Youth Empowerment Specialist

Position Summary
The Youth Empowerment Specialist position will provide leadership and coordination for the development and implementation of a team of young adults with lived experience to provide interim youth voice to interested local system of care collaboratives and work with those collaboratives to identify strategies for increasing local youth participation through targeted awareness and engagement campaigns. The Youth Empowerment Specialist will provide guidance to the young adult leaders to provide support to local SOC Collaboratives to provide local youth engagement training and to provide local youth leadership and advocacy training. The Youth Empowerment Specialist will work with their program team members to develop the trainings and certifications and the trainings and certifications developed by the program staff for local and State partners will be in line with national certification and training standards (e.g. the National Federation of Families National Family Peer Specialist Certification).

Minimum Qualifications
Bachelors degree and two or more years of related experience; or equivalent combination of training and experience. The candidate in this position should have relevant lived experiences related to personal experience with a Serious Emotional Disturbance for at least 12 months. Applicants should be able to demonstrate experience with skills in the following areas: written and verbal communication skills organization and cross- agency collaboration and coordination.

Preferred Qualifications
Applicants who are certified or eligible to be certified as a Certified Family Peer SpecialistTM preferred. Candidates who have experience working in a leadership role related to Youth and/or Family Peer Support and/or Education is preferred. Principles and practices of case management; interviewing methods and techniques; substance abuse and mental health assessments and services focusing on the Mental Health population; diagnostic methods and principles; basic structure of the Mental Health criminal justice systems; MS Word and Excel to create communication documents and spreadsheets; and MS PowerPoint to create presentations. Ability to: identify symptoms of mental illness and substance abuse in the JUVENILE population; solve problems analytically; maintain records files and reports; coordinate multiple tasks simultaneously; communicate effectively both orally and in writing; maintain cooperative working relationships with court staff and individuals outside of the judicial branch; develop and foster a spirit of teamwork to improve the quality of Mental Health Court work teams and committees and to bring people from different agencies together to accomplish the goals of the program.