Youth Advocate Programs— YAP for short— is a national nonprofit advocating for and delivering evidence-based services in homes and communities as a more effective and equitable alternative to youth incarceration and group child welfare, behavioral health, and intellectual disabilities placements. We also partner with public safety systems to help curb neighborhood violence.
YAP recognizes generational and structural impacts on educational, employment, health, and other systems across the U.S. and globally.
By redirecting justice, child welfare, behavioral health, and other social services dollars from youth prisons and other residential facilities to communities where our program participants live, we are helping our systems partners achieve equity in their service delivery and outcomes, which are strengthened with our evidence-based model.
We hire neighborhood-based, culturally responsive Advocates and mobile behavioral health professionals, which helps to keep local dollars and resources in the communities we serve. YAP Advocates are skilled in engaging youth and families. They meet program participants and their parents and guardians where they are and provide them with tools to lead and direct their individual and family service plans.
Led by the program participant and family and what they identify as their needs, hopes and interests, frontline YAP staff connect youth with tools that empower them to learn new skills and introduce them to people and places that provide meaningful supports in their community. Advocates, for example, identify local businesses where young people can gain work experience (at no cost to the business). YAP staff also connect program participants with other nonprofits where young people and their parents and guardians can access educational, workforce and other training, along with basic needs resources, that are fundamental to strengthening program participants’ family foundation.
YAP’s work is built on a foundation of research demonstrating that people do better throughout life when they have support where they live, work, learn and play.
Having access to positive relationships, spaces, opportunities, and services, empowers individuals and families, which contributes to creating healthy and vibrant communities.
YAP’s mission is to deliver and advocate for safe and effective community-based alternatives to residential care and incarceration that empower individuals, families, and neighborhoods to thrive.
Where they operate
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Organization Size
Headquarters Location
Harrisburg, PA
United States
Organization Type
Main Areas of Work
YAP Wraparound Advocate Program Implementation and Independent Advocacy
Strengthening Families, Increasing Educational Engagement, YAPAbility-Support of young people with disabilities and their families, Youth Participation/Youth CEO Groups/Parent and Caregiver Participation Groups, Supporting Unaccompanied Minors Seeking Asylum, Irish Youth Justice Service
Sierra Leone YAP (SLYAP)
Education focused, community-building, and gender transformative programming
Siembra Bien (Sowing Well)
Violence prevention, youth leadership, street soccer as peacebuilding and conflict management activity, working with families on positive parenting skills
YAP Australia
Working with young people who are justice-system involved and their families
We asked this organization to tell us a little more about their learning and knowledge sharing practices. Here is what they said
YAP has remained true to its mission for 49 years of being focused on community-based care, focusing on strengths and viewing people as assets, working in partnership with youth and families, working with the highest needs individuals and communities with Advocates as our front line workers, people who know the communities and are known in these communities and are trusted entities. For its global work, YAP works in equal partnership with international entities and individuals in a way that is culturally humble and values all strengths, interests, and capacities of partners in a humanistic way that does not rely on only western, industrialized, economically enriched viewpoints.
Weekly coaching happens for all employees, reflective practice and feedback loops happen continuously. External evaluations of our work are done by university partners and independent entities. YAP considers itself a learning organization.
We have a VOICE initiative/Participation in Ireland. YAP Voice gives current and former program participants an opportunity to share their success stories with the public so that policy makers and others understand and appreciate that with holistic wraparound services from YAP Advocates and behavioral health professionals, biographies can change. A former YAP participant now serves on the YAP Board of Directors as an Expert by Experience. All 5 YAP Chapter Countries (Australia, Guatemala, Sierra Leone, Ireland, USA) participate as equal partners in the International Peer Forum that works together continuously to: Share practice innovations, international advocacy, solidarity and support, cultural learnings, and building YAP International and YAP Global Youth Voices with collective branding and marketing to share the YAP International chapters’ collaborative story and raise our profile advancing individual and collective social change missions and daily labors. YAP is also a member of Dynamo International Streetworkers Association and works on a monthly basis with the Americas Network of Dynamo International. YAP hosts international fellows from the Community Engagement Exchange Program each year at local YAP sites in the US. Reciprocal exchanges allow American YAP hosts to then be hosted by the international fellow in their home country.