SGA Youth & Family Services

SGA is a city leader in early childhood development, providing both direct services and consulting. Services include Early Head Start and Head Start, utilizing the Parents as Teachers curriculum to serve children, ages 0-5, through a home visiting model that includes weekly group sessions and ongoing parent training. SGA embeds mental health consulting in its early childhood programs, ensuring social-emotional health of both the child and parent. Because of SGA's success in early childhood programming, the agency serves as a consultant for Head Start, Early Head Start and childcare providers across Chicago. Additionally, SGA leads consortia that focus on policies and best practices in the areas of infant mortality reduction and early childhood development.

SGA is a strategic partner with Chicago Public Schools, with staff embedded in select elementary and high school sites. Knowing that students can only learn when they are in a safe environment, SGA hires and trains community residents to provide safe passage to designated schools and extracurricular activities in targeted, high-violence communities. Within the schools, SGA may offer crisis intervention; individual, group, and family counseling; mentoring; gang diversion, drug and alcohol education; parent education; family engagement; classroom supports; and case management services. SGA offers college and career readiness, through a range of programs from those targeting youth involved in the juvenile justice system or local gangs to support services for high-performing student leaders who will be the first in their families to attend college. Together, these wrap-around supports ensure Chicago's youth have the opportunity to excel in both school and life.

Targeting out-of-school youth, including those involved in the juvenile justice system, SGA's workforce development services provide vocational training, job readiness preparation and job placement coupled with wrap-around supports, including financial literacy, educational remediation, case management, counseling and life skills training.

Using its several decades of experience and organizational strengths, SGA is embarking on an innovative venture: social service delivery models. SGA's programming is uniquely positioned to meet the needs of the community and overcome limitations of traditional approaches of social service delivery by providing the Cycle of Opportunity continuum of comprehensive services for children and their families. Community residents are deeply involved in all aspects of planning and implementation. By strategically expanding these cradle-to-career services family by family, block by block until the community reaches a tipping point and realizes long-term, sustainable transformation.