A moment with ... Steve Daschle of Southwest Youth and Family Services

Editor's Note: For a quarter-century, Seattle Post-Intelligencer readers have donated generously to the newspaper's annual Readers Care Fund drive, generating more than $5 million for local charities. Today we look at one of the charities benefiting this year: Southwest Youth and Family Services.

The new brochures for Southwest Youth and Family Services feature an abstract photo of the West Seattle Bridge, an image intended to portray solidness, indispensability and mobility.

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Like the landmark, "we take you from where you are to where you want to go," said Steve Daschle, executive director of the agency providing counseling and instruction in the West Seattle, White Center and South Park neighborhoods.

Describe your three services.

We're a licensed mental health agency, so we provide counseling to young people and their families in a variety of settings, both here in the office and at schools, coffee shops, basketball courts, their homes. We have ethnic, cultural-specific counselors who can meet people's needs in terms of their language and their cultural identity. And then we have a case-management function. ...

Our second program is our education center. We offer three education programs (two of which target middle and high school students who have been expelled or suspended or have dropped out). ... We also provide academic and parenting instruction for the teen parent. Many of them are products of teen parents. We're hoping to break that cycle.

The final program is the family support center. We do parenting classes in every conceivable permutation, for parents of newborns and toddlers to teens to a variety of ethnic and cultural-specific strategies.

You serve a large immigrant community.

We're in one of those transitional areas where recent immigrants find common bonds. We host the Iraqi Community Center for Iraqi residents. We have a Latino Family Center. We've been able to expand our services to East Africans and Cambodians and Samoan communities. Our effort in the next couple years is to establish a greater relationship in White Center and South Park to our immigrant communities.

We offer an interesting approach to (teaching) English as a second language. It's less academically focused but more focused on the urgent needs of the people. So a lot of times, someone will bring in a job application or some workplace- related question, and we'll spend the entire hour focusing on that question in the context of everyone learning English.

How do people find out about your agency?

Through referrals from school districts or individual schools and often times from police or courts. Very frequently it's through word of mouth from friends or neighbors.

Do you charge for services?

With the exception of our counseling program (which is on a sliding scale), all of our programs are free. No one gets turned away for their inability to pay or for our inability to serve. So even if we don't provide services directly, we're an open door to all the other services that are available in the community.

What's your budget and how much comes from the public sector?

About $1.3 million. Roughly 75 percent of that is public sector dollars. About 6 percent is from United Way, 17 percent from foundations and contributions and 2 percent from fees or miscellaneous things.

If not for your agency, what would happen to the neighborhood?

West Seattle, regardless of how efficient the bridge is, is still physically isolated from the rest of Seattle, and young people are not likely to seek out services if it means that it'll be really difficult for them to do so. If there wasn't an organization over here with our ears to the ground, knowing what is going on in the community, often their needs wouldn't be met. They wouldn't be identified.

SOUTHWEST YOUTH AND FAMILY SERVICES

Mission: to provide counseling to youth and families, help struggling students catch up academically and socially and teach parenting and English language courses to teen parents and refugees.

Number of people served: about 1,500 a year.

Total annual budget: $1.3 million.

Percent of budget from Readers Care contributions: 3.

P-I reporter John Iwasaki can be reached at 206-448-8096 or johniwasaki@seattlepi.com

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