Hi everyone, John Schulte from Catholic Charity St. Francis Community Services. Normally, I tell a story about a client. Today, I’m going to talk a little bit about breakthroughs that we have in our youth program.

A couple of really exciting things. I’m standing in a sensory room, and this sensory room is brand new. It helps kids cope whenever they’re feeling stressed. We can bring them into this room, and they can just decompress. With the help of our mental health counselors here at St. Francis, they also have someone to talk to.

The other things that we’ve been doing to also help kids is facilitate communication with their parents. We starteed a new program where we give kids a topic, and we train kids on how to better talk to and better relate to their parents. And on the other hand, we’re giving parents their homework, too, and giving them ideas on how they can better relate to their kids. So, on the ride home from our youth program, while the two are in the car together, they’re leveraging these new skills that we’re teaching them to improve their family life. We’ve not done this before. It’s all brand new and we’re really excited about it, and we’re hearing great things from the parents and kids that it is improving their family.

One other quick note, many of you might have gotten a note about some good news that we’ve had recently. Our Catholic Legal Assistance Ministry had a breakthrough and one of our clients who was detained who was pregnant, we were concerned that she might have to have a baby in a detention center. We learned 2 days ago that the immigration service was going to let her out of the detention center so that she could have her baby in a hospital in a normal setting.

So, from the work we’re doing with our youth program and families here in St. Louis in South City all the way to work that our Catholic Legal Assistance Ministry is doing with families in St. Genevieve that might be a detention center, St. Francis is there for all of it. We’ve connected all of that together to truly empower multicultural families to better their lives and the communities around them.