Cornell University Expands Youth Program to Support NYS Children with Special Needs

Last year, when Amanda Purington Drake took the helm of the ACT for Youth Center for Community Action, a nearly 25 year-old program that promotes adolescent health and well-being in New York state, she called the group together to think about what they wanted for the next 25 years.

The group’s answer was essentially “more.” They wanted to have more impact on more youth, in more areas of their lives. Now a year later, the group has been awarded a five-year, $5 million grant from the New York State Department of Health (NYSDOH) that will expand and deepen the center’s impact on children and adolescents with special health care needs, including children with physical, behavioral or mental health conditions and intellectual or developmental disabilities.

In collaboration with Weill Cornell Medicine, ACT (Assets Coming Together) for Youth will become a state Center of Excellence for Children and Youth with Special Health Care Needs, working directly with local health departments to help them connect families with care and navigate the health care system.

“The biggest potential here is to really better understand needs and streamline access to resources,” said Purington Drake ’04, M.P.S. ’09, Ph.D. ’22, the director of ACT for Youth, which is housed in the Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research, part of the College of Human Ecology. “Finding the right resources and navigating these systems of care – these are some of the biggest challenges. And we’re going to be addressing those issues from a number of angles.”

Since its founding, with funding from NYSDOH, ACT for Youth has supported local organizations by helping them implement evidence-based programs that advance positive youth development, collect and use data to assess programming and engage young people and families. The program currently supports more than 50 organizations in three statewide initiatives. They’ll now expand that model of support to 51 local health departments in an effort to improve access to care for adolescents as well as the care itself.

“But really the first thing we’ll be doing is listening,” Purington Drake said. “What are the things health departments feel like they’re already doing well? What are the challenges? How can we support them and make their work easier? What do youth and their families say they need? They are the experts on their communities.”

The Pediatric Mental Health Integration Program at Weill Cornell Medicine, with expertise in care for children and adolescents with special needs, will consult with ACT for Youth on strategic planning and implementation, as well as engage in collaborations with local health departments. They hope their model of embedding mental health care in all pediatric health care settings – so a child can get help with anxiety on a visit for an ear infection, for example – can offer local departments a way to vastly advance access to care.

“Having this integrated approach really improves adolescents’ ability to get connected with services efficiently and quickly and early,” said Corinne Catarozoli, assistant professor of psychology in Clinical Pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine. She added that the integrated model is especially effective because children with one illness or condition are often more likely to have another – for example, a child with diabetes is at much higher risk of suffering from depression.

“We hope this grant can help disseminate and implement some of these integrated models of care across New York state,” she said. “We’ll also be able to connect the Center for Excellence with experts in a whole range of areas related to physical, developmental and mental health.”

ACT for Youth will also develop a robust website, a clearinghouse of vetted resources from academic sources to best practices from the field, that health departments and families can easily access and search.

For Purington Drake, who has worked for ACT for Youth since she was an undergraduate at Cornell, the new center aligns perfectly with the Bronfenbrenner Center’s and Cornell’s land-grant mission.

“The work ACT for Youth does is a great example of translational research,” she said. “We are connecting the results of academic research to practice and then bringing questions and expertise from practice back into research – it’s this totally bi-directional process that has an overall impact on young people in our state.”