The Youth Advocate Programs - Assignment Example

Introduction
Many of the urban, young males and females in America involve themselves in gang-related activities as a way of challenging institutions of authority. In essence, the youths between the ages of ten to eighteen are most prone to joining street gangs whose composition consists of youths from rural or suburban areas with the intention of inhibiting law enforcement and service provision by human aid agencies. However, many organizations have devised gang intervention methods that have proven relevant in changing the behavioral concepts attached to individuals attached to gangs. One of the prime programs that have proved successful is the Youth Advocate Programs whose prime goals are to ensure that it maintains the youth in the community without putting the safety of the public at risk. With this, this essay will delve into this gang intervention program by giving a summary by highlighting the key successes of the program. Additionally, this essay will also take focus on the goals, mission, and successes of the program within its relative field.

Program goals
The program goals also include the enhancement of community safety by making use of neighborhood-located advocates that help in diverting youths from negative gang culture.

Intervention strategy
Arguably, this gang intervention program is a unique approach to minimizing gang engagement for the youths. First, the program involves the assessment of the level of gang engagement and the risk factors that the youths in gangs have before engaging in the intervention process (YAP, 2013). Within the process, the program also identifies the positive attributes as compared to gang violence, which serves as an influence to adopting a positive lifestyle. Arguably, this is one of the few gang prevention programs that focus on substance abuse by engaging in the prevention of this abuse by the targeted susceptible youth population. The program also has a crisis prevention strategy in which it also engages in building functioning communities that are the contributors to functional societies.

The process of delivering service
The Youth Advocate Intervention Program serves as an individual-based tact to approaching youths in street gangs by being an al rounder to the issues that face the targeted gang-involved youth. Essentially, the program uses centralized approaches by utilizing organized teams of individuals that aid youths in gangs to adopt healthy lifestyles. Therefore, YAP targets youths that are already in gangs by using both informal and formal services to attract youths that are in gangs (YAP, 2013). These systemic approaches are vital because they help the youths in street gangs to adopt recommended alternatives to the street gang lifestyle. In essence, the objective of the program is to develop relationships that involve role models for the youths and the young individuals with how they relate with their families. This is what the program refers to as an advocate whose recruitment draws membership from the actual communities that these young individuals come from. The program has been effective as it provides constant monitoring of the youths involved in the program by influencing the youths that have benefitted from the program to be advocates to youths trapped in the street gang lifestyles. Additionally, the program also equips the youths that join in on the behavior change by developing life skills and job preparation programs to ensure that the program maintains its objectives (YAP, 2013). The affirmation over the effectiveness of the program was in 2007 through a survey conducted to ascertain the satisfaction of the program b the participants. Therefore, these approaches to behavioral health change because of their involvement of role models that ensure that the participants uphold their healthy adopted behavior.