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Vision Youth Reaches Out to Young People in Need
World Vision battles poverty by going after its root causes. For more than 50 years, the Christian humanitarian organization has been serving children and families in struggling communities throughout the world. Here in the Twin Cities,World Vision is using its experience to come along-side churches and faith-based organizations already hard at work to lift their neighbors out of poverty.
Vision Youth is one joint response to poverty in the Twin Cities. The youth-focused initiative, which builds relationships and understanding between young people and their communities was launched in summer 2002.
At the core of Vision Youth are Youth Outreach Workers (YOWs), compassionate adults from the community who know the challenges and issues young people face, and who are committed to providing a caring, stable influence in their lives. YOWs recruit and arrange training for volunteers who are willing to help carry the burden for these high-risk youth. And most iimportantly, they provide partner churches with a staff member who can devote his or her energies full time to youth outreach, a luxury few inner-city churches can afford. Vision Youth helps to pay YOW salaries and benefits for the first five years, (on a descending scale) while providing training to partner churches on how to financially support the program and make it a sustainable, long-term agent of change.
Youth Outreach Workers are based in local churches that often are the only stable institutions in depressed neighborhoods.Vision Youth not only trains these outreach workers, but also offers technical assistance to pastors and congregations that helps enhance and broaden their involvement with neighborhood families in need.
Education—The Firm Foundation
When it’s fully implemented,Vision Youth will begin its journey with children when they are young by matching struggling elementary school students with trained tutors and mentors from partner churches and community organizations. These tutors will provide not only academic help, but also emotional nurture and sometimes the only consistent, supportive adult influence in these youngsters’ hard lives.
As young people mature, their needs change, and YOWs take their ministry to parks, schools, juvenile detention halls, and the streets––wherever troubled youth are found. They provide strong role models and the influence of a caring adult who can help young people succeed in school and set goals for the future. They help youth find resources to follow through on those goals, whether it’s through mentoring, or a referral to an academic specialist, drug-treatment program, counseling, or job training.
The ultimate goal is to help young people grow into healthy, successful adults, and remain in their communities to share with others the hope and promise they have received.
How You Can Help
Volunteers and YOWs provide young people with guidance and a caring relationship, which often is lacking in their lives, and the most important gift—hope.
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| Vision Youth Help provide tutoring, life skills training, and a caring relationship to high-risk youth. | | ||
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| The Storehouse Provide school supplies, clothes, toys, household goods and building supplies for strengthening families,schools and neighborhoods. | | ||
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| Tools for Transformation Help provide the organizational, planning and leadership tools to transform a neighborhood. | | ||
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Read about what is happening in Vision Youth programs around the country by clicking on the location name below. |
