The Youth Peer Services Advisory Council is made up of youth, young adults, Youth Peer Advocates, and adult allies across the state who have personal experience as a young person with a disability, emotional and/or behavioral health challenge, or experience in New York State systems such as mental health, special education, juvenile justice, foster care, addiction recovery, health care, etc.

Our Mission: To utilize our personal lived experience and training to promote voice and choice for young people to be actively engaged in their own services and the service delivery system. We do this by ensuring the integrity of training and credentialing for Youth Peer Advocate (YPA) services. The Youth Peer Services Advisory Council (YPSAC) is responsible for:

• Advise the training and credentialing of YPAs;

• Provide secondary reviews of credential applications when necessary;

• Act as a sanctioning body for individual violations of the YPA Code of Ethics;

• Advise and review training relevant to YPA Credentialing, and continued education;

• Advise on the development of supervisor and service team training to support effective supervision of YPA’s;

• Support the development of a career path for the future YPA workforce.

How You Can Get Involved:

To complete the application, please CLICK HERE or enter the hyperlink below into your web-browser:

https://tinyurl.com/FTNYSypsac

Staff Contact: 

Yasmeen R. Baxter
Youth Workforce Development Coordinator
YBaxter@FTNYS.org
Phone: (518) 728-4262

We Are Looking for People Who:

• Are dedicated to becoming a leader within their community
• Are able to attend monthly virtual meetings
• Passionate about the role of Youth Peer Advocates in New York State
• Have lived experience as a young person with a disability, emotional and/or behavioral health challenge, or experience in New York State systems such as mental health, special education, juvenile justice, foster care, addiction recovery, health care, etc.
• Have/had a YPA Credential OR be willing and able to receive it
• Have lived experience within a child serving system