Achievement Consultation

Identify who your "Achievement Consultants" will be to facilitate the curriculum and carry out the Consultations.  The ACs must have the ability to carry out their work from a strength-based and empowerment perspective, we highly recommend the Strength-based Family Worker (SFW) Credentialing training program offered by The Allegheny County Department of Human Services.  This specific training will teach your ACs exactly how to carry out their work from a strengths-based and empowerment perspective, which is essential for this work to be effective in the lives of your female youth.  Additionally, the ACs will need to be taught how to facilitate the curriculum in a conversation-style manner.  For this reason, we refer to these groups as "Forums", because they are carried out in a conversation-style, and not in a typical "classroom" style where the teacher does all of the talking.  The curriculum is only used as a guide for how the Forums should be carried out and the direction to go in, but ACs always need to be mindful never to just read the curriculum to the students.  Instead, the AC should always be looking for an opportunity for a discussion of the content and the students should also be actively taking turns along with the AC reading the content. 

*The attached "Ruth's Way Forum Facilitation Check List" will guide you in your AC training.

Determine who your students will be, typically, they are adolescent female youth between the ages of 11-18 who are experiencing repetitive negative behaviors that threaten their successful futures.  Referrals can come from principals, teachers, social workers, probation officers, moms, dads, grandmothers, essentially any concerned adult in the youths' life.  The only requirement is that the young lady has to want to succeed in life, without that, we are wasting everyone's time.  

Determine Your Strength-based and Empowering Services that you will provide, based on the needs of the adolescent female youth and their families that you will be serving.  Based on our own observations of the needs of adolescent female youth, we recommend Family Development, Care Coordination, Life Coaching, Life Skills, Job Development, Job Readiness/Employment Soft Skills, Counseling and Mentoring for our female youth and their families.  Providing these specific services provisions, from a strength-based and empowerment perspective, will produce positive outcomes for our youth and their families.  If you do not have the capability to carry out these services it's okay,  you can always collaborate with other agencies who do but you have to be very intentional in making sure that these services are carried out from a strengths-based and empowerment perspective.   So, it would be better if you carried them out to ensure this perspective, but if you must collaborate be intentional in establishing that agency's practices are from an aligned perspective.    

Designate the location where you be facilitating the curriculum.  It needs to be a space where the students are comfortable sharing sensitive and personal information, so a room with a door that closes is essential.  This space needs to be large enough to fit your students, we recommend a maximum of 10 students per AC.  The space needs to contain chairs for everyone, including the AC, and have the capacity to put the chairs in a circle format.  Internet access should be readily available at the designated location as well.  

Determine specific days and times that you will facilitate Forum.  These days and times should occur and the exact same days and times every week.  We suggest a minimum of 2x's/week, for a maximum of 1 hour per week.  Consistency among youth is key.  

Schedule one-on-one Consultations with your youth, and then with your youth and their guardian.  Consultations should take place outside of Forum times and locations, preferably at the families' homes and at the family's convenience.  If the family does not want you at their home do not be offended, it's alright, you can always offer to meet at a mutual place that is convenient for them like a library, Panera, McDonalds, etc.   The family's input is key, so we must include any concerned family members in on this process in order for our youth to be successful on a long-term continuum.  This process also teaches our youth how to utilize their own personal resources, vs. depending on an agency.  

Integrate the "Blueprint-To-Achievement" into the entire Achievement Consultation process.  This is the process where we teach female youth and their families the unique process of how to gain and remain in control of their own outcomes.  The “Blueprint-To-Achievement” is a teaching curriculum which is our targeted distinct process of demonstrating to adolescent females how to properly identify, and appropriately address their behavioral health issues, so that they may be able to ultimately manage future adversities through healthy self-reliance.  Through the “Blueprint-To-Achievement”, the students are empowered by learning how to control, maintain and alter their own positive destiny.  We consistently reinforce the belief of applying what they learn.  It prepares our students to apply the skill sets to properly navigate through various real-life scenarios to develop common awareness of recognizing effective problem-solving methods as they mature into productive young adults.  Simultaneously, we develop methods with youth and their families as to how to maintain healthy self-reliance and interdependence to properly prepare and cope with potential future adversities when family cohesion and preservation are maintained.

Within the Forum, The Blueprint-To-Achievement is guided by and we recommend using the Life Skills Just For Girls Forum curriculum content found in the "Life Skills Class 3: Personal Roadmap" which could be found on our website at https://www.ruthsway.org.  During the Consultations the Blueprint-To-Achievement is guided by and we recommend using the SFW Family Goal Plan (attached previously).  Here, the AC's focus is to encourage the student in the following:

1) What does SHE see as success?  How does she see herself as having a successful future?  How does she see herself, in the future, as an adult, in a successful position?  This will be your long-term goal.

*Here the AC should be encouraging the student in a "no-ceilings/the sky is the limit" mind frame, meaning she shouldn't have any limitations in choosing what she wants to be and do with her life.  *The AC should be encouraging creativity in the youth setting her goals.  

2) What is her career choice, what does she want to do when she grows up?  

The AC needs to remind the youth that they should choose a career goal in an area in which they enjoy, because they will be doing it every single day for the rest of their life.  What makes her happy/what does she enjoy doing?  

3) What does she see as a problem with her achieving that goal?  What threatens her successful future?  The AC will advise the youth that these would be identified as her "barriers" to a successful future.

4) The AC needs to guide the youth in exploring possible solutions to addressing these barriers.  The AC should also guide the youth in identifying personal and professional resources to address these barriers.  Also, the AC should encourage the youth to compare her current coping mechanisms, if any, for these barriers vs. the "appropriate" resources that will help her to successfully overcome these obstacles.  

5) What can we start working on NOW, to help her to achieve that goal?  What steps can we put in place to guarantee her success?  The AC can ask the youth to name those items, and then advise the youth that these will be identified as her "short-term goals" so that she will successfully achieve her long-term goal.

6) How can we help her to achieve these goals?  The AC should remind the youth that we are here to support her, and we will do everything in our power to help her achieve success; and if it's not within our own network then we will refer her to someone that we know and trust (an agency that you are very familiar with).

7) It is very important that the AC encourages the youth to set her own deadlines.  Youth are more probable to achieve deadlines that they set themselves, and they are more probable to achieve goals that they have set deadlines for, which we have observed within our own dealings with youth and families. 

*EVERYONE should be setting follow-up steps and deadlines: the youth, her guardian, and the AC.

8) Utilize this same process with the student's guardian.  Youth are less likely to excel in a household where their guardian is unsuccessful because of unaddressed barriers.  For this reason, the guardian's barriers to success need to be properly addressed as well, but our job here is to them how to do it.

*It is very important that the youth and their family are put in the position to guide this process, and their input is key.  The AC should acknowledge that the youth and their family are the experts regarding their own lives and their personal situation, the purpose that we serve is to support them.   

Within every aspect of carrying out the Achievement Consultation process, ACs should be practicing and encouraging youth to embrace a value-based system, in which recommend our “3-F’s” Value-Based system.  Within this system we encourage female youth to develop a new, value-based mind-set, which helps them within their maturation process as they develop into virtuous women of society.  The foundation of our 3-F’s Value-Based System, which is Family, Friendship, and Faithfulness, was derived from the values and morals of the Biblical story of Ruth.  Ruth's entire journey was fueled by her faithfulness to her mother-in-law and her determination to preserve her family connections.  Her journey was a lucid depiction of her virtuous spirit, which was full of great love, humility, and respect; and she cherished a value system which embraced family, friendship, and faithfulness!  These are the aspects of a value-based system in which values and morals should be practiced by everyone involved as they function as a cohesive team, and in which they stand firmly upon.  More importantly, these are the aspects of a value system that, once female youth are  encouraged and taught the art of embracing, helps to reveal the Virtuous Young Ladies within them.