Art Impact Project
Art Impact Project enhances emotional wellness through creative expression. Its model uses a 90-minute art-making session that encourages creativity and facilitates an outlet for emotions and a positive way to deal with stress and life challenges in order to help participants achieve emotional wellness and express and communicate aspects of themselves that may be too difficult to put into words. Art Impact serves teenagers, college-aged and adult populations, though at this time, the majority of its programming is provided to adolescents in middle and high schools in Waukegan, North Chicago, Highwood, and Highland Park.
Brushwood Center at Ryerson Woods
Brushwood Center collaborates with partners to generate program-based solutions, challenge systems, and create a just and healthy future through public programs and strategic efforts: Health, Equity, and Nature Accelerator; It's A W.I.N. (Art and Wellness in Nature); At Ease: and Art and Nature for Veterans. Its Health, Equity, and Nature Accelerator advances community-driven strategies to bridge the healthcare and environmental sectors and improve health outcomes in Lake County. It focuses on changing and re-creating systems that contributed to environmental inequities through research, innovation, and coalition building and targets the communities experiencing the most significant health inequities, including North Chicago, Waukegan, Highwood, and Round Lake.
CASA Lake County
CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates) Lake County promotes and protects the best interests of children who have been abused or neglected. CASA trains volunteers to advocate for the children in courts, in schools and in the community to help them receive the services they need to thrive and to find safe, permanent, and loving homes. CASA’s service area includes 52 cities and villages and unincorporated Lake County communities in northeastern Illinois, with Waukegan, Round Lake and Zion being the three largest areas where child clients resided at the time of removal from their homes.
Chicago Voyagers
Chicago Voyagers provides evidence-based experiential outdoor programming in partnership with Chicagoland schools and community organizations, including Neal Math & Science Academy and North Chicago High School. Year-round adventure-therapy programs include hiking and backpacking, overnight camping, canoeing, and mountain biking. Participation (and clothing and equipment) is at no cost. Each program uses a multi-faceted, neuroscience-based approach to prevent or diminish the impact of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs such as poverty, abuse, trauma from gun violence, and lack of familial support). The Voyage Program also provides teens with one-on-one mentoring, helping them develop life skills and a plan for personal growth.
CYN Counseling Center
CYN Counseling Center preserves and strengthens families while protecting children from abusive or high-risk situations. It increases access to needed mental health treatment; fosters improved mental health through counseling, psychotherapy, crisis intervention, community education, and prevention services; reduces unnecessary entry into the juvenile justice, child welfare, or mental health systems; and promotes coordinated, collaborative partnerships among various social, legal, educational and community service providers to cultivate healthier communities through collective impact. CYN provides school-based therapy services to northern Lake County middle schools and high schools from Antioch and Grayslake to Waukegan and North Chicago.
Erie Family Health Center | HealthReach Waukegan
Erie HealthReach Waukegan provides holistic, affordable, and accessible care to children and families in Waukegan and surrounding Lake County communities. Services include medical care, dental care; behavioral healthcare; and psychiatric care. Erie's Community Engagement team has identified and maintained relationships with key Lake County community partners to collaborate on educational programming, including education partners (College of Lake County); government partners (Lake County Health Department, Waukegan Township, Zion Township); public libraries (North Chicago, Highwood, Waukegan, and Zion libraries) and social service agencies (Catholic Charities, Mano A Mano, YMCA, Youth & Family Counseling) among others.
Heart of the City
Heart of the City levels the playing field for youth in Lake County by providing quality sports programs and opportunities regardless of socioeconomic status. Programing includes after-school camps and clinics (to expose children to soccer and positive youth-development opportunities); recreational Soccer Academy (to develop social-emotional skills such as teamwork, communication, and decision-making); and a travel program (focusing on academic success and athletic discipline through competitive soccer, to increase access to college/post-secondary opportunities). HOC also hosts Soccer Academy Satellite programs with school districts 112 and 56, and North Chicago Community Partners to expand its reach and make soccer more accessible.
The Josselyn Center
The Josselyn Center provides affordable mental health services that make lives better for its clients, their families, and the community. It provides the full scope of mental health needs, from individuals facing overwhelming situational challenges to those living with chronic conditions such as anxiety, major depression, bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia. Josselyn Center expanded into Lake County and opened a location in Waukegan in order to better provide accessible, high-quality psychiatric and mental health services to Lake County youth. In addition to its Waukegan location, Josselyn increased clinical capacity in Highland Park/Highwood with the consolidation of Family Service of Lake County as a program of Josselyn and a site in Grayslake.
Keeping Families Covered
Keeping Families Covered provides basic needs assistance to families regardless of income or circumstance through partnerships with community partners and nonprofit organizations to serve families in Lake and McHenry counties. It has donated over 6.5 million diapers and 625,000 period products to the community. Diapers are a critical component of the nonprofit’s services because safety net programs like food stamps and WIC do not cover diapers (and not having diapers means that parents cannot leave their children with childcare providers to go to work and that they are cut off from access to early childhood education programs outside of their homes).
LFOLA | Center for Conservation Leadership
The Center for Conservation Leadership engages partners throughout Lake County to break down barriers to nature and provide resources and immersive nature experiences that inspire and activate conservation communities. CCL offers educational and leadership opportunities to students and families, empowering them with life skills, inquiry-based learning, and a sense of place. Such opportunities include a Yellowstone National Park trip and educational stewardship opportunities for environmental science and language arts students. CCL's youth development partners include Waukegan High School, Cristo Rey St. Martin, Waukegan to College, Cool Learning Experience, and Boys and Girls Club of Lake County.
Nicasa Behavioral Health Services | Teen Court
Teen Court is a collaborative effort between Nicasa, police departments, and the Lake County Sheriff's Department, which offers an alternative to the traditional court system for first-time youth offenders. This program teaches youth to accept responsibility for their offenses, restore the damage that was done and learn to make better choices through sentencing by a peer jury. Successful completion of the program removes the offense from the youth’s record, giving him/her a fresh start. High school students volunteer as jurors. Nicasa operates Teen Courts in partnership with police departments in Round Lake, Round Lake Beach, Round Lake Heights, Round Lake Park, Fox Lake, Gurnee, Wauconda, Waukegan, North Chicago, Winthrop Harbor, Zion, and Beach Park.
Northern Illinois Food Bank
Northern Illinois Food Bank works to solve hunger by providing nutritious meals to those in need across its service area (13 northern Illinois counties), including 13.3 million meals provided in Lake County. While the majority of the meals were distributed through its extensive network of member agencies, its direct-to-neighbor programs (My Pantry Express and Mobile Markets) provide assistance for those unable to access their local food pantry due to lack of transportation, hours or other barriers or stigma. The Food Bank also collaborates with healthcare organizations who screen patients for food-insecurity. Its Child Nutrition Program provides meals directly to children at after-school and summer sites and through weekend backpacks of food through program partners.
PADS Lake County
PADS Lake County provides emergency shelter and wrap-around services, support, and resources to individuals and families experiencing homelessness to encourage a path to self-sufficiency and stable housing. It reduces homelessness by following a “Housing First” model, in which a safe place to live is the first step toward addressing the root cause of an individual’s homelessness. PADS has strong relationships with community partners that provide wrap-around services to its clients. Many have historically been unable to access these services or be successful in housing due to chronic mental illness or physical disability. PADS is working to find a fixed, single site shelter that functions as a shelter and a community center with space for partners to provide services.
Youth & Family Counseling
Youth and Family Counseling’s vision of safe and healthy communities, where individuals and families can thrive, is embodied in its work to provide access to high-quality mental healthcare for Lake County’s uninsured, underinsured, and income-constrained children and families. Among those facing access to mental healthcare in Lake County are individuals and families experiencing economic insecurity, those facing transportation and/or mobility challenges, limited English speakers, and children and adolescents seeking care from greatly in-demand clinicians specializing in work with youth. Children, adolescents, and college-age youth represent more than 50% of YFC's client caseload.