Preparing Our Kids for Education, Work and Life: A Report of the Task Force on Youth Aging Out

Summarizes a study of Massachusetts youth transitioning out of foster care, and offers recommendations for policies, practices, and resource conditions, including "Five Core Resources" to prepare them for higher education, work, and adulthood

From Citywide to Neighborhood-Based: Two Decades of Learning, Prioritization, and Strategic Action to Build the Skillman Foundation’s Youth-Development Systems

· This article explores the Skillman Foundation’s shift in its approach to fulfilling its mission to improve the lives of children and youth and to making grants – moving from a traditional grantmaker to a place-based investor and change-maker. · Three aspects of Skillman’s approach have directly shaped the evolution of its youth-development investments: recognizing Detroit’s economic, social, political, and environmental challenges; articulating overarching goals to provide direction and setting priorities for the scope and focus of its programmatic work; and using rapid learning to inform strategic decisions and social-innovation practices designed to tackle deeply entrenched problems. · This article reflects on the foundation’s evolution over two decades of learning, prioritization, and strategic action in its efforts to build and sustain outcome-focused youth-development systems

Building Skills and Collaboration for College Success: Lessons from the Detroit College Success Professional Learning Community for Youth Development Professionals

From 2018 through 2020, the Jamie and Denise Jacob Family Foundation made grants to 17 youth development organizations in Detroit that were at varying levels of readiness to advance college success outcomes with their program alumni. At the same time, it was funding three collaborating capacity-building organizations to structure and facilitate a professional learning community that would support the youth programs in improving outcomes for “striving students” — young people who are less likely to graduate college because they come from families or communities with less access to opportunity and resources. In total, 17 YDOs and four schools participated in the learning community over three years. This article seeks to inform funders, capacity builders, and others working to increase investment and rigor in college success efforts led by community-based youth development practitioners, and to make the case for investment in upfront capacity-building and technical assistance. It discusses a framework and recommendations for how grantmakers can extend their impact by engaging capacity builders to facilitate cross-organizational collaboration and learning as they start a portfolio aimed at moving community-level outcomes. This article also outlines the motivation for the Jacob Family Foundation to support this collaborative learning model and offers an overview of its goals, process, and key learnings. For family foundations initiating a new portfolio, it can seem daunting to invest in relationship building and technical assistance on the front end, but this learning community\u27s outcomes indicate that planning and preparation can contribute significantly not only to developing the best programmatic approaches, but also to positive, sustainable, long-term outcomes for young people and communities

Transcending Boundaries: Investigating Domestic Violence Among South Asian Immigrant Women

The Sara Lee Foundation funded a collaborative project between Apna Ghar Inc. and CURL to investigate effective models of service and outreach that are used to address the needs of domestic violence survivors within the context of South Asian immigrant culture and circumstance; the current status of policies and laws impacting immigrant women who access social services; and the incidence and the trends of domestic violence in Metropolitan Chicago, particularly with respect to the South Asian population

The BMC ACCESS project: the development of a medically enhanced safe haven shelter

This paper describes the development and implementation of the Boston Medical Center (BMC) Advanced Clinical Capacity for Engagement, Safety, and Services Project. In October 2002, the BMC Division of Psychiatry became the first such entity to open a Safe Haven shelter for people who are chronically homeless, struggling with severe mental illness, and actively substance abusing. The low-demand Safe Haven model targets the most difficult to reach population and serves as a portal of entry to the mental health and addiction service systems. In this paper, the process by which this blended funded, multi-level collaboration, consisting of a medical center, state, city, local, and community-based consumer organizations, was created and is maintained, as well as the clinical model of care is described. Lessons learned from creating the Safe Haven Shelter and the development and implementation of the consumer-informed evaluation are discussed as well as implications for future work with this population