CARE WITHOUT LIMITS
2020/2021 ANNUAL REPORT
LETTER FROM THE CEO
Since 1852, we have been caring for vulnerable children, families, and individuals. The world has changed a lot in those years. While times have always presented challenges for children and families, recently the trauma children experience and the demands on families are increasing.
And – as the world changed – so has Cayuga Centers. We have met the greater needs of children and families by changing, growing, embracing evidence-based and research-informed interventions, and by never wavering in our commitment to quality services and treatment.
We work to make effective caring real. By definition, all human services providers have noble sentiments. We all want to make a positive difference in the lives of those we serve.
We at Cayuga Centers know these noble sentiments must be supported by effective work. Those we serve do not benefit if we merely care. They benefit when we partner with them and help them transform their lives.
To do this, we embrace:
- Sharing power and decision-making with them. It is their lives. We can facilitate, but we do not control. That is true partnership.
- Being strength-based. People do not succeed if their weaknesses are the focus. Building on their competencies creates more competency.
- Employing relentless engagement. Not giving up. Breaking through resistance by being there and not accepting “they are not ready” or “it doesn’t always work.”
- Employing evidence-based and, when unavailable, research-informed interventions. We use science and knowledge as opposed to our own preferences when designing our programs.
- Serving populations others shy away from. People with options do not need us. We are there for those whom others have written off.
- Recruiting and supporting our incredibly dedicated staff who constantly step up and move mountains to be a difference in the lives of all we serve.
We care by providing quality work. And we are guided in our work by one overriding question: Would I want my child or other loved one served by this program? If we cannot say YES, we should not be serving anyone. As does all, we struggle with the ongoing damage COVID-19 is inflicting on our world. But we look for ways to continue to safely be there for those we serve because their need does not stop and neither can our effective caring.
Thank you for your interest in and support of our work. May you and your loved ones be safe.
Edward Myers Hayes
President & Cheif Executive Officer
Care through GROWTH
NEW INTERVENTIONS
Over the last year, we launched four new programs that really embody our mission to serve along a continuum of care. Our Restorative Case Management, Home Study and Post Release Services, Parent Partner, and High Fidelity Wraparound programs aim at expanding services for youth and families beyond what is expected. Not only do these programs serve as complements to our larger foster care initiatives, but they use a data-informed, long term, and out-of-the-box approach to ensure we are doing everything we can to help children and families build on their strengths fo the rest of their lives.
%
Of youth will avoid out-of-home placements and involvement with the juvenile justice system
Restorative Case Management
Based in Cayuga County, NY, Restorative Case Management (RCM) helps children who are involved in the juvenile justice system and offers them an alternative to being placed outside of their home. By recognizing barriers in all the different aspects of the youth’s life and placing the needs of the youth and family first, the program aims at improving the youth’s school attendance, reducing acts of running away, reducing physical aggression, increasing prosocial activities, and improving the youth’s general life and emotional skills.
High Fidelity Wrap Around
Based in Upstate New York, the High Fidelity Wraparound program is an added layer in our commitment to do whatever it takes in order to care for children and families. By following families’ choices and addressing individual needs regardless of reimbursement or pay rates, the program aims at preventing psychiatric hospitalizations and out-of-home placements. The flexibility of this program allows us to accept referrals from any source.
Home Study & Post Release Services
As our first nationwide initiative, with regional offices in Ft. Lauderdale, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Dallas/Fort Worth, New York City, and Chicago, the Home Study, and Post Release services program (HS/PRS) is designed to guarantee the long term safety, success and well-being of unaccompanied migrant children (UC) prior, during, and after they have been released from the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) to parents or sponsors. By offering services such as medical care, advocacy, counseling, mental health, education, legal services, unification, and navigation of the US immigration system, we are extending care to at-risk youth and their families in the immigrant community.
Parent Partner
This new program, based on a national model and located in Albany County, NY pairs parents of youth in need of special supervision with a staff member called a Parent Partner. Parent Partners have lived similar experiences and understand and empathize with the struggles of families with youth at risk of out-of-home placement. By employing parents with past experience to serve as mentors, guides and advocates, Cayuga Centers offers parents an added peer-based support. In this program, the peer parent is compensated for sharing their skills and expertise and helps the entire family unit through mentoring, partnership, and mutual parental understanding.
%
Of children whose parents engaged with a parent partner reunified post removal
Care through DIVERSITY, EQUITY & INCLUSION
DIVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH
Standing for Racial Equality & Equity
As we expand into our national footprint, we continue to prioritize and develop diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives that serve our communities. Whether it’s training staff and foster parents or simply creating spaces for staff to share their experiences, we are continually evolving our efforts to embrace people of all races, gender expressions, abilities, and sexual orientations. We recognize that thus far, we have taken small steps in addressing systemic issues and are committed to doing more to be a part of positive change.
In the wake of the pandemic, Cayuga Centers continues to stand for racial equality for all. Throughout the year, we have addressed current events and have taken a bold stance against the systemic violence that plagues our minority communities.
Providing Services through a Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Lens
We are proud to provide care to families and individuals from all different races and creeds. Our case managers and clinicians create individualized treatment plans that take into account the cultural backgrounds of those we serve. This is important because it allows us to develop trust, create culturally responsive assessments, and deliver trauma-informed care. This also informs why we print materials in multiple languages and have multilingual staff.
Care through STAFF DEVELOPMENT
A LEARNING ORGANIZATION
We introduced the first two of a series of internal trainings to educate our employees on how to be more inclusive. Our Pronouns course teaches the benefits of giving individual employees space to state their pronouns and encourages staff to think about how using pronouns creates a more inclusive environment. Our Cultural Humility course provides an overview of the impact of acknowledging unconscious bias, respecting cultural differences, and shares ways staff can be active listeners to better promote cultural humility in the workplace. We are dedicated to ensuring our staff are equipped with the tools to best support the diverse youth and families we serve.
Spearheaded by the Training Department, the Humanity Wall is a collaborative agency-wide initiative that creates a space for staff to reflect on who they are and how they think. Each month a new question is presented to staff who then post their reflections on our virtual and office bulletin boards.
Celebrating 30 YEARS of Family Preservation
KEEPING FAMILIES TOGETHER
We introduced the first two of a series of internal trainings to educate our employees on how to be more inclusive. Our Pronouns course teaches the benefits of giving individual employees space to state their pronouns and encourages staff to think about how using pronouns creates a more inclusive environment. Our Cultural Humility course provides an overview of the impact of acknowledging unconscious bias, respecting cultural differences, and shares ways staff can be active listeners to better promote cultural humility in the workplace. We are dedicated to ensuring our staff are equipped with the tools to best support the diverse youth and families we serve.
Spearheaded by the Training Department, the Humanity Wall is a collaborative agency-wide initiative that creates a space for staff to reflect on who they are and how they think. Each month a new question is presented to staff who then post their reflections on our virtual and office bulletin boards.
It has been such an amazing experience and an honor being a part of this program for over 22 years. It’s an amazing feeling knowing that I have helped families excel and drastically improve their lives thanks to the resources and opportunities available through the Family Preservation Program (FPP).
One family in particular, which I still consider to be my biggest success to this day, has to be from my very first case as a Family Preservation Social Worker. I worked with a mother who fell pregnant at a young age. Knowing she would struggle to raise two children at her age, she made the selfless decision to free the children for adoption. Several years later, while involved in a domestic violence relationship, this client became pregnant. I was introduced to her once the FPP referral was made. She had a strong distrust of services at the time so I did my best to explain the overall goal of the program and my intentions. Knowing that I would be supporting her every day for the next 6 weeks and knowing that help was only a phone call away 24 hours, 7 days a week, I was able to build a strong relationship with her.
FPP assisted the mother with parental skills, mental health, DHS SNAP services, and domestic violence services. We even worked to establish a strong relationship with her biological family who turned out to be a huge support for her. At the end of our time together, this client went back to school, began a career path, and continued to be an amazing mother to her two beautiful children. I will forever be proud of her hard work and accomplishments she achieved.
Our FOSTER PARENTS
are essential caregivers
Listen to their stories
Care through NURTURING
PROVIDING HEALTH CARE
We believe that access to life-saving medical care should be a right granted to everyone. That’s why this year we are highlighting our medical centers located in our New York City and Auburn, NY locations. Many times, children in our programs come to us with pre-existing medical conditions that require special attention, and for us it’s imperative to ensure the medical care they need is met immediately, no matter how severe.
Sometimes our UC youth come to us with problems related to malnutrition,
parasites, or even broken bones. Other times they come to us with longer-term conditions such as diabetes, cancer, or autoimmune diseases. In each case, we make sure their medical needs are taken care of, and if we cannot meet those needs, we connect them with top-tier pediatric institutions that have the child’s and family’s best interest in mind.
Such was the case with a tender age child that came to us with a serious neurological condition. With the help of the dedicated staff in our medical centers, our rigorous medical process, and our goal to do whatever it takes to meet the needs of our youth, we were able to help this child access world-class medical care. Our staff found a neurosurgeon that stepped up and agreed to perform a complex, high-risk surgery, and now the child has improved mobility. This would not have been possible without access to medical services, especially in a year when the COVID-19 pandemic made access to healthcare a vital issue for all.
MOTHERS & BABIES
Throughout the course of this year, we have been incredibly proud of the care and services we have provided to teenage pregnant and parenting moms. We have been very fortunate to be one of the few organizations that caters to the specific needs of teenage mothers throughout all of our programs.
In SafeCare we teach parents how to keep a safe family environment, how to build a healthy family routine, and the growth stages of a baby. In our Community Based Interventions (CBI) programs we help teens work through the anxiety and fear of revealing a pregnancy to their biological or foster family and as such have better access to prenatal care. In our UC long term foster care program we help migrant teenage mothers find a viable legal sponsor in the U.S. and guide them on how to qualify for legal relief in New York State. In our UC transitional foster care program we have created a unique space in our Learning Center where moms can attend lessons along with their babies and tender age children.
Regardless of the program, we go out of our way to work with foster parents who can accept expecting and parenting teenage mothers and their babies into their homes, and we work with the teen herself to develop an individual service plan that works for her specific needs. Such was the case with an expecting teen who knew she would not be co-parenting. She was determined to be independent and set goals with her skills trainer to plan for being a single mother – she learned to drive, gained employment, found childcare, and when she became eligible, she signed herself out of care with a strong foundation of support.
Care through QUALITY
Our Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) team exists to help
each department work at its best and ensure our clients are
receiving top-rated services across all of our programs. However,
the CQI team is not just here to find and fix problems. They share
our achievements with the rest of the organization to help other
programs learn what is working well and how we can all gain from each
team’s success.
And this year, the CQI department did just that. In the last year, the
CQI team asked what we can do better, where we can stretch a little
further, and where else we can go. They push not just for good – but
great – because our clients and communities deserve it.
CQI Committee
In spring, a cross-departmental CQI Committee was formed to allow members of different teams to review and further improve our performance as an agency. This committee serves as the central mechanism to promote quality and implement a systematic framework for our larger CQI plan.
We created this type of feedback loop to ensure that we are continuously strengthening the quality of services we provide to staff, families, and communities. We are proud to have a CQI team that continues to enhance our interdepartmental initiatives.
Care through SAFETY & WELLNESS
SAFETY, RISK, HEALTH & WELLNESS
Having an internal safety, risk, health, and wellness team has never been
more important. With the COVID-19 pandemic still affecting our lives, our
wellness team has continued to provide for our staff and our youth. They
have created Wellness Checkpoints at all of our locations, distributed
PPE, developed a scheduling system that ensured teams could remain
socially distanced, provided every youth in our care with a vaccine as
they were available, and ensured our front-line staff were being safe
while providing care to families. The wellness team became our support
system in a time of uncertainty.
Education materials, raffles, and gifts were provided to incentivize our
staff and families to continue to stay safe and informed about testing,
vaccines, travel policies, and the latest COVID-19 developments.
We have invested in the latest technology to continue serving safely throughout the pandemic.
The Wellness Committee’s Mission:
To create a safe and healthy environment for our staff that allows us to reach our full potential as employees and individuals. Our vision for the future is to adopt a holistic approach to safety, health, and wellness by offering diverse programs and concepts to support positive and individual choices.
Our IMPACT
Care through COMMUNITY
MLK BOOK & CAN DRIVE
JANUARY 2021
#MLKDay is the only federal holiday designated as a national day of service to encourage all Americans to volunteer to improve their communities.
To participate safely, we collected donations of books for children, youth, and adults to donate to local shelters and jails. We also collected non-perishable canned food items to donate to local food pantries. In total, we collected 293 books and 150 non-perishable goods agency-wide.
FOSTER HALL OF FAME
SUMMER 2021
We installed our new “Foster Hall of Fame” in spaces where children and youth receive mental health therapy and health care services to spark inspiration in their hearts. We selected talented former foster children/youth who rose above their circumstances to succeed and accomplish their dreams. Alongside the highlighted athletes, authors, and creators, the Foster Hall of Fame also includes space for celebrating artwork, poetry, awards, and other talents and achievements by the
children/youth in our programs. These spaces are intended for our youth to remember that no matter how difficult things might seem at the moment, there is always something better waiting for them
on the other side.
COVID-19 TESTING EVENT
MARCH 2021
In partnership with the Test & Trace Corps, on March 8, 2021, we provided free COVID-19 tests to the public with a pop-up site at one of our East Harlem offices. With no appointment needed, we prioritized confidentiality and safely allowed everyone in our community access to free COVID-19 testing.
FOSTER CARE MONTH
MAY 2021
Each May, during National Foster Care Month, we take the time to acknowledge
the over 400,000 youth in foster care, and the family members, foster parents, child welfare professionals, and policy makers who help them find permanent homes and connections. This year we hosted a virtual foster parent appreciation ceremony filled with famous guest appearances, prizes, and a chance to network with foster families in other regions across the agency.
LEARNING CENTER EVENT
FEBRUARY 2021
We were fortunate enough to partner with the Big Picture Foundation for the
second year in a row to provide our unaccompanied migrant youth the opportunity to experience a virtual “field trip” and visit with the students at The Academy at Rye High School, an alternative education program. The “trip” gave the minors an opportunity to interact with youth their age, share their culture through art and participate in fun activities like Pictionary.
STAY CONNECTED
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FOR FOSTER PARENTS
On our blog, foster parents can read about common experiences, get advice, and hear inspirational stories from other foster parents. Check it out today!
EXPLORE OPPORTUNITIES
We are a growing organization and always seeking talented individuals to join us as employees.
You can make a difference in a child’s life. Learn more about fostering with Cayuga Centers.
Do you think your community could benefit from our services?
Is your community ready for the Family First Prevention Services Act implementation? If not, as one of the nation’s first and foremost evidence-based and research-informed providers, we can help. Email us at: info@cayugacenters.org