YOUTH DEVELOPMENT
PREVENTION OF JUVENILE DELINQUENCY
Helping Hands International's programs offer youth and families a comprehensive array of services ranging from a teen mothers program to a home-based counseling program to a temporary emergency shelter to independent living facilities to an HIV/AIDS education service.
Helping Hands International programs are developed to meet the changing needs of the individuals and the families.
Please click on the programs below for more information.
Aids Prevention Services
Mentors Program
Assessment
Goals & Objectives of the Project
Shelter Care
Helping Hands International Transition House
Helping Hands International Outreach
Teen Mothers Program
Family Preservation Program
Substance Abuse Services
HIV/AIDS Prevention Services (APS)
AIDS Prevention Services (APS)
Helping Hands International, in association with its' Community Partners (residents, youth, churches, schools, and organizations) will focus on developing a culture that students can academically achieve, promoting social and personal responsibility and fostering a forum where students can benefit from their education and career choices. The reason for these choices of goals are because the problems the targeted youth either are involved with or at risk of are educational failure or dropping out of school, criminal, delinquent, or gang activities and/or lack the strong positive role models. Many of these problems involve such known risk factors, as lack or attachment to society, unsociable behavior in early adolescence, problem behavior with peers, and rebelliousness. These risk factors and problems that have been identified in our target area can best be prevented and addressed by two nationally validated and well-replicated prevention models, Leadership & Resiliency through Mentoring programs and Peer to Peer education.
Mentors program
Leadership & Resiliency through Mentoring programs and Peer to Peer education.
Peers are an important aspect of an adolescents' transition into adulthood. As youth move away from dependence on the family, closer ties with their peers give youth the social support they need during those transitional years. As the peer group assumes increasing importance, teens move to establish independence from their families. When this happens, other teens become the motivating factor for behaviors and standards. The social learning theory emphasizes that similarities in age and interest between those giving and those receiving educational messages will increase the persuasiveness of the messages. Empathy and a perception that peers share similar life experiences may also be critically important in the success of strategies to change attitudes and behaviors (9). Thus, peer mentor/educators can have genuine advantages over professionally trained adults in dealing with adolescents.
In order to provide the youth with the motivation factors necessary to reach their potential, peer education training and youth development will be implemented within our project plan. By implementing both strategies, the youth mentors are proved with leadership skills that help them to motivate mentees to change or refrain from unhealthy behaviors and the knowledge, skills, and services necessary to impart effective peer education services to other peers.
The social learning and academic development strategies will be implemented to formulate social competency and academic success. To be successful, mentoring programming must incorporate activities that cross old disciplinary boundaries, consist of schools and organizations providing support of resources and services, and that bring families, school and youth closer.
Many parents and communities desire a school-based approach in the development of a mentor program. Thus, we have chosen to implement our program in a school setting. To effectively build community support for a mentoring program, the planning committee will involve the schools, parent groups and youth from the outset. For the planning to be appropriate, planners must ask three (3) questions.
Helping Hands International Services have worked with and continues to work with many young leaders in the school and will be able to galvanize them to support our efforts in developing a mentor program. Youth will be encouraged to enroll other youth and their parents in efforts to build community support.
The focus of the planning process is school participation. For this program to effectively make assessments and plans for implementation, the planning committee will have to respect the rights and responsibilities of the schools officials to diagnose the causes of their own student problems. Assessing student needs will be a critical part in the pre-match planning process.
Assessment
Helping Hands International recognizes that the needs assessments are the weaker components of many programs. HHI understands that planning is a partnership and the all parties involved have knowledge and expertise related to the issues. Helping Hands International's staff will assist the school in facilitating the assessment process and help school counselors analyze the issues.
Community agencies and residents are important partners in the planning process of bringing perspectives mentors to the table. The process itself helps the community to take ownership of both the problem and the solutions.
Committed youth-serving adults cannot afford to overlook the positive results to be derived from incorporating youth development strategies with peer education prevention programs. Other mentoring programs should also consider linking with youth development programs in order to meet young people's self-identified needs. Peer programs embrace a youth development concept that encourages young people to use the skills they already have and learn. This is why it is so important to have and continue to support youth as a part of the planning, implementation, and evaluation process.
It is expected that the positive effects demonstrated in other studies of the Peer Education Model and the establishment of a Leadership and Resiliency Program will occur within our program. We anticipate improved attendance records, increased academic performance, and most importantly, enhanced social competence and resilience amongst our youth. Specifically, we expect that use of a well-established model such as the Peer Education model will lead to decreased unexcused absences, as well as more favorable attitudes towards elementary and middle schools. When one examines the actual components of the program, it is more broadly based than are many other prevention models. That is, the sessions of this program include many directed at self-esteem development, coping skills. If applied on a community-wide basis through the use of peer-mentors, peer-counselors, and peer-educators within recreation centers, church youth groups, after-school programs, schools and organizations, this model would address the leadership and resiliency of our youth
Goals & Objectives of the Project
Improve student achievement. The objective of the project is to increase the academic performance of the mentees in core subjects after twelve (12) months of program services.
Create a culture of achievement. Peer education programs can be a powerful approach to educating youth and changing their attitudes. Some studies indicate that teenagers receive most of their information about culture from other youth. The peer group is highly important in influencing adolescents' values and behaviors. In one study, youth stated that adolescents who believe that their peers are participating in school activities are more likely to do the same.
Promote personal & social responsibility. We expect that social learning and youth development will lead to improvement in social competency. Improved social competency skills should lead to decreased behavioral difficulties, as measured by increased self-esteem, and increased grades.
Increase participation in and enhance their ability to benefit from their education and career choices. The objective of this goal is to decrease unexcused absences of mentees and help mentees find better ways to occupy their time within the school environment, like intramurals, clubs, and organizations.
Shelter Care program
Helping Hands International delivers services to under-resourced families through a variety of programs including:
Therapeutic and traditional foster care
Family preservation
Juvenile justice
Substance abuse
Healthy families
Behavioral health
Helping Hands International's prevention and treatment services are grounded in a non-religious spirituality that promotes universally applicable principles and values on which healthy and wholesome communal living is possible. This approach has been codified as “The NTU Approach To Serenity”, a synthesis of western psychotherapeutic methodologies and eastern conceptualizations of optimal health and healing.
Helping Hands International's independent living program is purposed to provide young adults, 18 to 21 years of age, who have come through foster care with the high level of support, common to youth from intact families, while they are learning how to become an independent citizen capable of maintaining a home and supporting themselves.
Helping Hands International proposes to provide independent living services for youth who are under the care and legal custody of the Child and Family Service Administration (CFSA). Far too often, a cessation of services to young people and a dramatic drop in their well-being mark graduation from foster care.
Helping Hands International's independent living program will assist youth in foster care by providing services that are designed to promote movement from dependence on the agency to becoming an emancipated young adult.
Helping Hands International will also serve youth in other settings. For example, provide substance abuse treatment and prevention services to youth from substance abusing families and their primary caregivers. The organization will provide individual, family and group therapeutic services to adjudicated youth and their families following the youths release from detention and to adjudicated females residing in a community group home.
Helping Hands International will also provide mental health diagnostic and treatment services
Helping Hands International's Transition House
A caring alternative to the dangers of the streets for homeless, abandoned, abused, neglected, and runaway children.
Helping Hands International's Transition House is a short-term shelter serving youth in need between ages 11 and 17 24 hours a day. By offering a temporary place to live and supportive services, Helping Hands International's “T” House will be able to help nearly all of the youth it assists to secure a stable home life, with most safely reuniting with their families. In addition, if an individual and his or her family are in repeated crisis that does not stabilize through family counseling, the youth may have temporary respite care at Helping Hands International's “T” House. This will provide a needed break and facilitate a fresh start at resolving issues constructively. The shelter provides:
Crisis intervention
Individual and group family counseling
Case management
Aftercare counseling
Temporary respite care
Helping Hands International's Outreach
Providing home-based individual and family counseling and support services to at-risk youth between ages 10 and 18. Participants are self-referred.
Helping Hands International strives to maintain and enhance the family unit and empower young people and their families to make positive changes in their lives. By reaching troubled youth and families early in a crisis Helping Hands International's Outreach helps to prevent family disintegration and young people from running away from home, leaving school, or becoming involved in delinquent activity.
Helping Hands International's Outreach is a program that provides home-based services to young people and their families including:
Crisis intervention
Individual youth counseling
Individual parent/guardian counseling
Family counseling
School support and advocacy
Substance abuse prevention counseling
Case management & referrals to community resources
Youth, parent/guardian, and family activities
Parent/caregiver support groups
Teen Mothers Program
A structured, caring, and therapeutic environment in which homeless teen mothers between ages 13 and 21 and their babies can remain together and receive support, guidance, and other needed assistance. Residents will be referred by the DC Child and Family Services Agency.
This program will serve teenage mothers who are the victims of abuse and neglect and are wards of the District of Columbia . The program's goals are to keep mothers and their babies together, break the intergenerational cycle of abuse, and help the young mothers develop long-term self-sufficiency. Residents will receive education and career guidance, assistance with housing and employment, training in parenting and life skills, and pre- and post-natal medical support.
Family Preservation Program
Intensive, short-term crisis intervention to multi-problem families where child removal is imminent due to physical abuse or neglect. Referrals are through the D.C. Child and Family Services Agency.
This program will deliver three months of intensive home-based support to families with the goal of:
Achieving the safety of all family members
Preventing unnecessary placement of children into foster care
Improving family functioning
Increasing family access to community resources
Specially trained social workers, on call 24 hours a day, will provide a mixture of family counseling, casework, skills building, and help with practical problems.
Substance Abuse Services
Helping Hands International's alcohol, tobacco, and drugs group prevention curriculum provides youth with accurate information about substance abuse and teaches resistance techniques.
Individual prevention work, substance abuse counseling, and support services are also offered to Helping Hands International's youth in need. Helping Hands International will hold weekly group sessions in a variety of settings, including various Helping Hands International's programs, D.C. Superior Court, community housing developments, and other residential programs and shelters.
HIV/AIDS Prevention Services (APS)
Helping Hands International APS provides prevention and education services to high-risk adolescents, including runaway and homeless youth, commercial sex workers, teenage mothers, street youth, youth in shelters, and court adjudicated youth.
In order to better educate and prevent the spread of HIV and AIDS in youth, Helping Hands International's APS uses a variety of tools, including:
Street outreach
Prevention case management
Educational/school presentations
Outreach work at various citywide functions