Youth Advocate Program looking for mentors for kids in trouble
Help wanted: Advocates for Troubled Youth.
Forty-year-old agency with proven track record of success seeks caring individuals to work as mentors for kids who need guidance to stay out of trouble and rely on the strength of their own talents and gifts.
Part time. Pays $ 14-$ 15 an hour.
Must be from same neighborhood as youth served, have patience and a big heart. Must have an open mind and be able to see that inside most fledgling gang members or juvenile criminals is a kid who needs love and guidance.
For more information call (973) 624-1520.
Yes, this is serious.
The Youth Advocate Program (YAP), which for 40 years has steered kids headed for jail into productive lives through one-on-one mentorship and other interventions, needs people to get involved and potentially save a life.
“Our whole program is about keeping families together and reducing reliance on institutions,” said Jeff Fleischer, the national CEO of YAP, who works out of the nonprofit agency’s Newark office.
By institutions he means mainly jail. The kids referred to YAP come mostly from juvenile court. Some are serious offenders, with weapons and drug charges, or gang affiliation.
“We don’t refuse anybody,” Fleischer said.
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What makes YAP different from many other intervention programs, Fleischer said, is that the people involved come from the kid’s own life, not from government agencies.
“When we sit with them and develop a program, we’ll bring in who they want,” he said. “Their parents, their teachers, their minister, a detention center worker they trust, even a gang leader.”
Robyn Dawson, the Essex County program director of YAP, said gang leaders are remarkably compliant in “releasing kids with potential.”
“They’ll say, ‘Yeah, this kid can do better,’ and let them go,” she said.
“When we go into some of the neighborhoods, we know the gang members are looking out for us,” she said. “They respect what we’re trying to do.”
And, she added, “My car is always is exactly how I left it. I know they’re watching it.”
The program works like this: when a kid is referred to YAP, the staff gathers family and friends to help identify the strengths and interests of the young person, and what kind of behavioral treatment they might need.
The YAP advocates are people from the neighborhood who, as Fleischer said, “know the streets and the people.
“We sit with them and ask four questions,” he said. “What do you need? What can we do to help? How can we work together as equal partners? And how can you give back?
“The key is to find their talents, and put them to good use,” Fleischer said. “One of our guys was good in math. Now, instead of being in the youth house, he’s tutoring other kids in math.”
One young man, he said, was headed toward youth detention for a serious offense. During the intervention, he told the YAP team he was “good at fixing bicycles,” Fleischer said.
For restitution for his crime, he was asked to fix a bunch of broken bicycles in police hands, and they were distributed to kids who needed bikes. After that, he got a job in bicycle shop, where he works as a mechanic.
On a larger scale, Fleischer talked about a major YAP interventions in Fort Worth, Texas, with members of warring Crips, Bloods and MS-13 gangs. It reduced prison intake by 42 percent in one year.
Here in New Jersey, there are about 1,000 kids in YAP program in all counties except Hunterdon.
All they need, YAP staffers believe, is someone who cares.
Joan Newton has been a youth advocate for 25 years, beginning in Middlesex County, and has mentored “over 40 kids” in 15 years in Newark, some as young as 11.
“I’m a people person. I always loved working with youth,” said Newton, whose son is a New Jersey State Trooper. “I was a single parent and a lot of people helped me, so it’s my way of giving back.”
For Fleischer, 65, this has been a lifelong passion. As a kid growing up in the Weequahic section of Newark, he remembered a troubled neighborhood boy who would strip off his clothes and run through the streets naked. When police were called, the neighborhood kids would join the chase.
“I remember my mother telling me, ‘he’s got a problem, he’s not an animal to be hunted,'” Fleischer said. “Then he disappeared. They may have sent him to Greystone or Overbrook. This was in the 1960s. I always wondered what happened to him, and how his life might have been different with the right program.”
As a Rutgers College student and varsity soccer player, Fleischer became a Big Brother, then got a $ 1,400 grant to start an afterschool program at St. John’s Episcopal Church for kids from a nearby housing project.
During his master’s degree program in social work, he lived in a Perth Amboy project and worked with gang members.
One of his next stops was La Casa de Don Pedro in Newark, where the late Ramon Rivera threw him the keys to an empty warehouse.
“He said, ‘build a youth center,” Fleischer said. “That was all.”
Using skilled plumbers and electricians, Fleischer put 30 troubled kids to work, learning trades as they built the center, which still stands today at Broadway and 7th Avenue in Newark.
“This was in the early ’80s, when crack was rampant, and the violence was bad,” he said.
One of the boys from the project, Hakim Andrews, is just a few years younger than Fleischer and now works for the Newark Downtown District, helping to keep the city’s business area orderly.
“I saw him coming in today,” Fleischer said. “So, we have these relationships that last decades.”
It remains that way. Many of the kids helped by YAP come back to work as advocates themselves.
“I think that is the key,” he said. “Our model builds community. We are neighbors.”
Mark Di Ionno may be reached at mdiionno@starledger.com. Follow The Star-Ledger on Twitter @StarLedger and find us on Facebook.