Specifications include, but are not limited to: The Department’s youth “age out of care”, the barriers to successful independent living are many and multi-faceted. Former youth in care experience high rates of homelessness, unemployment, and low educational attainment. In an effort to address, reduce, and eliminate the aforementioned barriers, in FY ’08, Director Erwin McEwen of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, decided that Life Skill programs needed to be redeveloped. Life Skill services/programs will be redeveloped in order to serve more youth in care and to effectively meet their core areas of need. Director McEwen’s vision was to use the IDCFS statewide and regional Youth Advisory Boards as forums for garnering feedback from youth in care on how to develop a youth-driven and youth-focused Request For Proposal (RFP). This youth-driven RFP would supply the Department with the best “statewide service provider collaborative” capable of administering Life Skill services across the state of Illinois, to approximately 6,000 youth in care between the ages of 14-20 years old. In the month of August, Focus Group sessions were scheduled and facilitated in each region by the Regional Youth Advisory Board Executive Committee Members. Feedback from the regional Focus Group sessions was compiled and used to create the application requirements, goals, framework, and evaluation criteria. Life Skill programs will focus on youth-expressed areas of need according to the following categories: (1) education, (2) housing, (3) career planning, job readiness, and employment (4) money management, (5) health, (6) transportation, (7) parenting and prevention, (8) personal & community engagement, and (9) self-sufficiency.
