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Waking the Village: Youth Development Team Support
Program Overview: Waking the Village operates programs for homeless youth and families. Our hallmarks are intense advocacy, relationship based services, and creative services. Programs are detailed at the end of this post. We encourage applicants to explore our website at www.wakingthevillage.org and our Facebook page to learn more about our agency.
Overview of Responsibilities and Duties: Waking the Village is filling a short term opening through August 2019. The team support position supports our youth development team. The youth development team arrives daily to infuse the community with energy, compassion, and real presence. They inspire residents to be diligent and to treat their dreams seriously, while also modeling how to face challenges with grace and humor. The team creates a daily program that offers coaching, advocacy, and workshops, as well as coordinates with child development staff, community programs, and counselors from community partners. The youth development team support position coordinates with the team to provide transportation and other supports that allow our youth to connect to resources and make best use of time. Their primary work is transporting youth to appointments, childcare, and daily program, as well as acting as an advocate as youth connect to resources. The support person is not a case manager, but coordinates with our case managers to ensure follow through and support as youth make connections and pursue goals.
Primary Responsibilities:
Be on site at Tubman House or Audres Emporium 40 hours weekly to inspire residents to commit fully to their goals.
The Youth Development Team Support works Monday through Friday to ensure each resident and his or her child has a meaningful day. The most likely schedule will be Monday through Friday from 8:30 to 4:30. As an on-site presence, the team support person is called on help with the small details that allow a youth to move toward goals. Steadiness, consistency, and faith in the residents are always needed.
Coordinate with the youth development team to engage youth at morning meeting
Each morning the residents gather to begin the day. The morning meeting is a moment of reflection and sharing to add intention to the days work and check in with each resident. It is a time for resident to assess the day- what might prevent or promote progress, and to address it thoughtfully. Activities to build energy and community, explore current issues, or develop new skills are often integrated. The team support ensures youth are on track each morning to make it to meeting (and the start of their day) as well as transport youth to our main program site.
Respond to challenges that appear during the day
In a community of 20 young parents or pregnant women and all their children, there is bound to be challenges or difficult interactions or small emergencies that arise each week. All WTV staff responds to these moments that might include having a resident get a phone call with bad news, guiding a parent with a baby with a 104 degree fever, helping a resident cope with a break up, assisting a resident with a flat tire, helping two resident communicate frustration in a productive way, or advising a resident whose health insurance just got cut off. WTV staff is constantly stacking on hats, learning new skills, and modeling persistence and grace in the face of challenges.
Support residents in pursuing their goals and dreams as parents, employees, students, citizens, and self-sufficient adults
As the youth development team support, you will stand alongside residents in some of the most beautiful and some of the most difficult days of their lives. Our coaches help each resident create a road map to the future s/he wants, and remind her of the steps to these goals. The coaches and residents draw up plans for each day leading into the future, troubleshooting roadblocks, and navigating college enrollment, employment, saving money, parenting, securing childcare, enrolling in Medi-Cal, clearing warrants and debts, getting divorced, getting counseling, tutoringwhatever it takes in seeing through the many and varied steps toward self-sufficiency and wholeness.
As the team support, you will assist youth as they follow these road maps. Your role is not to counsel or case manage, but to facilitate connection through rides, advocacy, and encouragement. You will be making the journey a bit easier, helping youth foresee obstacles and plan experiences thoughtfully so precious time is not lost.
Work with Youth Development Team
As a team, you decide the best use of staff energy. You assess the week ahead and plan each team member's work in maintaining residents' momentum, and being present for key support. You also engage with the team in finding resources, and delegating responsibility.
Build a relationship with the children of the programs
The children see us daily and very quickly begin shouting our names jubilantly when we walk in the door each day. No matter how busy it gets, the children need us to slow down for silly songs or cuddles or a game of monster. We also encounter moms and dads in an occasional bad moment, and we all hone the art of knowing when to step in, when to hold our tongues, and when to give a break from the relentlessness of parenting. Staff experienced in parenting and work with children handle the big stuff, but simply sharing the day with children will require presence and joyfulness, and a willingness to change the occasional diaper or wipe the occasional nose. You'll want to like sharing the world with children.
Essential Qualities
Hard Working
Able to work independently and see a plan through
Strong Ability to Build Partnerships with Parents: Warmth and an ability to connect with youth are essential.
Professional: An ability to establish healthy, clear boundaries and model emotional intelligence is essential
Brave: Our residents take incredible risks and tackle the challenges of personal growth as they pursue their goals. As a staff, we must model the same courage to grow.
Joyful: Our young parents and children rely on us for smiles, hearty hellos, and a positive attitude that never quits.
Unafraid to speak the truth: We must not tip toe around our residents. They deserve to be confronted when they are ducking responsibility, making unhealthy choices, or sabotaging their own success. We must have the conversations they need to explore behaviors that undermine their goals and growth.
Open minded and accepting: We respect the choices our residents make. We respect their cultures, their histories, their religious beliefs or their atheism, their politics, their sexual orientation, and their visions for the future.
Flexible: Your best laid plans will intersect with the busy, complicated lives of 8 adults and all their children. 104 degree fevers, babies born early, job schedules, weird rashes, Medi-cal appointments, and family emergencies can change your day in no time.
Willingness to embrace and address each days challenges be they a sick child, a discouraged resident, a troublesome computer, or a dead car battery. We are looking for a director who can solve problems and who addresses needs as they arise, rather than one who simply reports problems.
Requirements
Experience as a teacher, social worker, counselor, or youth professional or intern working with youth, in particular youth coping with trauma such as homeless youth and teen parents. We place a high value on applicants with experience in serving homeless youth.
Prefer education in Social Work, Human Development, Community Development, Sociology, Psychology, Education, Womens Studies, Child Development or other related field of study
Prefer experience and/or training using a Youth Development model that puts youth in charge of decision making and governing of their community. Knowledge of Harm Reduction, Trauma Informed Care and Motivational Interviewing are all assets.
Additional abilities required by the position
Ability to lift at least 50 pounds
Ability to determine own physical limits so that injury does not result when leading service projects, recreation, or program activities.
Ability to walk up and down stairs or a request for an accommodation
Ability to safely transport self and others in agency vehicles. Must have a clean driving record that will ensure our agency insurance can cover staff to transport.
Ability to manage stress of multi-tasking, leading youth, and advocating for youth
Ability to establish healthy boundaries and maintain personal wellness while shepherding clients through past and current experiences of trauma.
Shift: Monday to Friday, 8:30 to 4:30 most days
Compensation: $15- 17/hr DOE
As this is a temporary position at the time of hiring, it does not include medical, dental, vision, or life insurance benefits. It does include prorated accrual of vacation time after the first 60 days. Should funding be secured to extend the position, an updated employment offer including benefits will be extended.
TO APPLY: Please send resume and cover letter to email on this listing. We will contact applicants we hope to interview by March 6th.
Equal Employment Opportunities Statement: It is the continuing policy of Waking the Village to afford equal opportunities for all qualified persons, regardless of their race, creed, color, age, sex, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, religion, disability, medical condition, marital status, or veteran status. No person shall be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination in any program, activity or facility of Waking the Village on the basis of these factors.
Waking the Village Programs
Tubman House: Opened in January 2003, Tubman House is a community for homeless, parenting youth and their children. Residents are between 18 and 21 years old and can join Tubman House for up to 18 months. Our purpose is two-fold. We meet the immediate needs of homeless youth and children for shelter, meals, consistent adult guidance, and health care. At the same time, we teach life, leadership and interpersonal skills, provide career counseling and college support, and support residents in pursuing growth as parents, students, citizens, and self-sufficient adults. Tubman is known for providing intensive, highly individualized support in tackling debt, legal issues, addiction, mental wellness, prenatal needs, parenting support, housing needs, citizenship issues, educational goals, and assembling all the pieces to build a joyful and meaningful life. We will not allow our residents to accept a second class, compromised future. Each resident begins the Tubman stay defining his or her vision of life 5 years from now. From there, s/he defines goals and steps that will bring this vision into reality. These goals address both the practical (housing, income, health care) and the need for healing and wholeness. Goals range from earning college degrees to securing apartments to spending quality time with their children to joining a basketball team to creating art. As staff, we help each resident believe in a meaningful future and help each navigate and celebrate the challenges, fears, setbacks, and milestones of pursuing dreams. Unlike many programs serving pregnant and parenting populations, Tubman House is not religiously affiliated. We support each person's right to choose and determine the path his or her life takes.
Audre's Emporium of New Tomorrows: Audre's Emporium offers two shared housing sites for LGBTQ+ youth and young adults that are overcoming homelessness and are survivors of crime. Sites serves both single youth and young families. Both sites follow the Tubman model of intensive services and community building.
The Doorway: The Doorway is a rapid rehousing program run in partnership with Wind Youth Services. The Doorway offers up to two years of housing and support in 12 apartments for homeless youth that are pregnant and parenting. Based on the Tubman model, the Doorway offers intensive coaching and program engagement in a more independent setting. The Doorway is funded by HUD and has a strong emphasis on connecting clients to employment and career.
P3: The P3 Pilot provides Tubman and Audre's graduates with a Housing Choice Voucher so that they can move into an apartment with rent subsidies in place that allow youth to complete degrees or career trainings and launch careers before taking on the demands of full rent. P3 coaches meet regularly with our graduates to ensure ongoing progress.
The Creation District: Launched in January 2016, the Creation District is an incubator and a safe haven for creation, discovery, activism, daring, and dream-making for Sacramento's youth and young adults. Based out of the new Fruitridge Community Collaborative, the Creation District offers a continuum of creative workshops that bring together young people from all different walks of life to tackle the work of building a brighter and braver future. Doorway and Tubman clients will frequently attend workshops at the Creation District.
Art Beast Children's Studio: Launched in 2009, Art Beast is a drop in arts space for children 0 to 7. Art Beast generates funding for Tubman while providing job opportunities for Tubman and Doorway residents, and connecting them to the broader community of families.
Art Beast Child Development Center: Launched in 2017, the center is a licensed center serving infants, toddlers, preschoolers, and elementary age students. The children in our housing programs attend the center along with children from the general public. The center embraces a play based model of learning that centers on healthy community and child directed exploration.
