Leadership Skagit team partners with Skagit Y for youth resource guide 

For the second straight year, a team from EDASC and Skagit Valley College’s Leadership Skagit program has joined forces with the Y on a project.
The Empowerment Rangers, composed of five local up-and-coming leaders, including the Y’s own Berenice Puente, created a resource guide for youth and young adults in Skagit County. The Youth Empowerment Services guide (Y.E.S. for short) contains over 175 different resources available in our greater Skagit community. Topics in the guide include mental health, nutrition/food, housing, family planning, and much more.

“Working with the Empowerment Rangers team of Leadership Skagit is a boon to the work of our Y,” shares Ben Leschensky, Communications Manager at the Y. “We strive to be a place where community comes together, and that includes making sure we’re a hub for information and resources that help our friends and neighbors. With the resource guide that the Empowerment Rangers team has put together, we can better help and inform the communities we serve.”

The Empowerment Rangers is one of five Leadership Skagit Teams in the class of 2023. When asked about their motivation for the project, they shared “Y.E.S. was created to empower youth to learn for themselves the resources available in Skagit County. Our goal is to create a directory for youth and their families on what assets are available to help them succeed and thrive in Skagit County.”

The guide is broken down by topic, and each organization listed in the guide has a short blurb of information about the services they offer, contact information, and a website URL. The team spent several months researching and compiling the resources into the tidy guide, which now lives on the Y’s Social Impact page and will be shared with all of the organizations included in the guide. Additionally, the guide will be translated into Spanish and eventually other languages.

“We feel like the youth resource guide is the tip of the iceberg,” adds Leschensky. “Creating resource guides for other segments of our community, such as seniors or families, is certainly something we’re looking into.”

If you have questions about the project or Leadership Skagit, please contact Berenice Puente at [email protected].

• Empowerment Rangers Team Roster
• Lauren Christian (Underground Ministries)
• Nathaniel Block (Skagit County Prosecutor’s Office)
• Donnell Austin (Volunteers of America)
• Berenice Puente (Skagit Valley Family YMCA)
• Jocie Slepyan (Skagit Valley College)