Face to Face Health & Counseling Service, Inc.

Face to Face's mission is: Empowering youth to overcome barriers and strive toward healthy and self-sufficient lives. Our goal is to be a safety net to youth ages 11-24 in our community by addressing health disparities, food insecurity, housing disparities, and racism. Face to Face fights against poverty, homelessness, and the many barriers our youth face.

Face to face operates the only drop-in center for youth experiencing homelessness in our entire county. 89% of these youth are youth of color, an incredibly disproportionate number since only 16% of youth in the county are youth of color. Our goal is to comprehensively support the youth at SafeZone by providing them with basic necessities, employment coaching, education services, intensive case management, healthcare, therapy, and rental assistance so that they can stabilize, heal, and thrive.

Our medical clinic responds to the needs of youth in a culturally responsive way, addressing the complex experiences they have and addressing them holistically. Our medical providers not only care for the medical needs of our youth, they also listen to their stories. Beyond medical services, our clinic also offers intensive case management, insurance support, basic necessities, parenting support, and more. Our goal is to empower our youth to reduce harmful behaviors, receive comprehensive healthcare, and live healthy lives, both physically and mentally.

Our mental health program is staffed by licensed therapists that specialize in working with youth with complex trauma. Our therapists are trained to understand that the underlying disparities our youth face impact their mental health. These disparities include adverse childhood experiences (incarceration, violence, instability, parental, maltreatment); neighborhood-level stressors (racial and ethnic segregation, safety, social support, norms, quality/quantity of resources); Socioeconomic status; family structure and Implicit biases and cultural competence. Our goal is to walk beside our youth through their many traumas, so they can find healing, stability, and hope for their futures.

Face to Face sees and addresses the disparities that exist for youth in our community at the root level. We recognize the impact of poverty, classism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, gender-based discrimination, social isolation, and past trauma on the youth we serve. Our successes are built on developing authentic, trusting relationships with youth. We take a positive youth development approach, focusing on the strengths of the young people we serve. We provide youth with support and access to the information and opportunities they need to overcome the barriers in their lives and achieve their goals. The voice of our youth is currently informing our decisions and leading our work against systemic racism.

Face to Face upholds the following strategies to acknowledge and respond to racism with the goal of creating a more just society:
● As an organization, explicitly acknowledging race and racism as major factors in health
care, mental health, and homelessness.
●Training staff on racism, how people are treated, and inequities and then holding them accountable.
●Ensuring youth have health insurance, basic necessities, safe and empowering medical and mental health care, rental assistance, and access to education.
●Removing barriers to appointments by providing necessary supports (e.g., transportation, interpreters, appointment reminders, etc.).
●Addressing social determinants of health through case management.
●Focusing on better understanding young women of color’s experiences and empowering them in their own care and choices
●Developing youth-led peer education opportunities.
●Focusing on developing trusting relationships with youth who have historically experienced negative and traumatic events.
●Learning to ask the right questions and listening to young people’s experiences during their medical and mental health journeys with Face to Face

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion are core values of Face to Face. We intentionally recruit and hire staff who reflect the population we serve. Currently, 56% of our overall staff are people of color or part of the LGBTQ+ community, including our Executive Director and many in leadership.

Face to Face, along with other members of the Homeless Youth Collaborative, developed, and tested the Nine Evidence-Based Guiding Principles to Help Youth Overcome Homelessness. We utilize these principles beginning with the perspective that youth are on a journey; all of our interactions with youth are filtered through that journey perspective. This means we must be trauma-informed, non-judgmental, and work to reduce harm. By holding these principles, we can build a trusting relationship that allows us to focus on youths’ strengths and opportunities for positive development. Through all of this, we approach youth as whole beings through a youth-focused collaborative system of support.

Our guiding principles uphold that our work is:

● Journey Oriented: Interact with youth to help them understand the interconnectedness of
past, present, and future as they decide where they want to go and how to get there.

● Trauma-Informed: Recognize that most homeless youth have experienced trauma; build relationships, responses, and services on that knowledge.

● Non-Judgmental: Interact with youth without labeling or judging them on the basis of background, experiences, choices, or behaviors.

● Harm Reduction: Contain the effects of risky behavior in the short-term and seek to reduce its effects in the long-term.

● Trusting Youth-Adult Relationships: Build relationships by interacting with youth in an honest, dependable, authentic, caring, and supportive way.

● Strengths-Based: Start with and build upon the skills, strengths, and positive
characteristics of each youth.

● Positive Youth Development: Provide opportunities for youth to build a sense of
competency, usefulness, belonging, and power.

● Holistic: Engage youth in a manner that recognizes that mental, physical, spiritual, and social health are interconnected and interrelated.

● Collaboration: Establish a principles-based, youth-focused system of support that
integrates practices, procedures, and services within and across agencies, systems, and policies.

Face to Face has been serving marginalized youth since 1972 when the agency began as a walk-in crisis counseling and reproductive health clinic serving youth on St. Paul’s East Side. Programming grew to include a full adolescent medical clinic and mental health program.

In 1994, the State of Minnesota asked Face to Face to start a drop-in center to be a safe place for youth experiencing homelessness to get off the street and get connected with resources. The result, SafeZone, is still the only drop-in center in St. Paul for homeless youth. Today, Face to Face serves approximately 3,000 youth a year through our medical clinic, mental health services, and our SafeZone program.

2020 has brought significant new challenges as well as significant growth. Face to Face has successfully modified and expanded our services to youth during the pandemic to do our part in eliminating the disparities that exist. We have created 3 new programs during the pandemic which include a hotel shelter program for young people age 18-24, a transitional housing program to support survivors of human trafficking, and a workforce development program.

Our long term vision is to increase our relevance and strengthen our sustainability so we can remain an essential safety net in our community. We conducted resource mapping, a community needs assessment and engaged Ramsey County in our strategic planning to identify gaps in our community.

We will expand services in Mental/Medical Health and Housing.

1. In response to community needs and demand for our services, we will explore our
Mental/Medical Health presence in schools and colleges and mobile/kiosk services. We will
expand capacity for mobile and telemedicine and add partnerships with homeless youth
shelters.

2. To meet the shortage of affordable housing, we will expand our short and long term Housing
support (including intensive case management and mental health services).