Community Outreach

Guided by our four core values, caring, honesty, respect and responsibility, the YMCA of Metropolitan Denver offers a host of programs and services to our local community – Health and fitness courses at our gyms, preventative substance abuse curriculums at high-risk schools, and safe summer activities for children and teens are just a sample of the offerings that enrich our neighborhoods. If you are interested in learning more about these programs and others offered at your local YMCA, please contact us.

YMCA of the USA Latino/Hispanic Collaborative: This is an effort of the YMCA movement to identify practices that successfully engage members of the majority-minority communities in making lifestyle choices that positively impact their health and well-being.
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Division of Youth Corrections (DYC). Beginning in June 2009, the YMCA began serving youth transitioning out of corrections and back into the community. Services include case management, advocacy and coaching to help build skills necessary for success in the community.

CASASTART, Striving Together to Achieve Rewarding Tomorrows, is a community-based, school centered program designed to keep high-risk 8 to 13 year-olds free of drugs and crime involvement, engaged in school and hopeful about their future.
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Northwest Denver Family to Family Collaboration
The YMCA of Metropolitan Denver has recently become the fiscal agent and community partner for the Northwest Denver Family to Family Community Collaboration.
Beginning in 2001, the Denver Department of Human Services began practicing a better way to handle child abuse and neglect cases by implementing a proven set of core values into a practice called Family to Family.
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Family to Family Community Collaborations address issues regarding child abuse, neglect, delinquency, and poverty, that are a community wide challenge. Services are designed to strengthen parent-to-parent, and parent-to-child relationships. The services must promote healthy family formation as a means of achieving safety, permanency, and well-being for children and families, particularly those in the child welfare and TANF systems. The primary goal is to keep families together, and when that is not safely possible, at least be able to maintain them in their communities through kinship care/foster care. Collaborations provide support services and resources to resolve the issues of child safety, family stability, and permanency. Interventions through neighborhood services assist in alleviating crises and prevent entry into public systems, or the expansion into the child protection system. There are four components that make the family to family practice work.

Kinship and Neighborhood Foster Care Recruitment and Training
Team Decision Making
Community Neighborhood Partnerships
Self-Evaluation

A successful Collaboration must demonstrate program flexibility which can meet the needs of at risk children. The TANF population and their families experiencing severe and/or chronic issues of instability, poverty, abuse, neglect, violence, mental and physical health problems, developmental deficits, substance abuse, past or current abuse, and domestic violence. The Collaboration must illustrate expertise in working with families in poverty, multicultural treatment expertise, and include Spanish speaking services, collaboration and communication with other service providers involved with the families receiving TANF. The Family to Family practice encourages cultural respect, and enables families to receive services in a familiar, friendly, supportive setting near their home. The program provides services to people who walk-in or those referred by the department. Many times, the families we help simply need financial assistance or guidance with parenting techniques. By offering the following services in-home, we can keep families and children safe and together: Case Management; Team Decision Making; Family Meetings; Parent Advocacy; Resource Delivery; Child Care; Mentoring; Parenting Classes; Counseling and Therapy; Substance Abuse Treatment; Domestic Violence Treatment; Medical Care; Job Placement and Training; Education; Neighborhood Based Foster Care; Respite Care; and Supervised Visitation. The YMCA is now responsible for creating a neighborhood based collaborative network. The charge will be to develop a service delivery plan that targets services for children and families (primary, kinship, foster, and adoptive), and the TANF population who are co-involved in the child welfare system or are at-risk of being involved with Denver Department of Human Services; act on behalf of the collaboration; be responsible for all of the administrative and financial responsibilities of the collaboration; and has the ability to manage and track expenditures and complete invoicing in a timely manner.

Lights On After School
The YMCA in partnership with Denver Public Schools and the United Way, provides after- school enrichment at two Denver Public Schools through the Light On After-School Program.