Florence Crittenton News — August, 2009
Newsletter Archives
In this issue:
- Profile: Judy Jacobs
- Touchpoints: Off & Running
- Budget Cuts & The Poor
Judy Jacobs : Showing Teens Their Power
Judy Jacobs smiles and her eyes light up when she talks about the youth she mentors. “It’s so inspiring to work with them,” she says. “So many of them have overcome serious challenges in making the transition from troubled teen to responsible adult. I love supporting them to make that transition.”
That’s not surprising. The Crittenton Teens Coordinator has devoted her entire career to working with vulnerable people in transition.
Jacobs earned a degree in counseling psychology from the University of San Francisco in 1982. Within a year or so of graduating, the emerging AIDS crisis catalyzed something deep inside her. “My heart told me that I needed to work with the dying,” she says. “I needed to give grief a voice.”
For three years, she worked at an AIDS hospice as a grief counselor and volunteer coordinator, tending to the dying and their families. She was also put in charge of emotional support for the International AIDS Memorial Quilt, and regularly engaged in fundraising for the project.
After more than 10 years of working in the field of end-of-life care, Jacobs shifted her focus to caring for people during a radically different kind of transition. She became a postpartum doula, working with newborn babies and their mothers in the home. “The most important thing about being a doula,” Jacobs says, “was helping the mother connect with her own wisdom in taking care of her child. My job was to empower the mother and to support the bonding process with her child.”
Next, Jacobs began working with violence-traumatized children in Bayview-Hunter’s Point. The children, ages 3 to 7, needed to move on with their lives but couldn’t do so without addressing feelings of loss and integrating the trauma. So, Jacobs facilitated groups, sometimes using art therapy to encourage them to talk about horrors they’d witnessed but couldn’t discuss with their parents. “I actually saw healing happen in front of me as the children opened up about their experiences,” she says.
Jacobs' work with young children from low-income communities set the stage for her next job – working with at-risk teens. That new phase lead her to Florence Crittenton Services.
Since 2004, she has worked as the Crittenton Teens Coordinator. The Crittenton Teens Career and College Planning class takes place at Ida B. Wells High School in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley. The school is an alternative “school of last resort” providing at-risk students with smaller classes and a supportive family-like learning environment.
Crittenton Teens helps students with academics and GPA improvement, along with goal-setting and professional development. In addition to classroom skills, the program teaches personal health; sexuality and delayed pregnancy/fatherhood; job skills; and empowers teens to make wise choices. The program coaches teens on how to create positive life patterns and to take charge of their lives.
Jacobs says her main goal is to inspire teens to stay in school and get their diplomas. Many have faced serious challenges with drugs, gangs, absent parents, low self-esteem, and violence. As a result, students are often hard to reach when they enter the program.
"We show them respect and care,” Jacobs says. “It may be the only time that they get it.”
To get students involved, the program curriculum asks each student to answer questions posed on a “personal mandala.” The questions are: Who are you? What’s your passion? What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses?
"“I ask them to do something many have never done before,” Jacobs says: “reflect about their lives.”
Yvonne, a graduate of the program, says that she learned “there are more important goals in life, like getting a job and finishing high school.”
The healthy sexuality and pregnancy prevention component of Crittenton Teens teaches teens about making healthy choices. “We explain to them that they are responsible and accountable for their decisions,” Jacobs says.
The message is getting across. A recent study showed that teens participating in Crittenton Teens at Ida B. Wells High School were more knowledgeable about healthy sexuality issues than teens at other schools surveyed throughout the city.
Ultimately, the greatest satisfaction Jacobs gets is seeing the way so many of the teens mature and open up during the course of the program.
“Watching teens mature is a phenomenal experience,” she says. “You see it in the way that they respect you when before they may have been disdainful; in opening up to you when before they were shut down. You begin to sense an inner confidence in them. I know I’ve gotten through to them when I see a little twinkle in their eye as they begin to understand that they have their own power.”
Touchpoints: Off & Running
On June 3, 4, and 5, Florence Crittenton Services staff performed the first Brazelton Touchpoints training in San Francisco at Parent University. Participants in the training were nine staff members at the Edgewood Center, FCS’ collaborator at Parent University. As the only Touchpoints Team in The City, FCS is taking the lead on training child care providers with this groundbreaking approach to child care.
Developed by pioneering pediatrician T. B. Brazelton, Touchpoints is a way of understanding family development and shaping it in a healthy direction. This approach empowers parents to discover their effectiveness as parents, guiding them through their children's predictable crises (“touchpoints”) to support their self-esteem and readiness to take on the world.
The June training educated participants in both developmental and relational aspects of the Brazelton approach. The developmental training consists of recognizing the stages in a child’s progress from newborn to three years of age. Awareness of a child’s developmental stages gives caregivers a context in which to apply the relational training. The relational training consists of using the baby’s body language to gather important insights that can help both parents and providers support the child’s healthy development.
Most importantly, the Touchpoints approach yields results. Research gathered at urban early care centers demonstrated significant benefits for families who received care from Touchpoint-trained providers when compared to those who didn’t:
- Families receiving Touchpoints-trained care reported more stable stress levels than other families
- Families receiving Touchpoints-trained care reported better relationships than other families
FCS’ Touchpoints team will be responsible for training 250 child care professionals in the coming year. The training reviews the theory of the Touchpoints approach, then lets participants put that theory into practice through exercises which help them integrate what they’ve learned.
Florence Crittenton Services is excited to be the first Brazelton trainer in San Francisco. We look forward to teaching Touchpoints principles in the coming year and to helping support the healthy development and well-being of San Francisco’s neediest families.
Budget Cuts: Making Poor People Shoulder the Load
Not long ago, Amanda Garcia’s life was making progress because of CalWorks. The state-run welfare- to-work program helped her return to college after the birth of her child. Now, recent budget cuts threaten to eliminate Amanda’s childcare assistance and derail her goals of getting a college degree and starting a career in law enforcement.
For hundreds of thousands of struggling low-income parents like Amanda – including the 1.4 million people in the CalWorks program -- California’s budget crunch is about to hit home.
In 2008, Garcia was fired from her job because of complications during her pregnancy. After her baby was born, she fled her abusive boyfriend. With no income and a baby to care for, her future seemed bleak. Then, she “enrolled in CalWorks, and within two months was back in college full time.”*
Then, the budget crisis began.
Proposed budget cuts would eliminate cash assistance for 250,000 children throughout the state, thousands of whom live in the Bay Area. Worse, cuts to low-income assistance lead to a downward economic spiral. Without childcare and education, poor people will be unable to carve out the time needed to learn the skills that will take them off the welfare rolls.
This year’s budget “is definitely regressive,” says Lydia Missaelides, executive director of the California Association of Adult Daycare Services in Sacramento. It’s “penny-wise and pound foolish,” adds Michael Herald, a lobbyist for the Western Center on Law & Poverty, because the cuts will ultimately cost the state more money in social services.
Please support childcare for San Francisco’s most vulnerable families by making a donation today.
*Steve Gorman, Reuters, 7/15/09.
