Federal Resources

This blog entry from the Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Family and Youth Services Bureau, contains tips from staff of the William T. Grant Foundation on applying for local and regional funding.

Many young people who have arrests on their record may have difficulty obtaining a job or securing housing. In this blog post, a lawyer provides advice for youth-serving professionals who help their clients move on by clearing their arrest records.

This article from the National Clearinghouse on Families & Youth highlights the work of Tulane’s Drop-In Clinic, which provides free medical care to teens in New Orleans. It shares some of the best practices that have helped the clinic successfully reduce barriers and connect youth to care. 

This podcast from the National Clearinghouse on Families & Youth describes the work of a nonprofit organization that uses a tool called community mapping to help young people understand the assets and deficits that exist in their communities

This series of articles from the Department of Health and Human Services, Family and Youth Services Bureau (FYSB), National Clearinghouse on Families and Youth, articulates the FYSB’s position on implementing evidence-based practices in youth programming, provides the perspective of an FYSB grantee on implementing an evidence-based program, and discusses working with researchers to illustrate the effectiveness of programs.

This slideshow presents tips for youth-serving organizations on how they can improve the health of the at-risk youth they work with. Ideas include partnering with local farms to receive fresh vegetables and offering classes for physical and mental health.

This blog post from the National Clearinghouse on Families & Youth links to multiple resources that can help youth-serving programs understand how the Affordable Care Act (ACA) affects youth, including homeless and runaway youth. The post also provides some of the highlights from a recent webinar that discussed what youth and youth workers need to know about the ACA. 

Developed by the Department of Health and Human Services' National Clearinghouse on Families & Youth, this guide provides information for adults and teens interested in starting a youth-serving non-profit. The guide walks users through four distinct stages, each including interactive videos and helpful tools.

“Logic Models and Theory of Change” is a new, free online course from NCFY that walks users through the basics of each model while presenting examples from the field. This training can help staff working for family and youth-serving agencies make plans to establish a new program or update an existing one. 

The NCFY Library is a searchable database, curated and managed by a librarian, which contains abstracts, or summaries, of more than 20,000 publications related to FYSB’s programmatic areas of youth homelessness, adolescent pregnancy prevention, and family violence prevention and services

The Department of Health and Human Services’ National Clearinghouse on Families and Youth released this list of recommended resources on sexually transmitted diseases, including information geared specifically to teens and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning youth.

This interview features Amy Lin of the health advocacy group Young Invincibles discussing her organization’s work to encourage young people to sign up for health insurance through the Health Insurance Marketplace. Amy also discusses the challenges that young people, including those who are homeless or teen parents, face in accessing healthcare and how youth-serving professionals can help them overcome these obstacles.

The National Clearinghouse on Families and Youth spoke with Alicia Wilson-Ahlstrom, a lead author of the report, From Soft Skills to Hard Data, to learn more about how to choose the right outcome-measurement tool for a youth program.

The Department of Health and Human Services’ National Clearinghouse on Families and Youth features a Q&A with the executive director of a youth-serving group in which he discusses steps organizations can take to develop good relationships in the community.

NCFY has compiled a list of resources from federal agencies and nonprofit organizations that can help professionals guide youth and families in obtaining affordable health care through Medicaid or the Health Insurance Marketplace.

This collection of articles highlights how using creative approaches like art and other forms of self-expression can enhance work with young people, as well as steps that youth-serving organizations can take to nurture creativity among staff. 

Without other trusted adults to guide them, young men in juvenile justice facilities may turn to employees for information about sexual health, a role that these individuals may not be trained to fulfill. To answer this need,  the Washington State Department of Health, through the State Personal Responsibility Education Program, provided training to juvenile justice staff to deliver evidence-based sexual health curricula to youth.

This article from the National Clearinghouse on Families and Youth provides an overview of recent research on the factors that influence sexually transmitted (STI) infection rates among homeless youth. The article also presents the factors that influence the likelihood these youth will get tested and offers suggestions for potentially effective prevention and intervention efforts to reduce risky sexual behaviors and promote STI testing. 

This article provides insights about how social services organizations can ensure that services to young people continue to be delivered seamlessly after a longtime source of support is no longer available

This Q&A with Joan Tucker, the senior behavioral scientist and professor at Pardee RAND Graduate School in Santa Monica, California, focuses on Dr. Tucker’s work on smoking among homeless youth and her recommendations for what tailored cessation programs might look like. 

This slideshow highlights six free apps that can help youth avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections.

This slideshow features free apps that can help youth avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. It includes a brief description of each app and a link to where it can be downloaded. 

This article highlights a recent study which examined why teens talk with extended family members about sex and what they discuss. The results indicate that almost 60% of teens in the study talked with extended family members about sex, and youth who said they talked exclusively to extended family members about sex were more than twice as likely to have had sex. 

This course, from the University of Wisconsin Extension, provides a holistic approach to planning and evaluating education and outreach programs. It helps program practitioners use and apply logic models - a framework and way of thinking to help us improve our work and be accountable for results. You will learn what a logic model is and how to use one for planning, implementation, evaluation or communicating about your program.