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Thursday, 27 January 2011 07:59 |
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F.E.G.S Health and Human Services has recently been awarded three grants supporting its work with disconnected youth at F•E•G•S’s Bronx Youth Center, located in the South Bronx. Based on F•E•G•S’s articulated model for working with young people, called CareerFirsts®, F•E•G•S provides a range of education, career and supportive services for disconnected youth at the Center, including specialized services for youth aging out of foster care through the F•E•G•S Academy program.
Robin Hood has provided a one-year $400,000 grant in support of F•E•G•S’s work to help disconnected youth obtain G.E.D.s, raise their literacy levels, obtain jobs, go to college and stay in college and/or retain their employment. Notably, this grant includes dedicated funding to enable F•E•G•S to provide basic education services to youth with very low literacy levels, defined as reading levels between second and sixth grade. There are very few government resources available to meet the needs of the thousands of youth in the city with low-literacy and numeracy levels. Research shows that intervening with this group of youth can produce positive long-term labor market effects.
The Tiger Foundation and the Child Welfare Fund have each made $100,000 grants to F•E•G•S specifically in support of the Academy program. These grants will support services for foster youth and data tracking/program evaluation activities. The Academy was developed in partnership with the New York City Administration for Children’s Services and several private foster care agencies. The Academy has served more than 400 foster youth since the program began in 2007, helping many youth make academic progress, develop career readiness skills, obtain jobs and transition to productive adulthood. F.E.G.S’s goal is to take the program to scale in New York City so that all youth in need of these services can benefit. More information on the program and the outcomes achieved to date can be found at: www.fegs.org/academy.
Other foundation funders of F•E•G•S’s Bronx Youth Center and the Academy include the Andrus Family Fund, Annie E. Casey Foundation, J.P. Morgan Chase Foundation, Joseph Leroy and Ann C. Warner Fund, New Yorkers for Children, Stella and Charles Guttman Foundation.
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