YBG has 21 full time staff and several part timers. They share two offices and I think we counted maybe 12 desks between the two offices. Both offices are not large. They are not located in neighborhoods that convey status because they want to be where their families are -- and many of them have come from lower middle class or poor families.
The equipment is not necessarily state of the art and the offices, while clean, are overcrowded and cluttered. And the walls are decorated with newspaper articles and ... caricatures of each staff and board member.
When you invest in people your families have the support they need. This staff of 21 places about 50 placements a year. If you would compare that to other agencies who are making that many placements with half or less staff, it seems less than impressive. However, the kinds of kids that are being placed are nothing like the placements in other agencies. Hardly ever is their a sibling group placement, so they actually are making about 50 placements instead of 20 placements of 2 or 3 kids at a time. And the kids that are being placed are all over 10 and most of them are coming from residential treatment facilities or group homes. These are TOUGH kids... the kinds of kids that nobody else thinks can be placed. The ones often thought of as “unadoptable.”
So investing in people makes sense. There are staff members who know the kids very well and who do therapy with them to prepare them for adoption. There are staff members who homestudy families, obviously, and almost everyone is involved in one way or another in making the placements last.
And the investment is not in the same kinds of people that most agencies recruit. A few do have advanced social work degrees, but many do not even have a college education. The criteria, from my observation, appears to be that they need to have parented a teen from the foster care system at one point or another, and they have to be fun!
The equipment is not necessarily state of the art and the offices, while clean, are overcrowded and cluttered. And the walls are decorated with newspaper articles and ... caricatures of each staff and board member.
When you invest in people your families have the support they need. This staff of 21 places about 50 placements a year. If you would compare that to other agencies who are making that many placements with half or less staff, it seems less than impressive. However, the kinds of kids that are being placed are nothing like the placements in other agencies. Hardly ever is their a sibling group placement, so they actually are making about 50 placements instead of 20 placements of 2 or 3 kids at a time. And the kids that are being placed are all over 10 and most of them are coming from residential treatment facilities or group homes. These are TOUGH kids... the kinds of kids that nobody else thinks can be placed. The ones often thought of as “unadoptable.”
So investing in people makes sense. There are staff members who know the kids very well and who do therapy with them to prepare them for adoption. There are staff members who homestudy families, obviously, and almost everyone is involved in one way or another in making the placements last.
And the investment is not in the same kinds of people that most agencies recruit. A few do have advanced social work degrees, but many do not even have a college education. The criteria, from my observation, appears to be that they need to have parented a teen from the foster care system at one point or another, and they have to be fun!
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