Welcome to the Youth ImPact Windham County website. Youth ImPact is a collaboration of youth-service agencies and faith organizations in Windham County that together are seeking ways to promote the healthy development of young people by building organizational capacity. The 3-year project is funded by the Federal Administration for Children and Families' Compassion Capital Fund (CCF) whose primary purpose is to help faith-based and community organizations increase their effectiveness, enhance their ability to provide social services to serve those most in need, expand their organizations, diversify their funding sources, and create collaborations to better serve those in need.

Youth ImPact partners are Youth Services Inc. of Windham County, the Boys & Girls Club of Brattleboro, Guilford Community Church, Vermont Independent Media and New England Network for Child, Youth & Family Services, which is also acting as the coordinating agency.

Our monthly training calendar continues through September, 2010 and we would like to invite you to attend our September training. Our hope is to create a lasting collaborative training model that prepares youth workers in the region with the most important core competencies for the field, saves our agencies money, and creates a supportive learning community committed to excellence. September’s training is described below. A list of upcoming trainings also appears on our website: http://nenetwork.org/Youth_Impact/ Simply send an e-mail to Andi Waisman (awaisman@nenetwork.org) to register yourself or a colleague.

Crisis Evaluation and Response, September 15th, 6:30 – 8:30, at the Guilford Church. Through lecture and role play, and questions and answers from our local crisis team, participants will master the skills and information needed to effectively evaluate and refer children and adolescents in crisis. Facilitated by Dr. Neil Senior, a Board Certified Child, Adolescent and Adult Psychiatrist. He worked for 20 years at the Brattleboro Retreat and has a broad range of professional and clinical interests, including psychopharmacology, attention deficit disorder, mood disorders, psychotic illnesses and anger management. Assisted by Billie Fairbrother, a Crisis Integration Case Manager with the HCRS Brattleboro office for the past 5.5 years. HCRS provides emergency mental health services in Windham and Windsor County.

Capacity building is the process of implementing activities critical to the long-term viability of your organization. The goal of capacity building is to increase organizational infrastructure and bolster sustainability. By building or increasing your organization’s capacity, the effectiveness of programmatic activities and organizational operations will also increase. The bottom line is MORE—if your organization is equipped to function smoothly at the operational level, your profile in the community will increase, you’ll retain great staff, develop and implement better programs, engage more stakeholders, and be more likely to acquire funding in the future from diverse sources. The end result is your organization’s ability to offer more effective services to those who need them most.

New England Network is employing and supervising several small "youth mapping" teams throughout the county. In order to identify resources and opportunities that exist in their community, youth "mappers" will canvass various agencies and businesses in Windham County, searching for free or low-cost activities, free food, apprenticeships/internships, jobs, and/or volunteer opportunities. Using this data collection strategy, young people will identify a host of resources that may not be found in traditional directories. Contact Andi, 802-254-4609 if you or someone you know wants to help with this work.