Family Advocate

PURPOSE:

  Youth Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) services focuses’ on improving or ameliorating the significant functional impairments and sever symptomatology experienced by youth due to mental illness or serious emotional disturbance. Clinical and rehabilitative interventions also focused on enhancing family functioning to foster health/wellbeing, stability and re-integration for youth who are returning home after residential treatment or in-patient hospitalization. The Youth ACT Team is a multi-disciplinary team and works together to provide family-driven, youth guided and developmentally appropriate services to comprehensively address the needs of youth within the family, school, medical, behavioral, psychosocial and community domains

POSITION OVERVIEW:

The Youth ACT Family Advocate works as part of a multi-disciplinary team to provide treatment and support services to families and children ages 10 through 21, who have significant behavioral health needs and who are at risk of entering or returning home from high-end

KEY ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS:

• Provide advocacy with providers across the child serving system to raise awareness, reduce stigma, engage families in and coordinate services
• Educate about self-help techniques and self-help group processes
• Provide psychoeducation to family members, caregivers or social supports
• Providing individual or group parent skill development related to the behavioral health needs of the child/youth
• Teach effective coping strategies based on personal experience and assist in development of community support systems involved
• Work to identify formal services and informal resources for families that are culturally affirming who are experiencing social-emotional, behavioral, or mental health challenges
• Assist families with identifying the challenges they face, their strengths and areas of improvement/goals
• Monitor and document family progress to track progress in accordance with agency and regulatory bodies policies
• Participate in multi-disciplinary team meetings, staff meetings, trainings, and supervision
• Maintain professional behaviors and ethical standards are established by licensing board, relevant professional association and the Jewish Board policies and procedures
• Using an electronic database, document demographic data on all individuals see, document an track family’s goals and all service provided
• Perform these services in the family’s home, youth’s home, community, office
• Any additional duties assigned

CORE COMPETENCIES for the position include:

• Excellent engagement skills
• Strong verbal and written communication skills
• Attention to detail
• Ability to work independently as well as with a team

EDUCATIONAL/TRAINING REQUIRED:

• High School Diploma or Equivalency
• Specialty credentialing in advocacy – can be obtained during probationary period
• Lived experience in parenting a child or adolescent with a serious emotional disturbance and/or lived experience of mental health challenges
• Ability to work with a diverse population ie: social, cultural, economic group
• Background in advocating mental health and/or in the educational system

EXPERIENCE REQUIRED/LANGUAGE PREFERENCE:

Bilingual Preferred ie: Spanish

COMPUTER SKILLS REQUIRED:

· Prior experience with electronic health records and Microsoft office

VISUAL AND MANUAL DEXIERITY:

• The Candidate can read paper and electronic documents and perform significant data entry into various computer programs.
• Manual dexterity and hand-eye coordination to travel independently using public transportation

WORK ENVIRONMENT/PHYSICAL EFFORT: 

Most services are provided in the community, with less time spent in office-based work.

While the offices of the Jewish Board are accessible in accordance with the ADA, the sites to which the staff may need to travel may or may not be accessible.  

To Perform the essential functions of this job candidate must be able to travel with NYC carrying equipment such as a notebook, forms, laptop, mobile hotspot and cell phone weighing up to approximately 10 pounds.

To perform the essential functions of this job, the candidate is routinely required to sit (60% of the time) and stand (20% of the time), and travel to and from appointments using public transportation options (20% of the time)

Frequent travel throughout the assigned borough ie Queens, Staten Island, The Bronx; infrequent ravel throughout NYC