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The Resilient Young Ladies and Men Program

A  service, training and research collaboration with the Dayton Urban League.
James E. Dobbins,  Ph.D., ABPP

Since its inception in 1947, the Dayton Urban League (DUL) has provided community-based services that support young people and their families. While current statistics on violence, school problems and family dysfunction would argue that all American youth are at risk, the at risk context of African American males cannot be underestimated. This population is often castigated and maligned by the popular media and within the general sentiments of the American public. Motivating youth who face economic and social barriers is matter enough, but to also try to help them within the context of a "thrown away" mind set, presents a unique challenge for professionals who intend to work with African American youth. We also recognise that the same disregard can be seen when the lens  of analysis is turned toward youth who are poor or otherwise disenfranchized. It is these social contexts that Dayton Urban League has chosen to help ameliorate for at risk youth and their families. The Dayton Urban League includes the Male Responsibility as one of its programs becuase it provides support to youth and their parents in their recovery from the internal and external forces that pull families apart.

Youth Services and Mission

The Resilient Young Ladies and Men (RYLM) was established in 2007 as the result of a shift in the intervention approach that the DUL adopted for all its fmaily and youth programs. Essentially the shift requires that all youth intervention to be administered via a family intake process and then youth are assigned to group based on screening and assessment. Other family members may also be referred to DUL or external interventions based on screening and case management review. In the past, the RYLM services for males were provided in the Male Responsibility Program and the Self Esteem for Girls Only Program. These seperate programs had similar missions i.e., to address a cultural mandate to educate, motivate and direct young males and females who were at risk for failing to prepare themselves for upward mobility in American society. The RYLM like the MRP program focuses on youth and adult participants. It assumes that adults at home and at school and in the community hold a sacred charge of preparing children for entry inot adulthood and into the workforce.

The RYLM Program

The RYLM Program achieved the DUL mission by strengthening family resilience, and enhancing personal development, cultural awareness and fostering an ethic of community development among its participants. In general, the youth that this program benefits can be best defined as "at risk" for juvenie justice status, teen pregnancy, and academic failure due to impaired motivation, or emotional atrophy related to social, cultural and familial problems. We believe that the child and his family are doing the absolute best that they can, but there are times when their personal and material resources are not sufficient to meet the challenges of their everyday lives. We do not however make excuses for families they must activate the necessary hardiness to meet their developmental problems or face breakdown. It is nonetheless critical to remember that they may be functioning well even when the broader society is not.

Essentially, the Resilient Young Ladies and Men is a holding environement and a metaphor for Rites of Passage. We represent an augmentation to the child's preparation for developmental tasks within a microcosm of the family's culture and community. We share in the charge of raising children to the point where they take on mature values as young adults. We understand that by providing this holding environment this is a way that prosocial cultural values will be esteemed and passed on. Archetypically, we join the parents of our youth in providing public ceremony that announces to the broader community that the child is blessed and sanctioned by his elders to be a person with a gainful outlook, dependable work values, and loyalty to community.

It is a certainty that no program has developed an approach that is universally successful in working with the types of problems that we try to ameliorate in the Resilient Young Ladies and Men. The RYLM is still a work in progress. The current and predecessor programs has undergone several modifications since their inceptions.

There are three types of interventions that address protective factors at the level of the child, the parent and the family as a whole. The child level is addressed most directly in a group intervention called the RYL or RYM Group. The parent level is addressed in an intervention called the Resilient Parent Workshop (RPW) Group and the issue of all the family members, especially communication skills and issues are addressed in the Resilient Family Group (RFG).

Case Management for such a broad mandate is a demanding task. It requires active advocacy, outreach and support for each family in the program. Case Management is the core of the RYLM interventions, without which, none of the psychoeducational or therapeutic interventions woudl be successful.

For more information, contact:
Dr. James Dobbins, Director RYLM
Duke E. Ellis Human Development Institute
9 N. Edwin C. Moses Boulevard
Dayton, Ohio 45407
(937) 775-4300

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