Members of Durant First United Methodist Church learned about the many programs operated by Youth Services of Bryan County when Stefan Roberts, director of Fathers in Action, spoke before the congregation on a recent Sunday morning.
Youth Services has been providing services to children of the community since 1971 and has since extended its outreach into the community to be more proactive.
“Under the great leadership of our current executive director Courtney Dukes, we are now transitioning into an outreach/ action center,” Roberts said.
Roberts gave the analogy of an outreach center providing a Band-Aid for immediate situations whereas a mission center provides skills that will help people sustain and provide for themselves.
He said that as part of that, Youth Services has brought in several new programs, including first-time offenders for children which is a referral program in that anyone can refer children to the program.”
“They can bring them in if they’re kind of getting off the wrong track, and they’ll have a little counseling and workshops with them,” Roberts said. “It’s a shortterm program to kind of help them get back on track.”
He said there is another program called CARS (Community at Risk Services) that is a mandated program through the court system that provides the same thing, but it is a long-term program with counseling, workshops, mentorship and other things.
“They help the children get back on track and so this is a part that they’re doing with the children,” Roberts said.
Another program under the Youth Services umbrella is Work Ready, that helps people obtain jobs.
“Work Ready is definitely a dynamic program also that they have provided to the community that not only helps people land jobs but they’re also teaching them how to professionally seek these jobs, whether we’re talking about the interview, the application process, everything else, they work with all of that and also they work on the confidence of the individual going through the program,” Roberts said. “It’s a week-long program that helps people really learn how to get a job.”
The program teaches people how to better fill out a job application and to not write “not applicable” on any part of the application.
“They teach you how not to do that because it makes your application look not as good,” Roberts said. “But, they really work with people not only on the professional aspect of it but also in the mental part of it to give you confidence, to give you self-worth and everything else throughout the program.”
Roberts spoke of the Fathers in Action network, the program that he directs. It’s a program that works with fathers, who are not necessarily “bad dads,” but just to teach fathers to be more involved with their families.
“That’s the main purpose of our program is to get father involvement going a little bit more with our families today because the big thing that we’re seeing right now is an increase in statistics for young kids with a father not involved,” Roberts said. “There’s higher rates of drug use, law enforcement contact. There’s underage pregnancy. Different things going on, drop-out rates in school, abuse, everything goes up when the father’s not involved.
“So, our program is there to help fathers understand the importance that they have in the family. That’s what were there for is to try to help them and the way we do this is we do it through a workshop of our own that’s a six-week long workshop that provides different programs twice a week. We go over things such as communication, discipline. Whenever we teach children discipline as a teaching moment as opposed to punishment, we’re working with them, teaching them how to do it the correct way and we work on several things, healthy relationships within the family.”
Roberts said the program teaches fathers to strengthen the bonds with family and for children to have mentors. Although not labeled a faith-based program, the basic principles are based on faith to help families under God and to teach fathers how to strengthen the family. He said it’s also about breaking old cycles of telling children to “suck it up.”
“We don’t show emotions as men,” Roberts said. “Those things are old and those are in the past. What we’re trying to do now is help these guys realize that there’s a new trend and the new trend is that fathers are more involved and they are there for everything.
“They’re there for the parent-teacher conferences, they’re there for the recitals. The things that my dad would not have been there for. If it was a basketball or a football game, yeah, he would have been there quick, but anything else like that, let mom do that. No, that’s not the new trend. The new trend is that the dads are there and that’s what we’re trying to help the guys understand.”
