Permanency Advocate

About You Gotta Believe (YGB)

You Gotta Believe (YGB) is a New York City-based, national organization specializing in finding permanent families for young adults, teens, and pre-teens in foster care. YGB focuses exclusively on preventing youth from aging out of foster care without family; thus reducing the risk of homelessness, incarceration, and poverty due to a lack of stable connections. Founded in 1995, YGB achieves this mission by collaborating with foster care organizations to recruit, match, and provide indefinite, comprehensive support to adoptive foster parents and youth.

The Permanency Advocate amplifies the You Gotta Believe (YGB) mission through outreach, training, advocacy, and support initiatives. They provide comprehensive support and assistance to youth served by YGB. Working collaboratively with all You Gotta Believe staff, the Permanency Advocates represent You Gotta Believe (YGB) with enthusiasm, integrity, and a deep appreciation for its values, mission, and impact. The organization’s primary goal is to ensure that every youth in our program has the opportunity to establish a stable and lasting connection with a supportive and loving family to prevent them from aging out of the child welfare system alone.

We strongly encourage applications from individuals with lived experience in the child welfare, foster care, or adoption systems. Your insight and understanding of the challenges, needs, and strengths of youth and families navigating these systems are invaluable in shaping our work and building trust with those we serve.

Sharing your personal experiences can be a powerful tool to connect with young people, inspire hope, and inform strategies that are truly youth-centered. At the same time, we recognize that revisiting certain experiences can sometimes evoke difficult emotions, especially if past trauma has not been fully processed.

Before applying, we encourage candidates to reflect on their own readiness to share and engage with these experiences in a professional setting. We are committed to providing a supportive environment to help ensure that your voice and story can be shared in ways that are healthy for you and impactful for our community.

• Facilitate individualized and group permanency engagement and services with youth residing in YGB contracted agencies. Collaborate with YGB Family Recruiter to expand family connections and help youth achieve moral adoption.
• Support youth morally adopted by YGB families. Collaborate with YGB Case Planner to assist in integration and address individual needs to ensure their well-being.
• Contribute to the recruitment, preparation, and retention of foster and adoptive parents. Participate in MAPP (Model Approach to Partnerships in Parenting) classes and co-facilitate discussions by strategically sharing personal experiences about child welfare to raise awareness about the importance of unconditional commitment from parents to youth in care.
• Develop and facilitate permanency-based curriculum for youth, prospective parents, families, and child welfare professionals.
• Raise awareness about the child welfare system and youths’ permanency needs through conferences, and public engagements locally, state and nationally; traveling out of NYC as needed.
• Document information using various systems of records to contribute to YGB’s impact.
• Participate in professional development opportunities identified by the Supervisor and Director to increase knowledge, skills, and abilities relevant to the role.

Note:

The responsibilities noted above may be subject to modification or addition based on the needs and priorities of You Gotta Believe.

• Minimum 1 year of related work experience working with older youth in child welfare in an advocacy, mentor, or human services professional capacity.
• Personal experience with the child welfare system.
• Personal experience with moral adoption; having an active, permanent connection to a supportive adult or legal adoption.
• Enjoy relating to a diverse group of people to contribute to YGBs approach of being team-oriented, collaborative, and…