YouthBuild Program Management

High attendance and retention are key indicators of program success. Students who show up consistently and stay the length of your program are more likely to succeed in the future. In this interactive webinar, Bonnie Landi, Program Director of Ulster YouthBuild Partnership, shares some of the best practices of high performing programs aimed at building a deliberate culture that leads to high attendance and retention.

At YouthBuild we are trying to create an environment in which young people and staff can learn, feel valued and cared for, make good decisions, and grow in their self-development, knowledge, skill, and leadership. Sometimes it seems that there are an overwhelming number of things to do to make things go right. But whether we are in the classroom, doing a rap group, on the work site, or in a Policy Committee or staff meeting, there are a few key processes which always help create the conditions in which groups of people do their best thinking, learning, or decision making.

This webinar is hosted by Sheilah Goulart, the YouthBuild Coordinator for San Joaquin County Office of Education. In this presentation, Sheilah describes the innovative approach she uses to staff her YouthBuild program and to provide essential services to her YouthBuild participants.

Articles also include On-line Resources, Improving Attendance and Retention, and Do You Know About the Loan Fund?

Written by YouthBuild USA under contract with the Department of Housing and Urban Development, these handbooks are designed to help people run effective YouthBuild programs in their communities. They include the HUD YouthBuild Program Manual, Construction Training at a YouthBuild Program, Leadership Development at a YouthBuild Program, Counseling at a YouthBuild Program, Education at a YouthBuild Program, and Opportunities for Graduates of a YouthBuild Program.

From a talk presented to YouthBuild Directors in 1992.  This article talks about two kinds of distress patterns: situational and chronic, and goes through the six parts of managing distress patterns.

Facilitator's Guide to Managing Your Stress Workshop, presented at the 2009 YouthBuild Transformation Institute in Chicago.

In this course, you will experience a demanding, rigorous, and caring immersion program utilizing physical, mental, and emotional challenges to facilitate the transition of youth from street culture to a program culture of accountability, possibility, and high expectations

This guide is a training outline that covers all aspects of the three-day Mental Toughness Training.

Supplement to "The Art of Being a Youthbuild Director."  This paper offers Dorothy's thoughts on the prevention of problems in mishandling power relationships, starting with the two generic issues: 1) becoming a leader who can appropriately balance autonomy with accountability; and 2) becoming a leader who can appropriately balance one’s own authority with the development of leadership and initiative in one’s subordinates.

As youth workers, our goal is to run a successful program in which young people are respected, their ideas are taken seriously, they are part of the decision-making of the program, they feel cared about by staff and they are learning real and important skills. If we achieve this goal, then, whether we like it or not, the young people will lay in our laps a lot of the pain they are carrying around from racism, poverty and personal family background. It doesn't matter what our official job title is. Most of us will wear the counselor's hat at times.

Published in Perspectives on Youth, Winter/Spring 2004.

Virtually every human group, when asked to describe good leaders, will answer: “They know how to listen. They hear what matters to the people. They care. They know how to translate what they hear into actions that meet the needs and express the will of the people.”

An overview of online technologies that we are using and could use to service our Community: email, websites, CMS, forums, blogs, wikis, and webinars.

As staff and program directors we are an intimate part of the complicated process of youth transformation.  Like the young people, we are at different levels in our own development.  Each of us has conscious or unconscious aspirations to reach for our highest human potential.  In our heart of hearts, what we most want for the young people we work with is to provide the environment for them to reach their highest aspirations.  When we look back at our own transformations, for most of us there was at least one caring, skillful adult who hung in there with us over a period of time, on whom we relied for some combination of encouragement, challenge, information, guidance, teaching, validation, and love; who believed in us until we believed in ourselves.