The EMPOWER standing for Education, Mentoring, Positive Use of Self, Opportunities, Well Being, Employment and Resiliency provides our youth with life altering opportunities to become self sufficient. The program provides wrap around services to our communities’ abused and disenfranchised children, young adults and families, through workshops, support groups, resources, job skills, educational resources and advocacy, tutoring, mentoring, outreach to children who have aged out of the foster care system as well as teens within the system. Last year alone we provided essential services to one hundred abused teenagers.

Unfortunately, when youth leave foster care at the age of 18 they often fail due to the lack of support and resources. Recognizing this tremendous need for our vulnerable youth, A & A Cottages provides the youth in our program and additional group homes in Mesa with the needed tools to guide them to success. We do this through the EMPOWER Program. The EMPOWER Program is completely community funded. We have no contracts, nor do we have state funding, yet we believe this is the most important program to help our youth succeed in life. The mission of A & A Cottages is to make a positive difference in the lives of at-risk youth through quality residential and support services, which promote dignity, integrity, and responsibility.

Providing a safe place to live is only one step to promote dignity, integrity, and responsibility; these youth need more support and help. At A & A Cottages, we strive to provide the teens with all the skills needed to face our world. Our dedicated 24-hour staff provides our girls with daily skills and support. In addition to meeting their basic needs we provide our vulnerable girls with a youth development program. This program provides the youth with assistance in academics, independent living skills, job skills, and community awareness. We still do not feel this is enough to tackle our foster care system’s crisis. The ongoing crisis that we continue to see from the youth in the foster care system is that when they turn 18 the bricks of the wall we help them build quickly crumble.

A & A Cottages does not have the current capacity to meet the tremendous needs of this population; last year, this program provided wrap around services to over 100 youth in the East Valley. We also sadly turned away youth and requests from local high schools to provide these imperative programs to at-risk youth. If we want these youth to break the cycle of violence and poverty, we need to provide them with the tools and knowledge to do so; we need to expand the EMPOWER Program. A & A Cottages EMPOWER Program provides the following:

Every youth enrolled has individualized service plans, weekly meetings with their caseworker, support groups and trainings determined by the youth and their caseworker. The most unique component to this program will be our aftercare program where we intend to mentor the youth for up to 5 years past their completion of the program. It is our hopes to maintain and support these youth that are often very alone in our often-overwhelming world.

The goals of A & A Cottages are to provide a sense of permanency, a safe environment, and the tools to become self-sufficient and break the cycle of violence and poverty in their lives. The objectives of our program are: