Project YESS (Youth Enhanced Services and Support) - The Institute for Health and Recovery Inc. (IHR), in partnership with LUK Inc. (LUK), proposes to enhance and expand comprehensive treatment, early intervention, and recovery support services for underserved adolescents and transitional aged youths who are at risk for or who have substance use disorder (SUD) or co-occurring substance use and mental health disorders (COD) and their families in Worcester County, Massachusetts. Project YESS (Youth Enhanced Services and Support) will provide a comprehensive, family-centered, trauma- informed, evidence-based, coordinated, and integrated outpatient system of care to support youth ages 12 - 20. The goal is to intervene early and reduce the development of and progression of substance use and its related problems with a focus on populations that have historically lacked equal access to services or have had more severe consequences from their substance use: youth of color, bilingual youth, females, and LGBTQ youth. SUD and COD are a pressing problem for Worcester County with prevention and treatment services for youth lacking. The county has diverse urban and rural communities. Worcester County has higher rates of excessive drinking and alcohol impaired driving deaths and one of the highest opioid-related overdose death rates in the state. While data on youth SUD is limited for the county, certain risk factors for youth are higher with 20% the state’s child welfare cases coming from the county despite containing only 12% of the population. In 2019, an estimated 9,540 youth, ages 12-20, in Worcester County needed substance use treatment, but approximately 1,300 actually received it. Once treatment ends, youth find few on-going supports available as few mental health providers in the area are trained on substance use. Using evidence-based and evidence-informed strategies, Project YESS will provide a coordinated multi-system family-centered approach to 450 youth and their families. Project YESS will outreach to area schools, community service agencies, coalitions, providers, and state agencies to increase SUD awareness and access to the program. Youth interested in the program will be screened using CRAFFT 2.1+ N that screens for drug, tobacco/nicotine, and alcohol use and placed into early intervention/brief counseling, for youth who score as low or moderate risk of SUD/COD, or assessment and treatment, for youth who score as high risk. Caregivers will be engaged at every step in the process. Early intervention/brief counseling includes “iDECIDE,” a Massachusetts-developed early intervention curriculum and Project Amp, a brief counseling program that pairs youth with young adults who share lived experience or near lived experience. Assessment and treatment includes Adolescent Community Reinforcement Approach (A-CRA), a behavioral family-centered therapy intervention that focuses on increasing the family, social, and educational/vocational reinforcers that support recovery and wrap around services along with Assertive Continuing Care (ACC) recovery support including wrap around services.
