Empowering Youth Advocates in Arizona DCS to Assist Young People Experiencing Trauma
October 2024
From September 16 to 18, Kaylene Quinones, LMSW, Director of Therapeutic & Peer-Led Services and Vincent Madera, Division Director, CV Training Institute and Permanency (CVTI)—the driving forces behind our BraveLife Intervention (BLI) training —headed to Phoenix to lead a three-day training program to the Arizona Department of Child Safety.
Kaylene’s and Vincent’s goal? To help the Arizona Department of Child Safety (DCS) revamp its youth advocacy program and adopt a process which is consistent with what The Children’s Village adopted with BLI.
BLI is a youth-centered and strength-based training that uses peer navigators to assist young people in reaching their goals, interacting with professionals, and eventually finding resources independently. Young people in programs that use this training are 14 to 21 years old and have experienced the foster care or juvenile justice systems.
“It’s so crucial to have young people at the table with lived experience who can understand what [foster care] is and what they need,” said Kaylene, who created BLI. Vincent elaborated, “It’s interesting how we love to say in human services ‘we serve families and youth.’ If you flip it in our personal lives, when we talk about acts of service, we choose the people who serve us. We hire them; we interview them. We fire them if they’re not doing well. Youth do not do that in child welfare. So, we really need to get to a real foundation of service where they lead us in what that service looks like. That’s extremely important.”
BLI assists organizations in building programs with effective, youth-focused foundations. Vincent noted that there are different structures needed for paid staff versus young people. Though peer navigators have lived experiences in the foster care system, they also represent a system that traumatized them in the eyes of young people they support. Meanwhile, when a young person enters foster care, most of the adults in their life are paid professionals, which includes the peer navigator. “How do you navigate that?” asked Vincent. This question served as the core of Kaylene’s and Vincent’s training sessions in Arizona.
Arizona DCS plans to use the BLI Peer Navigator training to recruit and hire Peer Navigators to support young people while considering the tools and ethics needed to work in the child welfare field successfully. This includes establishing boundaries with co-workers versus young people, working with a team of parents and peer navigators effectively, code-switching when speaking with people of different generations, and supervising young people while maintaining a good work-life balance. During the training sessions, staff at Arizona DCS role-played scenarios to develop these skills.
Kaylene and Vincent plan to offer continued support to Arizona DCS, conducting ten monthly consultation calls and an additional two-day refresher training later this year. The group will discuss actual case scenarios in which Arizona DCS can apply BLI effectively.
Arizona DCS is the latest to seek guidance from CV’s Brave Life team to develop advocacy programs for young people.
Three agencies in New Jersey—Children’s Aid and Family Services, Oaks Integrated Care, Inc., and The Children’s Home Society of New Jersey—already used BLI to build youth-focused programs with a total of 15 peer navigators, five per agency.
Kaylene and Vincent look forward to training more organizations across the country through BLI programs that use peer navigators to guide young people. For more information on training, please contact Kaylene at kquinones@childrensvillage.org or Vincent at vmadera@childrensvillge.org
