Youth-serving organizations take on a serious responsibility when they open their doors to children and other vulnerable people. Fulfilling that responsibility well requires two things working together: a safety culture strong enough to prevent harm, and independent investigations credible enough to find the truth when someone alleges mistreatment.
Youth Services Law covers both. Posts examine the legal landscape, practical decisions, and organizational choices that shape how schools, camps, churches, colleges, faith-based groups, and community organizations protect the people in their care and respond when something goes wrong. The goal is the same in every post: precise, useful guidance for child protection and investigations.
Many youth organizations have discovered the hard way that their child protection policies had a critical gap: they addressed what adults must not do to children but said nothing about what happens when one child harms another. That gap is not a minor oversight. Research, shows that more than 70% of child sexual abuse is perpetrated…
At 4:15 in the morning on June 5, 1944, General Dwight D. Eisenhower sat in a rain-lashed tent at Portsmouth and made one of the most consequential decisions in modern history. The weather over the English Channel was still miserable. His meteorologists offered a narrow window of improvement, not a guarantee. His commanders were divided….
We have long known about the replication crisis in social science research — the problem that few findings hold up in later studies. In April 2026, the largest replication project ever attempted found that only about half of the existing research holds up under further testing. This finding has profound implications for youth-serving organizations that want to follow evidence-based practices.
Saturday, May 31, is National Aging Out of Foster Care Awareness Day. The observance exists because what happens to young people at the moment the system releases them is, by most measurable standards, a national failure. Approximately 20,000 youth age out of the U.S. foster care system each year. They leave without a permanent family,…
May 31 is National Aging Out of Foster Care Awareness Day. Every year, approximately 20,000 young people reach the age of majority and exit the foster care system in the United States. They leave without a permanent family, without a home to return to after a hard week, and without the informal adult guidance that…
Every summer, youth-serving organizations across the country hire teenagers who spent the previous year as participants in their programs. A sixteen-year-old who aged out of the after-school mentoring program is now helping run the summer day camp. A high school junior who has attended your overnight program for four years is back this summer as…
In May 2025, Camp Cho-Yeh in Livingston, Texas ran what most administrators would consider a thorough background screening. Before hiring a new camp counselor, the organization used a vendor to search the Enhanced Nationwide Criminal database, the Department of Justice Sex Offender Registry, Social Security records, and county-level criminal records. All of it came back…
Staff turnover in youth-serving organizations runs as high as 40 percent per year. Most administrators treat this as an HR problem — a cost to manage, a vacancy to fill, a disruption to program continuity. The research says it is something more serious than that. For youth in your programs, particularly those such as foster…
May is National Foster Care Month, a good time to think about how our youth organizations can help children in foster care. Not every organization is positioned to become a foster family, and we are not asking you to. But there is a wide space between becoming a foster parent and doing nothing at all,…
SEO Term: skilled trades pathways for foster youth youth organizations Trade School Is Not Second-Best: What Youth Organizations Can Do to Change the Conversation This week your calendar has two observances that belong in the same conversation. National Foster Care Day fell on Tuesday. National Skilled Trades Day is today. That overlap is coincidental. The…