ADAPTING ON THE FLY
Flexibility, community support and cooperation with other groups have helped the organization to keep providing programs for children and teens
Resiliency, flexibility and collaboration, all in the midst of uncertainty, are strengths that Susan Mack of the YWCA of Kingston and Ulster County feels have served her organization well in the past year.
Mack, the YWCA’s executive director, said those three attributes sum up the past 12 months.
“We as a community are strongest and most empowered and able to serve the community when we work together,” she said during a recent phone interview.
Mack said all three main programs under the YWCA umbrella have been the most affected by COVID-19: the Magic Circle early childhood program; Girls Inc., which she said served about 230 girls last year; and Families Now, a home-based program for families “in imminent danger of losing their kids.”
All three programs continue to be successful because of her organization’s willingness to adapt to changing circumstances and due to the community support the YWCA has received, Mack said.
There is power, she said, in saying, “Look, our community has a need and we’re not going to be territorial. We’re not going to operate in our own little silos and keep everything for ourselves. … Our primary goal as a community and as a community organization is to serve people and doing that together has been, for Girls Inc. certainly, the most effective way for us to pivot and continue to provide the support for the kids.”
Mack said Girls Inc. is a national program and the Ulster YWCA is an affiliate chapter that typically served girls in grades three through 12 in schools during lunchtime and as an after-school program.
“So 2020, not so much,” Mack said, “so we talk about pivot and here’s where collaboration really came to the front. Instead of working in schools, instead of shutting down, we collaborated with other community organizations,” she said.
During the summer of 2020, Mack said the YWCA worked with Kingston’s Center for Creative Education and the Boys and Girls Club to serve youngsters at their sites, which were open and operating.
“Since kids were already going there … we moved it there,” Mack said, adding that the YWCA is “partnering with easily a dozen other organizations to provide programming right now.”
But, like so much in the past year, Mack said “the focus of our programs has changed to some extent and everything we do now has kind of a trauma-informed sub-theme” that addresses what the girls are experiencing due to COVID.
“They’ve been through so much and what they really need right now is social/ emotional support. We’re doing our regular empowerment and political activity and all those kinds of things, but with a very strong trauma-informed program,” she said.
Girls Inc. also expanded in 2020 to include girls in grades one through 12 and is also focused “on children with special education needs,” Mack said. “And we’re partnering with Family of Woodstock to serve youth in transitional housing — in the youth shelter, basically. So we are focusing on the most vulnerable populations there as well,” she said.
Although Girls Inc. is open to all girls, Mack said 61% of students in Kingston schools are economically disadvantaged and the program is now primarily serving that population. She said the isolation and economic impact of the pandemic has been difficult for young people, especially teenagers.
“A lot of their support, a lot of their development is through peer interaction,” Mack said. “A lot of their families have lost their income, have lost jobs. Families have been under enormous stress because their incomes have been gone or uncertain.
“They have people in their lives who have been sick or dying and, again, they have been socially isolated. It’s hard times and nothing is certain. Like many adults, children thrive on having some structure and predictability — emotionally and developmentally, so we have that in mind with everything we do with the girls now.”
Families Now, which Mack said is 100% funded by the Ulster County Department of Social Services, is a “home visitation program for families in imminent danger of losing their kids or who are trying to get their kids back in the home” and has a 90% success rate.
Because indoor home visits were not feasible during the pandemic, the YWCA also pivoted and began offering outdoor home visits and phone visits, she said.
“During the pandemic the staff decided to continue with home visits because they wanted to see the children. They just met with them outside with masks,” she said.
Families Now serves “families that are typically under enormous stress and very vulnerable, and during the pandemic, with the isolation, as you can imagine, problems were greatly exacerbated,” Mack said, adding that the staff’s workload “skyrocketed” over the past year. “The staff went from having a few phone calls a week to several phone calls a day from each family,” she said.
Her Families Now staff also added doorstep food deliveries and occasional emergency transportation to medical appointments due to domestic violence being in the mix, Mack said.
“We do what we need to do to serve our constituents,” she said.
Donations to help the YWCA meet the needs of Ulster County children and families may be made online at https://ywcaulstercounty.org/how-to-help/donate/.
“During the pandemic the staff decided to continue with home visits because they wanted to see the children. They just met with them outside with masks.”
— Susan Mack of the YWCA of Kingston and Ulster County