids from overcrowded, inhumane detention facilities in DC, Baltimore, Newark, Camden, New Brunswick, Paterson, Fort Worth, Houston, Dallas, Austin, New Orleans and other cities.

This past August we organized and conducted an International Conference of Advocate Programs from around the world. Representatives from 15 countries came together for five days at Monmouth University to launch an International Federation of Advocate Programs. Its new mission is to advocate for those kids and youth programs who are being oppressed, threatened, marginalized around the world and to provide support, advocacy and fundraising.

We have recently been asked by New York City to train their child welfare case managers and their NYC non-profit providers in our YAP model. We have provided training for child welfare workers in Louisiana and for juvenile justice workers in South Carolina. We are also in dialogue with officials in North Carolina, Washington, Arkansas, Virginia, Alabama, Georgia, and Michigan to explore operating programs so less kids are placed far away from families and so that they are seen as assets not commodities to be exported from their homes and communities!

We are also proud to have improved our health benefits plan and to offer health benefits and a retirement savings plan to both full-time and part-time staff. This is one way to show our appreciation to our front line staff who are changing biographies of our neediest kids and families, day in and out.

This year we have begun two major initiatives that will bring YAP to the next level. We are going for accreditation by the National Council on Accreditation (COA). We have also contracted with Public Private Ventures, a prestigious national research group, to conduct a three-year study with an experimental design including random assignment and a control group. When completed and assuming our results are positive, YAP will join the exclusive ranks of being an evidence-based model. We will have added tools to strengthen our program and credibility to serve more families and change more systems.

There is so much more you/we have accomplished together, and more to look forward to this upcoming new year.

Good luck and best wishes for a great year. I hope to see you soon and look forward to hearing about your struggles and successes.

Thanks to all. Have a peaceful Thanksgiving Holiday!
Jeff

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