Youth Impact Windham County

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.

CPR, Fridays, October 2nd 1:00 – 5:00, October 9th 9:00 -1:00, or October 16th 1:00 – 5:00, at the Brattleboro Savings and Loan

Swine Flu Prevention, Monday, October 5th, 7:00 – 8:30, at the Boys and Girls Club

Creating Professional Boundaries (Including Sexual Harassment), Wednesday, October 28th, 10:00 – 12:00 a.m. & 6:30 – 8:30 p.m.

Adolescent Development and Substance Abuse, Wednesday, November 11th, 10 – 12:30 & 6:30 – 9:00 p.m.

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.

Each quarter, our collaborative focuses on one of the major capacity building components of the CEY Grant. Our trainings this quarter center on the theme of program development. The questions we hope to be able to answer after the completion of this season’s training are:

Are our programs in line with what research says is best practice?
Do our programs take into account our client’s, our agency’s and our community’s assets?
How do our programs reflect all we have learned: the research, our agency and community assets, our mission, community needs and what we have discovered from successes and failures of previous programming?

Taken from "The Basics of Program Design", from CCF National Resource Center. Check out our upcoming trainings on program development!

"CONNECTING THE DOTS FOR PROGRAM DESIGN" (Thursday, June 25th, 10:00 – 2:00)
SETTING THE BAR FOR SUCCESS: PRACTICAL SUPERVISION IN NON-PROFITS (Part I) (May 28, 2008 2:00pm -3:00pm)
GETTING BETTER AT BEING THE BOSS: SUPERVISOR’S CLINIC (Part II) (June 11, 2009 2:00pm – 3:00pm)

Youth Services' 24th Annual Gold Tournament Wednesday, July 29th, at the Brattleboro Country Club. Here’s your chance to play on a great golf course while supporting a critical community resource! Youth Services changes the lives of 1,679 local youth and family members each year. Contact, Youth Services, 32 Walnut St., PO Box 6008, Brattleboro, VT 05302-6008, or call: (802) 257-0361 or visit www.youthservicesinc.org/golf

Guilford Church Old Fashion Strawberry Supper Set for June 28. Guilford, VT-- A summer tradition for the whole family, the Strawberry Supper at Guilford Community Church, Guilford, VT will be held on Saturday evening, June 27. There will be three seatings to choose from, at 4:30, 5:45 and 7 p.m. The price for adults is $10 adult, $5 children under age 10; $3 for kids age 4 and under. For reservations, call (802) 257-1819 or email nedm@sover.net. Ham, baked beans, deviled eggs, potato salad, cole slaw, fresh baked rolls, strawberries, shortcake and whipped cream, coffee, tea, milk or ice tea are on the menu. All proceeds benefit over 15 local programs supported by GCC, including the Boy Scouts, Hospice, Meals on Wheels, and Brigit’s Kitchen. Take 1-91 to Vermont Exit 1 (Brattleboro) south on US Route 5 just past Guilford Country Store, left on Bee Barn Road, then left again on Church Drive.

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.

Ruth Ever, Youth and Family Educator at the Northwestern District Attorney's office, in Northampton, MA, presented best practice concepts and curricula that could guide our program creation and revision. The following article summarizes those concepts and the programs in the field of violence prevention that "work," according to SAMHSA. Check it out!

Greg Ryan, from the Connecticut Assets Network, presented strategies on how community based agencies can employ strength-based, asset building frameworks into their programs and processes. The following articles and worksheets guide us to master these concepts and skills. Check them out! An overview of how the Connecticut Asset Network’s "village building" concept and how their new technology helps to accomplish that. "Key to achieving goals of greater connectedness for youth[i] and other community members[ii] is active, intentional village building, which involves the identification and mobilization of both individual and organizational community strengths, resources and capacities. CAN’s contribution to this dynamic village building by citizens is the creation of technologies that support the development and sustainability of connected communities." Check it out.

Check out a survey to administer to participants to help guide our work with them based on their passions ...and a tool to guide participants to discover their "circle of support"

Youth Spotlight

In this series, young people in Windham County describe their strengths and challenges, the things they love and hate, what goes well for them and what is hard for them. And each tries to answer this question: "What do you most want adults to know about young people in our county?"

Guilford Students Speak

Guildford is a really small town and doesn’t have a lot of population so everyone knows everybody. So we are close in that way yet you do have the privacy of not all being all cramped next to each other. You just have to reach out your window to touch someone. When the ice storm that just happened, everybody helped each other; we had shelters set up everywhere. That’s what it is really supposed to be. That is what Guilford is about, a community helping each other. I enjoy how we all know each other and love each other; its is very close

The opportunity to be an individual is really there and a lot of us take advantage of that. It is artsy and has lots of open mindedness and room for creativity, like NEYT, and performance spaces, the boys and girls club, creating clay with Bonnie Stearns, Brattleboro School of Dance, and Kelly’s. We like that there are sports activities. We have a connection to the youth asset program and our school newspaper, The Gazette, gives us a sense of accomplishment. We have a lot of stuff to do. Everyone is environmentally conscious.

What is not so good and sort of good is that we live in the middle of nowhere; you can’t walk to town and can’t do a lot of things if you don’t have ½ hour time frame to work with. We have limited resources when it comes to getting somewhere. And there is really not a lot to do that is close to us that you can get to without driving, like malls are really far away from here and girls kind of like malls. We have all this nature and we try to be environmentally conscious but it takes 15 minutes in a car to get anywhere. It is hard to get somewhere without driving your car. Because of that though, we get around to each other in different ways: snowmobiling, four wheeling, walking. Most people in Brattleboro can’t really do that stuff. So it gets kind of boring. When kids don’t have much to do they tend to drink do other things, not really terrible things like cocaine and heroine. This is because there is nothing else to do and we can’t go into town and hang out. If we lived in Brattleboro we could go to The School of dance or just hang out. There are like stores, theatres, and sports places, something other than cows. In town there are other friends, freedom to walk around town. There is shopping which helps when I am really board. Even to just walk around town with friends gives you something for you eyes to look at. They have buildings, civilization, roads, and buildings with stuff in them. You can always find something to entertain you, a couple guys fighting, window shopping, entertaining, food, anything. It would be great if we had a couple bus stops. My mom hates driving. At the Putney School, there is a bus that goes from the school to Brattleboro and brings people back to Putney School, like a shuttle. Then our parents pick us up at school.

I think that there are a lot people being doing drugs and stuff. I have seen that parents don’t have control over their children. They spoil them at first and try to discipline them later and it doesn’t work. It is also hare for kids when they are left to learn from experience even when they can’t do things on there own things. Things don’t always get spelled out for them like they need to.