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.

Our monthly training calendar continues through September, 2010 and we would like to invite you to attend our next three upcoming trainings. 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. Our next three trainings are described below. A list of upcoming trainings also appears on our website: http://nenetwork.org/Youth_Impact/ Please let me know if you or your colleagues are interested in attending any of the following trainings. Thanks. Andi

Getting The Word Out: Messaging in Traditional & New Media, Thursday, April 1st, 10:00 – 1:00, at the Guilford Church, 38 Church Drive, Guilford.
Print Ads. Radio Ads. TV Ads. Brochures. Websites. E-Blasts. Direct Mail. Podcasts. Billboards. Trade Shows. Posters. Handouts. Sandwich Boards. Signage…and NOW… Networking, Instant Messaging, Texting, Youtube, Online virtual communities! There are some good old fashioned ways to get the word out to both the kids you work with and the adults who care for/about them. Though people use all kinds of fancy buzzwords to explain how it’s done: “Demographics,” “Psychographics,” “Unique Selling Proposition,” “Competitive Frame,” “Qualitative Research,” and many others, when it comes right down to it, all marketing begins by answering a few very simple questions: What is it? What’s so great about it? Who should care? Why should they care? And then there are new technologies that have changed the ways that youth communicate and learn about services available to them. In this workshop, we will look at an event or service you are offering and ask the traditional questions as well as explore how you can effectively introduce newer technology into your marketing campaign. Facilitated by David Blistein and Samantha Maskell. David has been a copywriter, creative director, and marketing consultant for 30 years. From 1987 through 2001 he owned Church & Main, one of New Hampshire’s largest advertising agencies. Samantha began her work in advertising in the mid-90’s where her focus was on developing brand marketing through online communities. She continues to serve as the Youth Services Librarian in Rockingham, VT, where she has been for nearly 10 years. Samantha’s interests have kept her informed about emerging technologies and how they can be utilized by non-profits to connect with a youth and young adult audience; information she has presented to libraries and organizations around New England.

Child and Adolescent Trauma, April 14th, 3:30 – 6:30, at the Guilford Church, 38 Church Drive, Guilford.
In this workshop, participants will learn the basics of child trauma theory and the impact of trauma and loss on kids' presenting problems. You will learn techniques to implement a healing relationship with your clients and some suggestions for self-care for those who work with distressed kids. Facilitated by Judy Greenberg, a licensed Psychologist in private practice for over twenty five years. Her areas of expertise include working with adolescents and people with a history of psychological trauma. She is an EMDR consultant and facilitator. Judy also works part-time at World Learning at the Graduate Institute and their 80 different Study Abroad Programs as a mental health counselor. She has consulted to many area schools including Vermont Academy, The Putney School and Marlboro College. She is on the national board of directors for Witness for peace and leads delegations of health care providers on research trips to Cuba. She started a not-for-profit in the Dominican Republic over fifteen years ago that works with six different local elementary schools on the north coast there. Judy has been the mental health consultant at Farm and Wilderness Camps for over fifteen years and enjoys working with staff and providing training and ongoing support and consultation to people working with children and adolescents.

Adolescence and the use of Alcohol and Drugs, Wednesday, May 12th, 3:30 – 6:30 p.m., at the Guilford Church, 38 Church Drive, Guilford.
Do you work with youth? Are you a parent/friend/neighbor of a teen? Then join us to learn about current drugs adolescents may be using, the dangers associated with early use, the ever changing adolescent brain, and our own attitudes that help and hinder our working with youth on this issue. We will have fun at the same time. (yes it is possible). Facilitated by Debby Haskins, MS, LADC, CCS, the Executive Director of Association of Student Assistance Professionals of VT, who has been in the substance abuse field twenty two years. She is an educator, teaching courses at UVM, and has a private practice in Central Vt.

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.

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.