Assisting Youth To Help Themselves

The Youth Rescue Fund was created by the Board of Directors of LA Youth Supportive Services, Inc. because it felt, after careful reflection, that the Youth Rescue Fund name more accurately represented the current scope of its mission.

LA Youth Supportive Services, Inc.(LAYSS) was formed in April of 1995 by Jason Wittman, MPS to provide for the well being of high risk youth in Los Angeles. With very little resources, both financial and personnel, LAYSS has a record of success that exceeds most agencies many times its size. They have moved many kids off the streets and on to more successful lives and have assisted even more to stay at home, in school and in jobs.

The reason for this success is the techniques that Jason has developed to both reach normally unreachable youth and to work effectively with them. Called Counseling On Demand (COD), it entails having masters level mental health professionals do their own outreach in areas where kids gather. After establishing rapport and gaining their trust, they are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, either in person or by phone, to respond to the counseling and social services needs of their young clients. The COD counseling approach has three parts: teaching youth how to change their negative behaviors; teaching effective ways to increase their self-confidence, self -esteem and self-love; and teaching social, relationship, work, and even, domestic life-skills that are necessary to support a healthy, responsible lifestyle.

The Board of Directors has recognized that the widespread use of Counseling On Demand would greatly increase the effectiveness of youth work, everywhere. They, therefore, expanded the organizations mission from the purely local counseling effort to one that recognized the need for teaching these techniques to other mental health professionals and agencies and to assist agencies to start their own Counseling On Demand programs.

The funding priorities of The Youth Rescue Fund are to first insure that the LAYSS counseling program in Los Angeles is fully funded so that it can effectively minister to the needs of all its clients and can serve as a model of what can be accomplished using the COD approach and to serve as an on-the-job training site for the training program. Second to fund its on-going training program that teaches professionals and agencies the COD approach and allows them to get first hand experience by observing and working with the Hollywood program staff. And third, as funds become available, to assist other agencies to start their own Counseling On Demand programs.

The Winter 1998/99 Youth Rescue Fund Newsletter

Please go to the L.A. Youth Supportive Services web site for more about our operating agency.

All that you have read about our accomplishments has only been possible because of the gererosity of our contributors who, in the absence of any governmental support, have kept us going and growing for the last five years. We hold our overhead to a bare minimum so that most of your contribution will go into direct services to our youth. Your generous support will allow us to finally reach all our areas' youth that are so desperately in need of our services.