The Beat
As people power up their computers to buy holiday gifts, why not point them toward websites that help them support your organization and finish their shopping? NCFY found several resources that allow gift-givers to support a nonprofit of their choosing when making a purchase. These tools may not earn your agency a lot of money, but they are relatively quick and easy ways to boost donations and awareness during the holiday season.
-
We-Care.com lets shoppers who buy from participating merchants donate a percentage of their total to any registered nonprofit. There is no extra fee to make a donation, and the downloadable We-Care Reminder tool ensures that a donation is made each time users visit that merchant’s Web site.
- eBay shoppers willing to pay a little extra for a good cause can add a donation of a dollar or more to each purchase. Similarly, eBay sellers can donate a percentage of money made to a selected nonprofit. Agencies must register with MissionFish, eBay’s charitable partner, to be eligible.
- For gift-givers considering making a donation on someone’s behalf, JustGive lets users purchase gift cards that can be donated to any nonprofit that opts into the service.
Because we know the end of the year is an important fundraising time for charities, we’ve designated the first week of December “Fundraising Week” on our blog. Starting today through Friday, December 7, we’ll be re-posting some of our favorite articles from our Right on the Money column. And throughout December, visit us on Facebook and Twitter for links to our favorite fundraising resources from across the Web.
More From NCFY
"Right on the Money: Lessons in Social Media Fundraising"
"Right on the Money: ‘Crowdfunding’ for Youth-Serving Organizations—Indiegogo vs. Kickstarter"
"Test Your Knowledge of Fundraising: A Quiz"
It has been more than 30 years since the first cases of AIDS were reported in the U.S.—which means the young people you work with have never known a world without HIV. Here’s what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say about young people and HIV:
- Young people ages 13 to 29 accounted for 39 percent of all new HIV infections in 2009.
- HIV disproportionately affects young gay and bisexual men and young African Americans, compared to other young people.
- All young people should know how to protect themselves from HIV infection.
December 1 is World AIDS Day, a good opportunity to emphasize to your youth the importance of getting tested, reducing the stigma of living with HIV, and making healthy choices that reduce their likelihood of getting the virus. (Of course, every day is a good day to emphasize those things.)
Getting tested. To find HIV testing sites, youth can text their ZIP codes to KNOWIT (566948) or type a ZIP code into the AIDS.gov locator. If youth do test positive, the locator can also point them to services for people living with HIV, including housing assistance, health centers, HIV care for those without insurance, mental health and substance abuse programs, and family planning clinics. The locator is also available as an iPhone app.
Reducing the stigma. Facing AIDS is a federal initiative that encourages people to support the National HIV/AIDS Strategy by speaking out and helping to reduce the stigma that continues to surround HIV. According to the strategy, “The stigma associated with HIV remains extremely high and fear of discrimination causes some Americans to avoid learning their HIV status, disclosing their status, or accessing medical care.” Even if you don’t want to upload photos to the Facing AIDS website, you or your young people can organize an event to discuss why it’s important to face AIDS.
Preventing HIV. Obviously, preventing HIV isn’t a one-day deal. If you want to launch a program that addresses the problem year-round, you may want to consult the website of the Office of Adolescent Health’s National Resource Center for HIV/AIDS Prevention Among Adolescents, which lists programs shown to reduce HIV risk among teens.
More From NCFY
“Q&A: Make Every Day World AIDS Day by Encouraging HIV Testing Year Round”
“Ask NCFY: Providing Support and Respect for Young People Living with HIV”
More African American children than white children are born into poverty in the United States. That difference at birth leads to inequalities throughout a child’s life, according to “Portrait of Inequality 2012: Black Children in America.” Published by the Children’s Defense Fund, a child advocacy nonprofit in Washington, the report compares how African American and white children fare when it comes to childhood poverty, family stability, health, school readiness, education, employment and other factors.
To learn how youth workers can think about and address the disparities African American youth face, we spoke to MaryLee Allen, who directs the fund’s child welfare and mental health policy and advocacy.
NCFY: Is there a relationship between the inequalities detailed in your report and youth homelessness?
Allen: Clearly there’s a relationship between the inequities in the report and the challenges facing youth later in life, of which homelessness is certainly one of them. Children are born with certain challenges and the odds they have to overcome increase over time. As you look at it, as children move on in life, many of the challenges they face can be attributed to the effects of poverty. Not only are black children three and a half times as likely as white children to live in extreme poverty, but also more than two-thirds of black children who are born poor will remain poor for at least half their childhood.
Poverty stacks the odds against children throughout their life—whether it’s healthcare, whether it’s early childhood, whether it’s education, whether it’s dropping out of school, unemployment. Those problems, which all contribute to homelessness, continue to grow. In each of those areas black children and black families are far behind white families.
Youth end up homeless too often when they’ve fallen behind in school and dropped out of school. One of the most striking data in “Portrait of Inequality” is that more than 80 percent of black public school students can’t read or do math at grade level in 4th and 8th grade. So the likelihood that they are going to end up dropping out or being pushed out is very significant.
I would make the same connection when it comes to teen pregnancy. Poor performance is related to their chance of dropping out and their increased likelihood of becoming pregnant as a teenager.
NCFY: What should youth workers do with the information in the report?
Allen: There’s several things: Knowing the data, but also keeping faces on the numbers is an extremely important thing to do. We hope they will—and we know many do—join with others to work to eliminate child poverty but also to make sure that we invest in early childhood, development, education, health, and specialized treatment that all children need. My experience has been that youth workers and the young people they serve better than anyone can make policymakers and other interested citizens understand the odds children are facing but also convey the opportunities there are to overcome the odds and give every child that high school diploma, college degree and job that they need.
Cynthia Solomon didn’t know much about homeless youth when she set out to build a secure website where people could store their personal health records. She founded a tech company, FollowMe, in Sonoma, CA, and first developed the health records site after her son had an accident and couldn’t communicate a serious medical condition to first responders.
Looking for potential markets, Solomon joined forces with Wind Youth Services, a California-based nonprofit working with homeless youth, to test her prototype. The two organizations launched a Youth Ambassador Program to gather ongoing feedback on the product’s design and features. Solomon says the process resulted in an improved product named HealthShack and, for her and her company, a newfound appreciation about the value of youth input.
From Testers to Marketers
According to Solomon, youth ambassadors first began sharing their stories to help make HealthShack more responsive to their needs.
Solomon says, “What was exciting was … the youth themselves sort of taking it on and basically saying, ‘Well, health information is important, but it’s not as important as where I’ve lived. It’s not as important as a place to store some of our important information.’”
HealthShack now allows users to upload non-medical documents such as leases and school records. Youth can also create and edit their resumes.
Soon, ambassadors started getting involved in the business end of the project. They created a sample business plan and put together agendas to meet with funders. They also got involved with marketing, designing the logo and creating promotional t-shirts.
Even the HealthShack name came from the youth ambassadors after they said they didn’t like the name adults had come up with. According to Solomon, youth debated the new name for nearly six weeks.
Beyond HealthShack
Youth ambassadors were also asked to talk to their peers about HealthShack and to teach them how to use it. Some traveled across California to give demonstrations at conferences and events. For a period of time, Wind Youth Services even received grant funding to pay young adults for their help.
“It really encouraged and empowered them to become not only good public speakers, but knowledgeable about the health care system and competent to speak with other youth and bring them in,” Solomon says.
For at least one ambassador, being in the program led to a health career. She recently completed a degree in pharmacy technology.
Continued Commitment
In October, Solomon formed a new partnership with technology company AltruIT to bring HealthShack to a broader audience. Their first joint contract is with a large foster care agency in California that works with approximately 800 youth transitioning out of foster care.
AltruIT CEO Barbara Sorensen says she hopes to bring ambassadors into future conversations and incorporate more of their suggestions.
“That’s kind of what our next step is going to be, to engage the youth in yet another area ….to see what we can do to expand that and to incorporate several additional functionalities and documents,” she says.
Learn more about HealthShack by contacting Barbara Sorensen at bsorensen@altruit.com.
At a recent community symposium on the commercial sexual exploitation of young people in Dallas, the audience witnessed an unrehearsed demonstration of just how far the city has come in its approach to combating trafficking.
A police detective explained that he and his colleagues no longer detain girls and charge them with prostitution. Today, police treat the girls as victims, taking them to shelters where they can get social services that prepare them for a different life.
It turned out he had once, back before the change in philosophy, arrested one of the young women who shared the panel stage with him.
“Just a few years ago the girls and the Dallas police were at odds,” says Katie Pedigo, executive director of New Friends New Life, a program that helps Dallas women leave the sex industry. “Now we all work together. They literally sit side by side, fighting for this cause.”
Pedigo credits the police department for creating the High Risk Victims Unit about a decade ago. By adding a unit that specializes in helping trafficked young people, she says, the police underlined their seriousness in addressing the issue. They also created a “home base” for the trafficking issue, Pedigo says, helping to coordinate the work of the justice system, youth shelters and advocates for trafficked people.
Here’s how it works: When an officer in the High Risk Victims Unit finds young women who have been trafficked, they take the victims directly to the Letot Center, a Dallas County shelter for youth at risk of getting in trouble with the law. Bonnie Buccigrossi, who helps oversee young women’s entry to the center, and her colleagues admit the youth. The officer alerts Pedigo and her staff, who make their way over and begin providing therapy and other services that will enable the young women to exit “the life” of sexual trafficking.
The High Risk Victims Unit communicates regularly with every Dallas-area agency that works with trafficked people, serving as an information hub while taking the lead on criminal aspects of cases, including prosecuting pimps. The police also help find and communicate with victims’ families, especially if they happen to be out of the area.
With the family and criminal aspects of the case in police hands from the get-go, Buccigrossi says her staff can tend to the immediate needs of the girls who come to their shelter.
“It helps us because we can focus on the girl,” she says, “and it helps the police because they know the girl is in a safe place with people who know this population. And it helps families of the victims, because they know everything is being taken care of.”
Changing the Conversation
Pedigo offered some advice about how to begin collaborating with police on this issue:
Ask how you can help. Pedigo says police will respond more positively if you say, “We don’t want to hinder or contradict your practices. We want to be a resource for you.” That attitude allows for expertise to flow both ways, and everyone feels their own workload is being lightened, not added to. So make a presentation to the sergeant in charge of youth issues, and explain the effects of trafficking on the community. Then discuss how your agency can help the police address it.
Meet with community leaders. Local and county legislators and councilmembers also interact with the police, and can insist on setting certain priorities. “If it’s an issue for their constituents, local leaders will start paying attention,” Pedigo says.
Stay in touch. Letot Center administrators meet with members of the High Risk Victims Unit and the district attorney’s office about once a month. The conversations keep the youth workers aware of the street-level fight against trafficking and enable the police to follow the ongoing recovery of the girls they help.
For nearly two decades, Park Place Outreach ran its emergency shelter out of one of Savannah, GA’s signature Victorian homes. Then about five years ago, the organization’s leaders decided they couldn’t stay in the drafty old building any longer.
“We knew energy costs were going to be going up,” says Executive Director Linda K. Hilts. “The goal was to make [our] building sustainable, make it cost-efficient, make it a healthier building for the kids to be in.”
To ensure that it was really meeting those objectives, the organization didn’t want to just switch out a few light bulbs. They chose to raise $500,000 to buy and renovate their next building using Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design guidelines, or LEED. The move, Hilt says, has enabled Park Place to triple its shelter’s size while reducing its carbon footprint and cutting utility costs in half.
“We realized that to get the most savings and reduction in environmental impact, it was worth it to us to go the extra distance and become a LEED building,” she says.
The voluntary LEED certification program operated by the U.S. Green Building Council requires applicants to meet certain standards when it comes to the building materials they use and the design choices they make. For Park Place, becoming LEED certified meant installing low-flow plumbing, building skylights to take advantage of natural light, switching to energy-saving appliances, and re-sloping the building’s roof so they could use rain water to irrigate their grounds, among other changes.
Hilts says that taking an environmentally conscientious approach fits well with Park Place’s philosophy of helping the surrounding community.
“We helped restore an area in Savannah that was starting to fall into disrepair so we were part of that community,” she says. “But we’re also part of that community when we’re working with the youth, and we’re trying to help them restore parts of their lives back and helping them restore their connection with their family.”
Smaller Steps for Everyone
If it doesn’t seem like LEED certification is in your agency’s future, there are smaller steps you can take to reduce your environmental impact and, ultimately, save your agency money.
“Every little change helps the environment and cuts operating costs,” Hilts says.
Hilts recommends that agencies considering environmentally friendly changes to their building work closely with their board of directors. More sustainable choices like compact fluorescent light bulbs and low-emissions paint can cost more than regular bulbs and paint, but will lower your utility bills in the long run. Here are some specific ideas you can propose:
- Caulk around windows to reduce the amount of air that seeps in or out.
- Switch to energy-efficient light bulbs, like compact fluorescents or halogens.
- Take advantage of natural light as much as possible.
- Use environmentally friendly paint and insulation.
- Switch to energy-saving hot water heaters and appliances.
- Install low-flow toilets and showerheads.
- If you’re due for a new roof, talk to a roofer about changing the slope of your roof to promote better drainage that can help water gardens.
Certified yoga instructor Casadi Marino teaches others how to achieve yoga's benefts, but her expertise extends beyond the mat. Working at the Regional Research Institute for Human Services, she has studied the effects of yoga on mental health. Now a doctoral student at Portland State University’s School of Social Work, Marino has also seen yoga’s impact on her own life as she maintains her recovery from bipolar disorder and substance abuse.
Earlier this year, we read Marino’s article called “Yoga for Youth in Trauma Recovery” (PDF, 391KB). In it, she reviews the literature on how yoga affects youth with histories of trauma. We know many youth-serving programs use a variety of approaches to help young people deal with past trauma, so we spoke with Marino about the benefits of yoga and steps youth workers can take to help youth heal both emotionally and physically.
NCFY: How does yoga help youth feel safe?
MARINO: When people have been traumatized, they become fairly alienated, not just with others and with society, but with themselves.
Yoga really helps people to reattach to their bodies, helps them to own what’s going on with themselves physically while at the same time not totally identifying with it. So it’s their body, it’s their experience, but it’s not who they are.
NCFY: How can you tell if yoga is making a difference?
MARINO: You can see that people are actually breathing; they’re breathing more deeply. You can see how they hold themselves. They’re not always hyper-alert so they can let go of some of that hyper-vigilance. They might actually be able to receive a social touch without being reactive. They’re not always looking behind them.
NCFY: How can youth workers help young adults whose lives are unstable engage in regular yoga practice?
MARINO: When people are busy surviving, it’s harder to heal if you’re still being wounded. However, it never hurts to breathe, and you can sneak yoga in in little ways.
If you’re washing up in a restroom that you find that you can take a little sink bath in and you do tree [pose], then you’ve done something really good for yourself.
NCFY: You also recommend that youth visit trauma-informed yoga classes to learn from properly trained instructors. Can other yoga classes be customized to aid youth recovery?
MARINO: There are some schools of yoga, Vinyasa for instance, that are much more flexible in terms of how somebody does yoga. But it does come down to the individual teacher so it’s important to talk to the individual teacher, tell them your expectations, make your requests very clear and perhaps even write them down and keep them in front of your yoga mat. “I do not wish to have an adjustment. I wish to have permission ahead of time to come out of a pose and just hang out in child’s pose if I’m just getting too activated.” So, it’s definitely possible, but I would just urge people to go slowly.
More From NCFY
A little while back, we wrote about the nonprofit organization Street Yoga, which uses a trauma-informed approach to yoga to help youth, families and caregivers struggling with homelessness and addiction.
We’ve often heard people who work with homeless youth in rural areas talk about the particular challenges their young people face. These teens travel dozens of miles to get to school, to health clinics, to social service agencies. Often, there’s no youth shelter within hundreds of miles.
There’s also a dearth of information about what providers are doing, and can do, to help. To start to fill the gap, the National Alliance to End Homelessness surveyed rural youth programs and then surveyed them again, asking about two common strategies: host homes and outreach. The results and some recommendations are described in the Alliance’s brief, “Housing and Outreach Strategies For Rural Youth: Best Practices From the Rural Youth Survey.”
The brief also profiles two rural youth programs, Youth Advocates of Sitka, in Alaska, and Sea Haven for Youth in North Myrtle Beach, SC.
Here’s our summary of some of the document’s most interesting points about host homes and rural outreach to homeless youth:
Host Homes
In the host home model, youth live temporarily with members of the community while receiving services. Host homes can serve as emergency shelters or as longer-term housing for youth in transitional living programs.
The Alliance asked service providers to share their experiences recruiting people willing to share their homes. Highlights include:
- Recruiting hosts who might share characteristics or experiences with youth, including people who have interacted with the child welfare, foster care or juvenile justice systems or those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or questioning.
- Collecting testimonies from youth who had positive experiences with their host families and families who enjoyed hosting a youth.
- Inviting host families to staff trainings to build relationships and strengthen communication.
Outreach
Survey respondents also explained ways they had reached out to youth in areas where they are often spread out or have few places to hang out:
- Putting up posters in schools and handing out materials at school sporting events.
- Advertising on television, radio and public buses.
- Asking local car dealers to offer reliable, low-cost vehicles to program participants to deal with the difficulty youth have getting from place to place.
- Establishing a Safe Place network by getting local libraries, community centers or fire stations involved in outreach to youth.
More From NCFY
Bright Idea: Getting Rural Homeless Youth Off the Couch and Into Their Own Beds
Master Planning for Youth In Rural Communities
Youth Speak Out: Shared Experiences Help Rural Youth Leaders Connect
Bright Idea: With Training, Host Homes Offer LGBTQ Youth a Safe Harbor
For the last few years, Eric Rice has been studying the largely positive aspects of social networking for at-risk and runaway youth. In interviews with dozens of homeless youth in the Los Angeles area, he has found that tools like cell phones and Facebook can keep runaway young people connected to their peers and family members back home.
We know youth workers are always looking for ways to link youth to friends and families, when doing so is safe and makes sense for the young person. So we recently asked Rice, an assistant professor at the University of Southern California's School of Social Work, to further explain the implications and scope of his findings about social media and runaway youth.
NCFY: How has social media changed the experience of being a homeless or runaway youth?
RICE: Social media and cell phones have really changed the kinds of interactions that runaway and homeless youth can have. Prior to those technologies, youth would leave home and basically their connections were limited to other street youth or to really overworked program staff—social workers, case managers and volunteers. They had few social connections, and most of them involved other high-risk youth who don’t have a lot of resources to get out of street life.
Once social media like Facebook or MySpace became more prevalent at drop-in agencies and libraries, it provided an opportunity for homeless young people to connect with people outside of street life, particularly friends from home with stable lives, and family members they still had good relations with.
NCFY: And what benefits do those relationships have for runaway youth?
RICE: There are two important implications of these relationships. First, they provide street youth with resources around housing and employment that they probably wouldn’t have otherwise. And secondly, they can observe a set of behaviors that isn’t quite so desperate as those around them.
Take our study of runaway and homeless youth substance abuse, for example. We found that when they stay connected to family or home-based peers who weren’t users, homeless young people were less likely to report substance abuse. Whereas the ones who were primarily connecting face-to-face with street peers were much more likely to use.
We’ve found this same result across a whole host of outcomes. In terms of mental health, youth with more connections to street peers report more depression and anxiety. Young people connected to sexual risk-taking peers on the street were more likely to exhibit those behaviors themselves.
NCFY: So what can youth workers take from this?
RICE: We created a policy paper in collaboration with youth workers, and we gave four major recommendations:
One: Try to provide more computer and Internet access in your youth program. Most runaway and homeless youth are dependent on public libraries for access. They need help getting online to maximize the positive benefits of social media.
Two: Encourage computer use for normal adolescent social media use in addition to more traditional things like job searches or finding long-term shelter. Recognize that these have positive benefits.
Three: Bookmark some useful pages on your agency’s computers. Youth don’t always know how to find credible sources. So make it easy for youth to access youth-friendly sites on substance abuse treatment or HIV awareness, for example.
Four: Monitor young people’s computer use with harm reduction in mind. In addition to positive relationships, young people can also use social media to connect to harmful relationships [such as] drug dealers or sexual partners. Low-key monitoring can help staff reduce these risks.
While our research is limited to a largely African-American male adolescent population in Los Angeles, I have colleagues that have done similar work with other populations in San Antonio, Colorado and New York. We can see that this is not an L.A. or male phenomenon so much as a youth phenomenon. It’s part of their daily life.
I don’t think technology is a silver bullet for youth homelessness. But looking at the way it connects youth to resources and positive networks, it can be something that enhances the lives of these young people.
More From NCFY
"Research Roundup: Online Social Networks May Protect Homeless Youth From Negative Influences"
“The Family Spirit Trial for American Indian Teen Mothers and Their Children: CBPR Rationale, Design, Methods and Baseline Characteristics” (abstract), Prevention Science, Vol. 13, No. 5, October 2012.
What it’s about: This study describes preliminary findings from the Family Spirit trial, a home-visiting program designed to promote health and healthy behavior and reduce drug use among Native American teen mothers and their children. More than 300 pregnant Native American girls between the ages of 12 and 19 were randomly selected, in a process similar to a coin toss, to receive either the Family Spirit intervention along with standard care (prenatal care and early childhood visits) or standard care alone. The young women were mostly first-time mothers who became pregnant without meaning to.
In the Family Spirit intervention, trained female professionals from the community visited teen mothers at home once a month or so from the third trimester of pregnancy up to the child’s third birthday. Sessions covered topics including parenting skills, alcohol and drug abuse, and breast-feeding education.
The authors want to find out if Family Spirit can help strengthen young families and break the cycle of poverty, violence and alcohol and drug abuse that afflicts so many Native communities.
Why read it: The authors contend that their ongoing research is the most thorough study yet attempted of behavioral health problems, such as drug and alcohol abuse, among multiple generations of Native Americans. By combining random assignment and other rigorous research design techniques with community participation in the research process, the authors hope to provide a picture of this population that hasn’t been seen in social science studies thus far.
In the authors’ words, “If the Family Spirit intervention is demonstrated to be effective, tribal leaders may have new strategies that are feasible, culturally appropriate and cost-effective to prevent drug abuse and other behavioral challenges in young families.”
Biggest takeaways for youth workers: This first installment of the trial's findings focuses on demographics, such as how old the young women were when they got pregnant, whether they were single or married, whether or not they were in school, and whether or not they smoked, drank or used drugs. The authors found, for instance, that the young women smoked and drank at about the same rate as the national average. But they had much higher rates of using marijuana, meth and crack-cocaine.
Even if they don't serve Native teens, youth workers may want to follow the Family Spirit trial as it develops and stay abreast of its findings on the ways poverty, abuse and alcohol and drug use are passed from generation to generation.
Additional references: The Johns Hopkins Center for American Indian Health, which also partly funded this study, conducted a similar randomized trial in 2002 and a 2009 study to evaluate the effects of the Family Spirit intervention. Skye Bass, an Indian Health Service public health specialist, spoke to NCFY about drug abuse among Native youth.
(Publications discussed here do not necessarily reflect the views of NCFY, FYSB, or the Administration for Children and Families. Go to the NCFY literature database for abstracts of this and other publications.)