Youth Services Mapping (YSM) Team

Purpose: To help design and implement the Youth Services Mapping (YSM) web-based system that will serve the community as a planning resource for aligning and improving services for children and youth.

Team lead: Suzanne Hershey
Contact info: suzanne at communitysync.com  or 512-323-0024

YSM Project Specialist: Angela Wacker

Participating members:

Current Activities:

• Improving the system
• Conducting outreach and training for service providers to enter their program data
• Training school staff

Announcements:

The YSM system is launched! Now we need all service providers to enter their program information.

Check it out at www.ysm-austin.org!

Accomplishments/History:

When the Ready by 21 Coalition in Austin was first formed, members said that our community needed a web-based tool to identify and address gaps and overlaps in services and support for youth.The Coalition’s YSM team worked with a local software developer, who built a system prototype which was piloted in 2007.  The YSM prototype and pilot concentrated on services available to high school stage youth. In 2007, the Austin Independent School District was awarded a four-year grant to prevent violence and substance abuse among students, funded through the federal Safe Schools/Healthy Students Initiative.  Through AISD grant project, called “Austin Community Collaboration to Enhance Student Success” or ACCESS, the YSM prototype is being rebuilt to improve its interface and functionality, and to expand the system beyond high school to show services to children and youth, by school and by zip code, from elementary school age through high school and young adulthood. Ready by 21 Austin and YSM system developers have been gathering requirements from different stakeholders, including school counselors and youth service provider agencies.  The new system was launched in Fall 2009.

Team meetings:

Now that the system is built, the YSM Team has sunset.  For more information, please go to www.ysm-austin.org.