Youth Employment Services (YES! Program)

The program provides foster youth in our care with employment coaching, workforce readiness, internships, summer employment, full-time employment, and educational support. Through these services, our dedicated coaches and mentors empower our youth to build promising futures free from homelessness, substance abuse, incarceration, and financial dependency.

The YES! Program is a strength-based approach to equip youth with the skills necessary to succeed in today’s competitive job market. The 8 week program for young people in or formerly-in foster care includes a workshop on how to build your own business so that participants can exercise their entrepreneurial spirits and better understand how they can contribute to the success of a business.

Each young person is matched with a career development coach who supports them before, during, and after they complete our formal program. This support continues for up to 12 months following completion of the YES! curriculum and is a critical component in increasing job retention.

The Journey Program

The Journey Program works along side the case planning team to ensure that our young people have a better and brighter future. The goal is to ensure that our young people receive the resources that are needed to help them on their journey. To achieve this, we provide young people with the long-term coaching, social/emotional, academic, and career development supports they need.

We help them develop relational skills and a strong network of positive peer and adult supports. The program prepares them for high school, graduation, and encourages them to persist in post-secondary settings. It aims to build progressive career development experiences in line with their interests and academic/vocational plans that will help them navigate onto a living wage career pathway. It also sets out to help them access and to maintain affordable housing (for young people who age out of foster care), gain independent living skills and build a network of positive adult and peer supports.

Care Management Program

The goal of our Care Management Program is to make sure eligible children get the care and services they need. In New York State, many people who get their health benefits through the Medicaid Program are generally healthy. However, others may have chronic health problems and have a hard time finding the right providers and services. Catholic Guardian Service’s Care Management Program was created with these children in mind.

Once a child is enrolled in Catholic Guardian Service’s Care Management Program, he or she will have a Care Manager assigned to him or her who will assist in making sure that your child gets the right care and services from doctors and providers that you choose for physical, behavioral, and/or mental health services. The Care Manager will work with you and your child to set up an individualized plan of care to make sure that your child benefits from all of the services that he or she needs.

For more information on the Care Management Program, call: 718-828-0300, ext 271, or email: CMPinquiries@catholicguardian.org

Outpatient Mental Health Clinic

The CGS Family Counseling and Wellness Center is Catholic Guardian Service’s mental health clinic located in the Bronx. They partner with children and families to treat depression, anxiety, behavioral issues at home or school, sadness, and other concerns by providing a comprehensive array of psychological and psychiatric services. Services offered include Supportive Family Services, Individual, Family & Group Psychotherapy, Psychiatric & Psychological Assessments, Medication & Health Management.

For more information about the CGS Family Counseling & Wellness Center, visit their website here

Residential Treatment Services

Catholic Guardian Services’ Congregate Care Program is contracted by the New York City Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) and licensed by the New York State Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS). The framework of Catholic Guardian Services Congregate Care Program is behavior modification, whereby residents follow daily routines and are positively rewarded for progress toward the attainment of treatment goals.

We provide adolescents between the ages of 13 and 20 years of age with safe, nurturing, and therapeutic environments, while addressing their unique education, social, behavioral, developmental, medical and emotional needs. The Congregate Care Program’s group home residences include a female hard-to-place group home, a male hard-to-place group home, and a maternity mother child blended group home.

The program helps adolescents and their families establish improved relationships. For adolescents returning home, we help to establish the long-term community supports needed for a successful life upon discharge. For older youths leaving care, we help to provide them with improved skills, connections to family, and the economic, emotional, and social supports they need for a successful transition to adulthood.

Wendy’s Wonderful Kids (WWK)

The mission of the Wendy’s Wonderful Kids (WWK) program is to dramatically increase the number of adoptions of children waiting in North America’s foster care system. The vision of the program is that every child will have permanent and loving family. We believe that “every child is adoptable”.

Wendy’s Wonderful Kids works with children who are in the custody of the New York City Commissioner of Social Services and who have no identified legal permanency resource. Due to circumstances not of their own doing, these children have been placed in foster care with the likelihood of exiting foster care without a permanent, loving family.

Children served by the Wendy’s Wonderful Kids program are 1.5 times more likely to be adopted, older children are 3 times more likely to get adopted, children with specific mental health needs are 3 times more likely to be adopted and older youth opposed to adoption were more likely to consider adoption when working with a WWK recruiter.

“There are no unwanted kids, just unfound families”. Visit the website for Wendy’s Wonderful Kids here.

Training

CGS’ Training Department offers support groups and training for foster parents to assist them in their journey caring for vulnerable children.
Community members are welcome to join in on several of the trainings (if highlighted on the calendar as being open to the community) on a variety of topics such as autism, ADHD, fire safety, and many more. Prospective foster parents are also strongly encouraged to attend.

See the training calendar here for a list of dates and classes currently available.

To register, please e-mail us at, training@catholicguardian.org and include your name, cellphone number and e-mail address.