Member Spotlight

Youth Advocate Programs— YAP® for short— is a national nonprofit delivering and advocating for evidence-based services in homes and communities as a more effective alternative to youth incarceration and group child welfare, behavioral health, and intellectual disabilities placements. We also partner with public safety systems to help curb neighborhood violence.

YAP® recognizes generational and structural impacts on educational, employment, health, and other systems across the U.S. and globally.

By redirecting justice, child welfare, behavioral health, and other social services dollars and resources from youth prisons and other residential facilities to communities where our program participants live, we are helping our systems partners achieve better service delivery and outcomes, which are strengthened with our evidence-based individual and family wraparound services model.

We hire neighborhood-based Advocates and mobile behavioral health professionals, which helps to keep local dollars and resources in the communities we serve. YAP Advocates are skilled in engaging youth and families. They meet program participants and their parents and guardians where they are and provide them with tools to lead and direct their individual and family service plans.

Implementing service plans led by the program participant and family and what they identify as their needs, hopes and interests, frontline YAP® staff connect those we serve with tools that empower them to learn new skills and introduce them to people and places that provide meaningful supports in their community. YAP® Advocates, for example, identify local businesses where young people can gain work experience (at no cost to the business). YAP® staff also connect program participants with other nonprofits and local businesses where young people and their parents and guardians can access educational, workforce and other training, along with basic needs resources, that are fundamental to strengthening program participants’ family foundation.

YAP®’s work is built on a foundation of research demonstrating that people do better throughout life when they have support where they live, work, learn and play.

Having access to positive relationships, spaces, opportunities, and services empowers individuals and families, which makes communities safe, healthier and more vibrant.

Mission

YAP®’s mission is to deliver and advocate for safe and effective community-based alternatives to residential care and incarceration that empower individuals, families, and neighborhoods to thrive.