Community Intervention Outreach Worker

About Our Organization: At Youth Guidance, we believe that no matter what challenges a young person faces, they are more likely to succeed when they have caring adults in their lives. Our highly-trained staff guides kids to overcome the life and academic challenges facing Chicago’s youth. We meet kids where they are — physically and emotionally — to help them focus on their education, make positive choices, and remain on the right path toward life success.

Position Summary**:** The Community Intervention Outreach Worker is responsible for providing support to designated communities by recruiting and guiding youth and families to participate in safe and fun activities, events, group and individual services.  The worker will help plan and coordinate with the program case manager and under the direction of the program manager.

Essential Duties/Responsibilities:

• Recruit youth and their family members to participate in safe and fun activities designed to promote youth development and community cohesion
• Employ crisis response strategies under the direction of the program manager and lead case manager
• In consultation with program leaders determine the level of youth and family needs through a strengths-based needs assessment
• Be available to lead and participate in community, family, and youth-focused events, and activities at various times throughout the day and evening hours
• Be on-call for time-sensitive crisis response as needed
• Lead or participate in peace circles or other group-related forums
• Collaborate with the team to connect youth and families with community resources
• Complete documentation in the appropriate database
• Attend regular team meetings
• Participate in community meetings
• Other duties as assigned

Minimum Qualifications:

Education/Experience/Training

• Associates Degree required, or High School Diploma with a minimum of three years of community outreach or community organizing experience
• Three years of work experience in education, human service, youth development, or social service field
• Familiarity and/or professional experience with the Roseland community is strongly preferred

Skills/Abilities

• Demonstrated passion and dedication to the agency’s mission and the continuous improvement of service quality
• Succinct and clear verbal and written communication skills
• Proven accountability of timely documentation and attendance at meetings.
• Demonstrated strong coaching and leadership skills
• Strong interpersonal skills and demonstrated cultural sensitivity and respect for differences
• Ability to function in group and team settings with the capacity to be solutions-focused, task-driven, and innovative in those settings
• Proficiency in Microsoft Office products (Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint)

Core Competencies

• Communication: Uses effective written and oral communication with internal staff, teams, and community served; demonstrates empathy and listening
• Client orientation: Recognizes needs of diverse stakeholders and approaches relationships with a service orientation, to ultimately maximize the impact
• Equity mindset: Understands and is committed to goals of equity, consistently brings an equity mindset to the organization’s work and workplace
• Growth mindset: Views growth as important for personal and professional development; seeks out opportunities to expand skills, even if the change is required, demonstrates curiosity and eagerness to learn
• Ownership and quality of work: Effectively manages own work, and work of the team to ensure delivery of high-quality work
• Supervisory skills: Effectively manages and develops others
• Mission drive: Demonstrates commitment to the missing of the organization as a whole and alignment with organization values

Physical Demands

The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions

Work Environment

The work environment characteristics described here are representative of those an employee encounters while performing the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

• This job operates in a professional office environment, school setting, and working with the public, COVID-19 vaccination is required
• Occasional local and national travel

What Youth Guidance offers:

We offer a robust package for eligible candidates including:

• A hiring incentive of $250 for part-time and $750 for full-time
• A retention incentive of $250 after 90 days of continuous service.
• A competitive benefit package. Even though healthcare costs have gone up, we have not passed along those increases to our staff.
• If you are pursuing your social services licensure, we can help you by providing licensure test study support. Licensing test reimbursement. Assistance in attaining licensure supervision hours.

DEI Statement

At Youth Guidance, we understand that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) are fundamental to realizing our vision of bright and successful futures for all young people. We celebrate the diversity of youth and recognize them as empowered leaders, problem-solvers, and experts of their own experiences. At the same time, we acknowledge that many systems and institutions meant to support youth are inequitable and unjust.

As such, we are committed to advancing DE&I through our words and our actions, both internally and externally, by:

• Strengthening cultural competence as well as policies, practices, and organizational structures that foster belonging and leverage the unique backgrounds and talents of staff;
• Offering youth-centered programs that are accessible and responsive to people from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, abilities, sexual identity, gender identity and expression, language, and cultural and religious beliefs and practices;
• Influencing systems that youth, their families, and communities are impacted by, such as schools, organizational networks, governmental bodies, researchers, and the funding community, to apply approaches that embrace DEI in addressing the needs and supporting the aspirations of young people.