The Glenwood Springs YouthZone building is just off of Grand Avenue on the corner of Eighth and Cooper. A sign in the window says, "If the only thing you know about YouthZone is that we help kids stay out of jail. You're right." Founded in 1976, YouthZone serves around 500 juveniles and their families a year.
For youth ages 12 to 18 who have committed a criminal offense in Colorado's 9th Judicial District, the courts can offer an alternative to jail time. YouthZone takes clients from Garfield, Rio Blanco and Pitkin Counties, and it's a big undertaking. Between the Rifle and Glenwood Springs offices expenditures peaked at over $2 million last year. YouthZone Development Director Ali Naaseh-Shahry says the programs they offer are worth what they cost, and the proof is in their success rate. Nearly 90% of youth clients don't re-offend while working with YouthZone.
ANS: The national average for kids who've committed similar offenses but aren't receiving these kind of services is about 50%.
Attorney General Phil Weiser supports YouthZone. He says that helping young people develop healthier lives outside the penal system is better for them and the community.
PW: It's been a program I've learned from and that finds ways to support young people on the front end, helping them develop their best, authentic selves as responsible people.. helping kids [with] an alternative to potentially getting caught up in a criminal justice system and creating closer partnerships in connection with young people who really need mentoring and support on their journey.
These services can include therapy sessions, helping clients get to court on time, substance education classes, and victim offender mediation. Naaseh-Shahry says these have about a 90% success rate.
ANS: Maybe more importantly we measure their performance in five different areas. So those are their drug and alcohol use levels, their optimism and their ability to solve problems in their daily life, their engagement in school and community and then their level of trauma.
And we see about 50% of our clients improve in at least one of those during their time with us.
The majority of YouthZone's clients are referred by the Garfield County Court System for possession of marijuana or alcohol and petty theft. Roughly half of these kids are white and the other half are Latino.
When the Trump administration took office in January and began carrying out immigration raids, many clients were afraid of what their involvement in the court system could mean for their families.
ANS: So we spent a lot of time informing our community and our clients about their rights around. Immigration and involvement in the legal system. We trained our staff on how to respond in those instances. But what it did was it ended up taking away from some of the more traditional work that we do with the clients.
The attorney general says this is a trying time to be a nonprofit and that the federal government's cuts will wind up hurting more than helping YouthZone does not receive any direct federal funding, but it's still a part of a chain of income.
Federal money that flows into Colorado makes its way into grants. The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environments Office of Gun Violence Prevention Awards, one such grant that enables YouthZone to work with violent offenders with weapons offenses. Naaseh-Shahry says after President Trump's inauguration, that funding source became unpredictable.
ANS: One thing that happened very quickly in January was the Federal Office of Gun Violence Prevention webpage was taken down from the White House website. So our first thought was, how's that gonna impact us?
In March, the Trump administration announced that $11.4 million were being revoked from Covid-era funding linked to addiction care.
The cuts trickled down to YouthZone's Juvenile Substance Treatment Service in early May. YouthZone offers the only such program in the 9th Judicial District, so the $200,000 gap had to be filled immediately. Here's Executive Director, Jami Hayes.
JH: We have to work now to make sure that we meet a balanced budget at the end of the year and compensate for that $200,000 shortfall because what's not happening is our services aren't decreasing. The same number of kids need the same number of hours of substance treatment as the same qualified staff in front of them, if not more.
Naaseh-Shahry says that it would take up to a year to see other losses due to the number of organizations and entities these decisions have to go through. Local support may be the key to keeping YouthZone alive as the federal government continues to slash funding for healthcare. YouthZone's contingency plan is to reduce reliance on state funds and shift focus to private donors and local governments, including the towns of Silt, Basalt, Glenwood Springs, Rifle, and Carbondale.
