Latin American Youth Center Inc

Housing: layc's housing department provides comprehensive programming for runaway, homeless, and unstably housed youth (rhy) across washington, dc and maryland's prince george's and montgomery counties. Specific services include street and community outreach, rhy drop-in centers for immediate and harm-reduction care, emergency housing and transitional housing placements, and intensive case management and wraparound support. In partnership with local continuums of care (coc), staff screen and assess the specific underlying causes of homelessness for each rhy and develop individual service plans to guide case management strategy. Across all services, staff help rhy to attain housing, access community resources, reunify with family (as appropriate), and build academic, job (continued on schedule o) readiness, and life skills necessary for long-term independence.

Promotor pathway: layc's promotor pathway supports our region's most vulnerable youth to successfully transition to adulthood through empowering, long-term relationships with trustworthy adult mentors. Promotores, or "guides," provide intensive, long-term, one-on-one mentoring and case management to youth. Youth often face multifaceted barriers such as homelessness, academic disconnection, unemployment, mental health or substance use challenges, and/or complex family issues.

Community wellness: prevention and intervention programs including sti, hiv, and pregnancy testing are offered in our dc site. Our dc site also offers parenting classes to young parents. Layc's long-standing cooperation with area schools allows us to place staff in partner schools to provide pregnancy/sti education. Many health and wellness programs offer a peer education and leadership component that enables youth to teach what they have learned and to organize community events.

Education & workforce investment and social enterprise: education and workforce programs including after-school and school-based academic enrichment, wrap-around services within schools, and mentoring programs as well as employment training, computer skills certification and ged preparation programs.

Social services: bilingual and culturally sensitive clinical support services with the goal of improving mental health. Programs include mental health and substance abuse therapy.