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The Request:
We respectfully request a grant of $25,000 with a goal of $50,000, which would be used to increase staffing on the PYD Transformation team to scale PYD to more locations throughout San Diego County. This will allow us to have a more immediate impact on the mental health crisis among not only the children and youth we serve, but also through sharing our findings and partnering with a wider network of community-based providers and child-serving organizations. With this investment, we can reach at least 50 additional staff members who serve approximately 100 additional children over the next year. Our overarching goal is to reach all team members who work with children in order to impact the nearly 100,000 children served across the YMCA each year.
The Vision and Need:
Positive Youth Development (PYD) is a program the YMCA that engages young people through methods that promote resilience and improve mental wellness and social-emotional skills. The YMCA believes this moment calls upon us to radically reimagine how our youth are engaged in their environment.
We are currently facing unprecedented challenges in the mental health of America's youth stemming from the recent pandemic and exacerbated by systemic barriers and inequities. Increases in demand for pediatric inpatient mental health services are an exceptionally concerning indicator, with children's hospitals reporting a 42% increase in cases of self-injury and suicide in 2021 when compared to 2019.
Each year the YMCA serves nearly 100,000 children and youth, with many living in systemically under-resourced areas with limited access to mental health care. Programs such as sports, out-of-school programs, and camp deeply impact children's positive development and social-emotional learning, which has been demonstrated to translate into effective coping mechanisms later in life.
The YMCA is implementing a pilot PYD model across five of our branches and developing a PYD toolkit that will be made available nationally to other youth-serving organizations.. With the ultimate goal of measuring expected social-emotional gains among youth, the pilot is training staff to embed six core PYD practices into their youth-serving work while measuring both staff fidelity to the model and youth experiences of staff.
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