New Year, New Communications

A new decade means time to reflect and grow for Southside Youth Outreach!
​Find out what we’re up to and our plans to grow our community through building strong, young lives!

Since Southside Youth Outreach was founded, it has sought to serve and aid children in all forms of need. Along with that, as we have been approaching this new decade, we have found that our core values of innovation and collaboration have been guiding our evaluation and development of what we want to see Southside Youth Outreach become. 

In fact, this new blog style of our newsletter is our solution to an ever-growing digital age and our desire to keep our wonderful supporters, really our family, better informed and involved in what they are helping to create! Therefore, you can expect a monthly blog from one of our staff on a range of events, goals, and needs that SSYO is currently encountering. We hope you’ll join us each first Friday of the month to learn more about what we’re up to and how you can be involved! 

For 2020, we have two main developments that we are incredibly excited to announce: ​

Our staff training to be TBRI Practitioners: Anna Jennings on the left and Jessica Mathias-Henderson on the right.

Firstly, our Program Manager, Anna Jennings, and our Development Director, Jessica Mathias-Henderson, have been accepted into a prestigious trauma-informed care practitioner program called Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI). This program requires online and physical training to instruct and develop leaders into practitioners of trauma-informed care for children from hard places. Anna and Jessica will be attending a weeklong training in Anaheim, California in March to finish their practitioner certification. ​​

​In short, we view this crucial training as an investment into the future of Southside Youth Outreach. With these credentials and understanding that come from trauma-informed care, we hope to better care for the community and children in our care using these life-transforming methods. We will do this by equipping our volunteers and staff with carefully crafted tools that develop the whole child through correcting methods. Additionally, we would love to partner with various community organizations, schools, churches, and even counselors to use this information to better serve the youth in our city. 

For more information about this training check out our website or go to child.edu.tcu. 

Secondly, in September of 2019, we launched new or modified versions of our old programs and are excited to see how these changes will develop to the needs of our community. 

RISE After School students enjoying a field trip to the pumpkin patch in October 2019

Our yearly after school academic program run by Anna Jennings was changed from A.C.E.S. to RISE After School! While the general content of the program is similar to the past, we decided to change the name due to similarities between our name and an evaluation study of children from hard places that uses the same name.  Additionally, we wanted to increase the continuity between our Summer academic program, RISE Summer School, and our After School program. We hope the program will continue to grow its reach and we are excited to have already seen an increase in the number of families enrolling!​

The second major change to our programs was the retiring of our program, Tuesday Bible Club and the creation of a similar but different program called THRIVE. THRIVE is split into three facets of age to better serve the various age ranges we serve: Kids (Pre-K – 4th), Youth (5th & 6th) and Teens (7th-12th). The goal of THRIVE is to build strong, young lives through weekly spiritual discussions and implementation of trauma-informed care.  With this program, the hope is to appeal to youth through interactive programs and engaging mentors from the local community. While this program has a lot of potential, we are still in the growing and learning stages and are always seeking Christian community members who have a desire to pour into the younger generation once a week. ​

THRIVE Kids Director, Jessica, and a kiddo showing off their building block design!

If you or someone you know is interested in learning more about becoming a THRIVE Volunteer, please check out our website or email us to learn more! 

As we always say, the future is bright at Southside Youth Outreach and we can not wait to see how your partnership with us will continue to build strong, young lives so our community will thrive! 
​

Jessica Mathias-Henderson

Is the THRIVE Kids and Development Director for Southside Youth Outreach. She loves Jesus, kiddos, and taking long walks with her husband. 

To contact her, you can email her at [email protected]