Appropriating $49,231.00 Federal Assistance Grant for Operation of the Youth Services Bureau

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YOUTH SERVICE BUREAU THE SERVICES There are principally four services available at YSB. These are Co- unseling, Modeling, Programming and Referral. COUNSELING We see youth individually, in groups, as families and with other ag- ency professionals. We have staff members with particular counseling skills and training and we try to pair each client with that worker with the best potential to get through to the young person. Most one - to -one and family counseling is done at our office or in a school after we have developed the rapport we are looking for. In this way, the client's familiarity with his own environment is not permitted to be a detriment to "opening up ". MODELING All of our actions in the presence of a client can be considered as impressions from which the client may learn. Any conversation has the weight of counseling and any action has the potential for influ- ence. For this reason, we have hired staff who are positive role models. They are generally young, quite open, pleasing in their own personality, exemplary in their lives, willing to work extra hours and similar to Big Brothers and Sisters to the youth on their case- load. We have always maintained a sex and race balance on the staff for this reason. PROGRAMMING We have some programs which of themselves are able to reduce delin- quency behaviour in young people. Each of these programs was created in response to a lack in our community, most of them are operated in conjunction with other agencies and many of them have been learned by our staff from the various journals and conferences available to people in social work. In the past three years we have also been asked numerous times for advice on recreating our programs in other communities. When our investigation of a client discloses that another agency has better resources to deal effectively with the problem, we make the appropriate referral. Many times the client is unaware of which agency has the needed service or is put off by formalities. Our concept of referral is to stay with the client's case until he has already begun service at the new agency, and not to merely provide a phone number and expect them to make it on their own.