How Youth Villages Finds Success Where Others Fail

On a recent afternoon, Daniel Alejandro, a case worker for the nonprofit Youth Villages, walks up a hill in Lowell, Mass., to meet three brothers who have been living on their own since their mother died from cancer last Christmas. If 18 year-old Aniel can’t take over the parental role, the brothers will be separated. Securing housing, health care, and finding appropriate schools are top priorities. The middle brother, 17-year-old Joan, who is deaf, is doing well academically. But there are challenges. The youngest, Yaniel, 15, has been skipping school and leaving the house late at night to visit his girlfriend.

In the apartment, Alejandro and Aniel review the list of things Aniel must accomplish to keep his family together: finalize the paperwork on a new apartment and get Yaniel to a dentist and a therapist. Aniel had already worked on a plan, using Collaborative Problem Solving — an approach developed by Massachusetts General Hospital — to stop Yaniel from sneaking out at night.

Alejandro “has been really helpful,” says Aniel. “I needed a lot of help learning how to navigate this situation.”

Most social service agencies would have given up on the brothers, but not Youth Villages. The group, which operates in 29 states, works with at-risk youth and strengthens families who are in some of the toughest circumstances. It prioritizes keeping families together, chiefly with services delivered to their homes — an approach backed by independent research.

Youth Villages tracks its outcomes through its own research department. Its use of data analysis to help develop its programs is one of the key reasons why its clients fare far better than young people leaving foster care. One year after being discharged from Youth Village programs, 97 percent are in school, have graduated from school, have earned a GED, or are employed, and 92 percent have had no trouble with the criminal-justice system. By comparison, one study found that 59 percent of women and nearly 82 percent of men who had been in foster care had been arrested by age 26.

Youth Villages was founded in 1986 by Patrick W. Lawler, who still leads the group today. He draws management wisdom from obsessive reading and passes books on to staff members with highlighting and scribbled notes that point to strategies he thinks Youth Villages could use. (He recently handed out the book Power Questions to his executive team.) He has recruited board members with backgrounds in law, finance, and philanthropy and experience in scaling up enterprises nationally.

Deep-pocketed philanthropists have supported the group, drawn by its use of evidence-based therapies, heavy investment in training, support, and retention of staff members, and its data-centric approach. Blue Meridian Partners, which pools philanthropic money to help poverty-focused nonprofits scale up, is one of the group’s biggest supporters. It has committed — either spent or promised — a total of $175.6 million to Youth Villages over nearly a decade. The bulk of that funding has gone to the group’s Lifeset program, which helps young people who are transitioning out of foster care, an issue government funding has largely neglected in the past.

Like Lifeset, many Youth Villages programs win strong government support, after years or even decades of patient philanthropy. While always concerned about the risks of government cuts, Youth Villages depends little on direct Medicaid support. Most of its government funding is distributed by state governments that respect the value of its programs, said Richard Shaw, its chief development officer.

Part of Youth Villages’ success lies in its ability to avoid competition, support collaboration among providers and funders, and help other organizations adopt its successful methods, says Jessica Lupo, a senior director at Blue Meridian. Over the years that Blue Meridian has supported the group, she says Youth Villages has shown “the ability to learn, innovate, and pivot.”

When it hits a stumbling block, she says, leaders think of alternate ways they can drive impact. When they hit a plateau, she says, they ask “How do we keep going up?”

Persistence and a Donor’s Challenge

Youth Villages may be a massive and highly influential operation today, but it had humble beginnings. In 1980, a judge asked Lawler to temporarily take over a small Memphis residential juvenile treatment facility that the judge planned to close. That center eventually grew into Youth Villages.

“He started out as a scrappy grassroots leader, and he didn’t build Youth Villages in some massive stride or with some massive windfall,” says William Foster, managing partner of the Bridgespan Group, the nonprofit consulting firm that has worked with Youth Villages on its strategic plans.

Smaller nonprofits might think they can’t learn anything from Youth Villages, with its $548-million annual budget and 5,000 employees. But, Foster says, its story of growth and perseverance holds lessons for all nonprofit leaders. “It’s been 100 steps of constant dedication to building an organization that delivers with increasing excellence every year.”

Youth Village’s core program has been Intercept, the one that Alejandro works for, which provides intensive in-home parenting and mental-health assistance to keep children from winding up in state custody.

At the same time, Youth Villages has excelled at starting new programs — even when donor backing is meager — to solve complex problems. In 1999 Lawler met with a Memphis-based philanthropist, Clarence Day, who asked him: “What kids aren’t you helping?” Lawler kept describing existing programs. But Day, not satisfied with the answer, kept hammering away with his question. Eventually they agreed that Youth Villages would try to help one very neglected group: foster children who were aging out of that system.

Day provided $88,000 of seed funding.

At the time, few child-welfare advocates were focused on foster children transitioning to adulthood. Subsequently, researchers have gotten a clearer picture of the damage done by the lack of support for those transitions. The National Council for Adoption says former foster children can become a costly burden to the criminal-justice system and mental health, homeless, and employment services. One study found that a fifth of former foster children who hadn’t found a family did not have a high school diploma or a GED by age 26, and only 46 percent had jobs.

More than two decades ago, funding to help these young people was hard to find. State child-welfare offices and philanthropists often shrugged the problem off. After the initial seed funding, Lawler had difficulty raising more funds and Day became disgruntled. He called Lawler and said, “I’m done with you.”

Within a week, though, Day had a change of heart. He called Lawler back and made him an offer that he hoped would bring in the support necessary to grow the program: $1.5 million over three years if Lawler got matching funds from Tennessee.

Lawler won the funding, which started a slow cascade of additional money. The persistence paid off: In 2013, Tennessee, in partnership with Youth Villages, became the first state to offer access to evidence-based services for every youth aging out of foster care.

Lifeset has now spread to 21 states, reaching 7,400 young people. It is a classic example of patient philanthropy supporting a program’s early development and government stepping in to scale the program up. Today nearly 90 percent of Lifeset’s $81-million budget comes from government sources.

Alexis, a participant in Lifeset who has been in foster care since she was 13, has beaten the odds thanks to the program. In a suburban Memphis library she met recently with Lifeset specialist Erna Sveinsdottir to review her transition to the University of Tennessee at Martin. Only 8 percent of those aging out of foster care get a postsecondary degree, one study found.

Alexis has a driver’s license, a car that her uncle gave her at graduation, and a job at T.J. Maxx, the retail store chain. She is starting in a Youth Villages Scholars program that will give her a monthly stipend, ongoing clinical support, a mentor, and a peer-to-peer network. Of her Lifeset specialist, Alexis says, “She helped me come out of my shell and actually be able to talk to people.”

Empowering Staff to Individualize Services

Youth Villages expanded to New England 20 years ago after Strategic Grant Partners, a coalition of family foundations, learned from the Massachusetts child-welfare commissioner that he thought in-home services for at-risk children would be more effective than pulling them out of their families. A search for an organization taking a family-first approach led the coalition to support Youth Villages’ first work in Massachusetts.

Matt Stone, who moved from Tennessee to Massachusetts to be the first Youth Villages employee there, applied the group’s approach of nimbly tailoring its offerings to meet the complex needs of individual families. Soon after his arrival he worked with a single mother living in government-subsidized housing who had a 15-year-old daughter already in state custody, a 14-year-old daughter, and two four-year-old twins. The younger children were at risk of being pulled from the home at any time. “From the outside,” says Stone, “this looked like a mom who didn’t care about her kids. They weren’t getting to the doctor. The house wasn’t clean. There was dog poop on the floor and no food in the fridge.”

But Stone says he and another social worker talked to the children, and discovered that the mother and children really loved each other. The family was facing difficulties, though: The mother was depressed and not taking her medications. The father of some of the children had died.

Stone and a coworker cleaned the family’s apartment. They helped the mother establish a routine, showing up at 7 a.m. to make sure the 14-year-old got on her school bus. They helped the mother repair a relationship with her sister, so the sister could provide some support.

Eventually the mother got full custody of all her children. If Youth Villages hadn’t intervened, Stone says, all the children would have been taken from the home and separated from each other. In the 18 years since the family was discharged, none of the children have come back into the child-welfare system.

“What we’ve learned as an organization,” says Stone, “is that if we can do the work right there, in the community, with the family, at that micro level, then a great many families have a great chance of success.”

In addition to case workers, Youth Villages has after-hours on-call trauma teams that families can call any time. The teams respond to urgent situations and, when needed, can send a social worker out.

Youth Villages now has a presence in five New England states. It credits evidence-based practices, often gleaned from academic research, and careful training and close supervision of its caseworkers for its success. But Stone notes that the work is hard and the young people the group works with often experience terrible events. “That takes an emotional toll on our staff,” he says, something he tries to be up front about with new hires.

Along with the organization’s emphasis on supporting and motivating staff, Foster at Bridgespan says the group also maintains a performance-oriented culture with high expectations.

Driven by Data Analysis

Alejandro, the Massachusetts-based Youth Villages case worker, serves five families at a time and sees them each three times a week. But the roughly four hours a week he and other case workers spend documenting their work is also vitally important. That documentation becomes data that can be analyzed for research, which shapes the group’s programs and elevates its success.

Youth Villages’ culture is driven by analysis of data, says Fred Wulczyn, director of the Center for State Child Welfare Data at Chapin Hall, a research and policy center at the University of Chicago. He has conducted independent research on the Intercept program and is currently consulting with the organization. The Youth Villages approach, he says, is that “If we don’t have evidence that we’re making a difference, then we have to change what we’re doing so that we do make a difference.”

Youth Villages has an unusual feature for a nonprofit: A 47-member research department. The department has roots in the mid-1990s, when Youth Village’s programs were completely residential. When the organization checked on what happened to former residents, Sarah Hurley, managing director of data science, says, it found that the ones who had stayed in the program the longest or were 18 when they left fared the worst. That finding undermined the group’s assumption that if kids stayed in the program longer they would fare better because the programs were so good.

What it actually meant, Youth Villages now knows, was that such children weren’t getting back to their families, where they have the best chance of success, and the families themselves often weren’t getting enough help. Lawler came to realize that he needed “to get out of the business of raising other people’s kids.”

When Youth Villages searches for the best ways to help its clients, it often looks for top research-backed models. In this case it began to use Multisystemic Therapy, developed at the Medical University of South Carolina, an approach that uses in-home, family-centered treatment to help young people with serious problems.

To work with the university’s researchers, Youth Villages had to carefully measure its outcomes. The group’s research department has subsequently developed systems that give daily updates on the performance of programs and staff members. In some states, the group’s programs have been the subject of randomized clinical trials that confirm the effectiveness of its key programs, Youth Villages says.

Now Hurley wants to use the group’s data-centric approach to help it go beyond measuring the past to predict the future. Youth Villages still has residential programs for children who can’t be served safely or effectively in their homes. Within those programs, Hurley believes it may be possible to predict serious incidents, such as aggressive behavior. Factors as varied as the weather or workers whose caseloads are temporarily bumped up might affect the rise of serious incidents, she says. “I’ve got a thousand questions about how we can use what we know to make our services better,” she says.

Eyes Forward

While Youth Village’s signature programs, Lifeset and Intercept, have the largest national profile, the organization continues to grow. It is expanding its capacity to serve children on its residential campuses in Memphis and at a residential psychiatric facility west of Atlanta called Inner Harbor. It has also started Memphis Allies, a program to combat gun violence.

Lawler, ever intent on helping more families, says he would like to see Youth Villages reach children in populous states it does not currently serve, such as California, Florida, Michigan, and Texas. He sees a need for more work with children with developmental disabilities and severe mental illness. “What happens if children can’t go there?” he asks, referring to one of Youth Villages’ premier residential facilities. “It ain’t pretty where they go,” he says. “They wind up in the worst places.”

Youth Villages wants to expand from serving 47,000 young people a year to 61,000 by 2030. Bridgespan’s Foster says that one of Youth Villages’ strengths is that it doesn’t draw up plans that are marketing or fundraising documents. Instead it lays out clear steps for the organization to take.

In the future, Youth Villages wants to encourage the better use of federal money already available to states to extend foster care to age 21 if states provide matching funds. That money, the organization says, could be steered to more prevention, evidence-based treatment, and improved case management.

But growth can’t come at the expense of quality, board members say. Fred Burns, the board secretary, spent much of his teenage years moving through a dozen Mississippi foster-care homes. Youth Villages helped steer him to homeless-shelter placements and group homes, and helped him stay in touch with his nine siblings.

His teenage behavior was not ideal, he says: robbing, stealing, and selling drugs in Jackson, Miss. He says he had no control over his environment then, but once Youth Villages got him to a stable place where he didn’t have to worry about things like getting something to eat, it changed his path.

He was adopted, with Youth Villages assistance, by his aunt at age 15. He went on to become the valedictorian of his high school class, and, with the help of a Youth Villages scholarship, earned a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering.

He now shares the organizations’ love of data. “I use it to paint pictures and tell stories and identify who we need to help and how we can help them,” he says. On the board, he strives to be the voice of the at-risk youth who can’t be at the table.

He knows tens of thousands of people around the country are on waiting lists of government agencies or private organizations, hoping that someone will help rebuild their family or assist an at-risk child who is hurting.

But, he says, responding to those vast and dire needs has to be balanced against being effective. “I’m not just constantly saying ‘grow grow grow’. I want to make sure that in what we’re doing now we keep having quality around it.”

Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content. See more about the Chronicle, the grant, how our foundation-supported journalism works, and our gift-acceptance policy.