Beth Agen Leaving NYFS; Looks Back On Youth, Counseling Agency Merger

By John Voket

Beth Agen sits behind her desk at Newtown Youth & Family Services’ office on Church Hill Road as bright afternoon light streams through the blinds catching tears forming in her eyes. As she shakes off the bout of uncharacteristic sadness, Ms Agen refocuses on some of the accomplishments the local family support and youth empowerment agency has enjoyed during her four-year tenure — three years as its leader.

Perhaps some of the momentary melancholy is rooted in the fact that Friday, February 18, will mark her last day at the agency. Ms Agen is moving on to a private sector job with a regional health care company.

While her first year in town involved serving as grant coordinator for the Newtown Prevention Council, she was provided space to do her work at the local youth bureau where she learned through proximity some of the challenges and issues Newtown was facing in its attempt to provide better care and support for its children and families.

She also was well aware that the Newtown Youth Services and Family Counseling Center were in the exploratory stages of a possible merger, and for that first year she watched from the sidelines as plans for the merger solidified and eventually came together.

“I could see, even from the sidelines, the incredible possibilities the merged agencies could bring to Newtown,” she recalled.

At the time of her arrival, NYS was without an executive director, and as a new leader was hired, the merger plans solidified and played out to its eventual and successful end, she said.

“The merger was completed in July of 2007, and the executive who was on board at that point departed three months later,” Ms Agen said. “I don’t honestly remember who approached who first, but the agency needed a leader and I felt, having seen the operational side of the new agency, that I could step in do the job.”

Following the screening process, Ms Agen was offered the post, and she hit the ground running in February 2008. Her first goal was to diplomatically homogenize the very different policies and procedures staff from the separate agencies were accustomed to, on both the administrative and human resource fronts.

At the same time, she began instituting a cultural shift at the new agency.

“While I knew we had plenty of stories to pull at your heartstrings, stories that motivated a lot of support from the community, I knew we were going to be challenged to enhance the agency’s function without substantial grants,” Ms Agen said. That meant instituting a regular practice of coupling the anecdotal evidence of the agency’s success stories with hard data.

“Programmatically, coming from a social services background, I’m big on data,” she said. “And I knew we could do much better if we could also illustrate the effectiveness of our programs, and promote our plans with data-driven outcome measurements those personal stories could not reveal.”

Enhancing The ‘Fusion’

One of the first programs her agency enhanced through those outcome measurements was the “Fusion Program,” a peer mentoring initiative that paired Newtown High School juniors with at-risk freshmen.

“I think with the data we presented, the district could easily see this program was worthy of greater support and expansion,” she said. “And over the course of the next two school years, the Fusion Program has grown five times.”

Similarly, the NYFS Children of Divorce program also expanded substantially, from a single session devoted to children from ages 5 to 14, to a split session with 5- to 9-year-olds in one class, and 6- to 14-year-olds in the other.

“Up until we crunched the data and began really promoting the program’s success, we would consistently have five or six kids in the single group,” Ms Agen said. “But once we split the sessions, with age appropriate curriculum directed at each group, we now have about 20 participants.”

One of the programs that she could not continue supporting was the NYCAAP project — Newtown Youth Creating AIDS Awareness for Peers.

“The program required high school students to get out of class and travel to the middle school to mentor students there,” she said. “But we found the disruption was counterproductive for the high school participants, and once we really started enforcing the boundaries and expectations required to make the program successful, we found it was almost impossible to solicit volunteers.”

She was also gratified to see the outcomes from a program called Women Empowering Women, a multigenerational drop-in group that provided a secure environment for participants to creatively tackle their personal challenges.

“It was so cool to see 20-, 40-, and 60-year-olds all supporting each other,” Ms Agen said. “I know a number of true friendships sprang up among those participants, and not all were exclusively within their own age brackets.”

New Program Launching

As she departs for a new career, Ms Agen is handing off the initiation of the agency’s Partnership for Success program, which will be funded through the state for the next four years. It will employ NYFS representatives who will fan out across the community, creating focus groups and surveying nontraditional communities of residents at the micro level to determine how Newtown should respond to the issue of underage drinking.

“This is aimed at members of the community we don’t traditionally hear from,” she explained. “Obviously Newtown has a number of families who come from cultures where teens and even children are introduced to alcohol. And we want to be able to tackle the challenge with the appropriate cultural sensitivity.”

During her tenure, Ms Agen also served for two years as chairman of the Newtown Prevention Council. One of the biggest lessons she learned early on was that a lot of residents, and even many outsiders, were under the impression that “communities like ours that are somewhat affluent, have no problems.”

“But there is a history, patterns and consequences we can easily see in the data,” she said. “And that data we derived from the hard work of the NPC was instrumental in getting us the funding that will support the Partnership for Success program.”

Ms Agen said that in her relatively short tenure, her greatest success was helping the new agency become accredited through the international Council on Accreditation.

“It was an 18-month process, and we killed a lot of trees developing all the paperwork, but we did it,” she said.

Fighting back another wave of emotion, Ms Agen paid tribute to her team of staff and volunteers past and present.

“I can’t say enough about this staff,” she said. “Not only are they smart, but they are individually so compassionate and dedicated. The town should be proud we have such a cohesive group of client-driven professionals here at NYFS.”

One of the memories Ms Agen said she will carry with her always is the sight of hundreds of participants in the annual Newtown Road Race being led to the starting line by a lone bagpiper, a tradition at the annual benefit for the agency. And while she is moving on to other adventures, she committed to coming back for the 2011 race this Labor Day weekend.

“Except instead of working,” she said, “this year I will actually get to run it!”