Family Advocate

The Jewish Board•Bronx, NY

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

Youth Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) services focuses on improving or ameliorating the significant functional impairments and severe symptomatology experienced by youth due to mental illness or serious emotional disturbance. Clinical and rehabilitative interventions are 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. 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.

Requirements

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
Excellent engagement skills
Strong verbal and written communication skills
Attention to detail
Ability to work independently as well as with a team
Prior experience with electronic health records and Microsoft office
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
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.
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 travel throughout NYC

Nice To Haves

Bilingual Preferred ie: Spanish

Responsibilities

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 and 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