Youth Ambassadors (YA) is an educational employment program designed to empower underserved teenage youth with important life skills, soft job skills, creative expression and adult mentors—helping them become future community leaders willing and able to work for positive change.

YA primarily serves youth between the ages of 14-18 who live within areas of Jackson County experiencing elevated rates of poverty and crime. Our agency provides trauma-informed programming through social emotional learning, trauma healing, and anti-violence programming.

Preventing Teen Violence

Youth Ambassadors aims to prevent teen violence through specialized training courses in health and wellness, youth entrepreneurship, community development, life and job skills, and creative expression. Training courses occur in conjunction with an evidence-based social emotional learning curriculum, along with a specific focus on skills attainment and violence prevention.

Ambassadors who have mastered the curriculum are promoted to participate in community impact projects that include maintaining community gardens, leadership on community health projects such as the Teen Peace Summit, public art murals, and neighborhood clean-ups.

Primary Objectives

Youth Ambassadors has two primary objectives that establish the framework for all services: 1) youth strengthen their cognitive coping and processing skills that promote social and emotional health and wellbeing; 2) youth become better prepared for future employment and educational opportunities through the development of skills that increase overall job readiness.

Core work assignments, to ensure these objectives are met include expressive art and writing projects: violence prevention workshops (with topics such as teen dating violence, restorative justice, conflict resolution and community violence):  building employment portfolios, participating in mock job interviews with career professionals: and leading public conversations on major issues impacting our communities.

Locations

Click on the window icon (upper right corner) of the map below to expand. List of all program locations is included with expanded view of map. Locations are also listed on this page below the map.