YWCA St. Joseph

Women’s Resources

The YWCA Women’s Resources Department provides services for women in the areas of parenting, breast cancer awareness, life skills, and diversity. This department interacts frequently with the community, giving presentations on all of the aforementioned programs as well as on other women’s issues, and on the history of the YWCA.

Mom’s Time                              

Moms’ Time is a stress relief, empowerment program for women with young children. We currently have one group that meets in the evening at the YWCA, and one that meets offsite in collaboration with Evenstart through the St. Joseph School District. (Evenstart is a program for persons who are working to get their GED or learning English as a second language.) Our outcome for this program is that the moms will increase parenting knowledge and life skills and learn to reduce stress related to parenting.

JUMP                               

JUMP stands for Journey to Unite Mentors and Parents and matches up adult mentors with pregnant and parenting teens.  JUMP is a partnership between the YWCA, Youth Alliance and Heartland Health.

JUMP provides education and support to teen parents by providing mentors, monthly group education meetings, home visits, and school visits.  Mentors are required to attend a training workshop, attend monthly meetings, and have a background check done, as well as being fingerprinted. We work very closely with the middle and high schools, the Heartland Health Care Teen Program, Parents as Teachers, St. Joseph Health Clinic, WIC and Community Action Partnership.

Choices

The Choices program is an eight week life-skills group for girls in the four middle schools in St. Joseph through collaboration with the St. Joseph School District.  The groups are led by a facilitator at the school during the school day.  

The Choices curriculum addresses issues facing adolescent girls and helps the girls to increase their life skills and to make good life choices. This program has been funded the past three years through a grant from the St. Joseph School District. In 2008, a portion of the funding came from the Missouri Western Athletic Women’s Department with funds raised through a Women’s Walk. 

Special Events

Each Spring, we co-sponsor the Day of Commitment to Eliminate Racism breakfast with the NAACP. During this community event, we award the Kelsy Beshears Racial Justice Award to an individual, group or agency for their work in the of area racial justice. During 2008, we also strove to provide a safe environment for open and honest dialogue of racism by hosting two Unlearning Racism workshops.