ST. VINCENT’S SERVICES – EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Founded in 1869 as a refuge for homeless Brooklyn newsboys, today St. Vincent’s Services (SVS) is a full-service agency providing comprehensive services and support to young people and their foster, birth, and adoptive families in an atmosphere of inclusiveness and caring. Our mission to serve needy children and their families with services which support, supplement, or substitute for the healing, nurturing, and developing relationships ideally found in family life remains unchanged, even as our objectives and programs have grown to meet the increasingly complex needs of children and families in our city.
SVS is currently serving approximately 1,000 of the city’s most vulnerable children each year, including over 750 in foster family homes, 90 in our Positive Caring Services (PCS) program (including children with HIV/AIDS and other medically fragile conditions), and 100 in our Youth Residential Services; in addition, we served 54 adults with developmental disabilities in five residences. Our outpatient Mental Health Clinic hosted 21,000 visits per year, comprised of both SVS children and families as well as clients from the surrounding community. Our Family Foster Care and Adoptive Services—offers adoption and post-adoptive services as well as intensive case management and support services for our young people and their foster and birth families. We endeavor to find permanent homes for our youth, placing approximately 100 children in permanent adoptive homes each year.
In 2000 SVS launched our innovative Specialized Preventive Services (SPS) initiative, a community-based program that provides a host of services to families and children in order to prevent foster care placement when possible. SPS services are geared towards families with a child at risk, in particular those who have a special medical condition and/or a developmental disability.
-Our Youth Residential Services (YRS) YRS includes an expanded permanency planning unit to secure family connections for older adolescents who are aging out of care and to provide extended after-care services to ensure that our young people have access to housing, educational opportunities, and/or employment when they leave our care. In an effort to expand the capacity of our Youth Residential Services, in 2008 SVS opened its first Children’s Community Residence in Springfield Gardens, Queens, serving boys and girls between the ages of 13-18 who present with behavioral and/or emotional needs that prevent them from residing in a family setting. This new model is a beneficial temporary step between the institutional environment of a hospital and the young peoples’ own homes, to which they will ultimately return. In January 2010 we launched the SMART Girls initiative. The implementation of the SMART Girls program—which includes a Book Club, “College Bound” mentoring, a volunteerism component, Creative Self Expression, and “rap session” style group discussion—is providing the young women of SVS Group Homes with a positive intervention that will address the emotional and personal traumas they experienced prior to their placement in the foster care system. SMART Girls is designed to promote increased safety, stability and self-esteem among our female Group Home residents, empowering them to lead lives free of violence and abuse and to work toward economic self sufficiency.
-Our Behavioral Health Services incorporate outpatient mental health clinics that provide comprehensive services to both SVS clients and the general public. SVS’s Outpatient Chemical Dependence Treatment Program (OPC) is a comprehensive program designed to help clients stop using mood-altering substances, strengthen their family and social relationships, develop a sober support network in their communities, upgrade their educational and vocational skills, and ultimately become self-reliant. SVS’s community-based Clinic Plus Program provides preventive mental health services to New York City children who are at risk of developing serious mental illnesses.
-Our Positive Caring Services (PCS) program provides care and support for medically fragile infants and children facing a range of complex conditions, including HIV/AIDS, cerebral palsy, spina bifida, brittle bone syndrome, and autism. PCS offers targeted assistance to the families of medically fragile children in order to increase their ability to cope with the conditions affecting the children in their care. St. Vincent’s Medical Treatment Center operates a full service pediatric and adolescent clinic with specialties in neurology and pediatric and infectious diseases, providing comprehensive medical care to children and adolescents. Our Developmentally Disabled Services comprise five community residences in Brooklyn where 54 profoundly disabled adults, ages 20 through 70+, live in supportive “family style” housing. SVS provides the residents of these facilities with comfortable living conditions, high-quality medical care, and physical therapy. Weekly life skills workshops provide residents with skills and support that enable them to care for themselves to the best of their individual abilities, while recreational and cultural outings on weekends allow residents to take part in enjoyable activities with their peers.
-Through our signature American Dream Program (ADP) promising young collegians are provided with tuition assistance, tutoring, and counseling, as well as room and board, health insurance, and incidental living expenses through graduation—even past the age of 21 when all government support ceases. The ADP is at the forefront of our efforts to ensure that when our children leave us, they do so with marketable skills, which will allow them to support themselves for the rest of their lives. In fall 2009 we launched the Pathways to the American Dream Program (PAD), an exciting new effort designed to extend the extraordinary educational support provided to our college students through the ADP to a younger population of high school-aged foster youth. Through the PAD we will provide enrichment and remediation activities to a group of 9th-11th graders who are attending New York City public schools, with the goal of improving their educational outcomes, ensuring an “on time” high school graduation, and preparing these young people to enter the college or postsecondary school of their choosing.
