Miami Bridge’s services are designed to assist families in opening lines of communication, enabling parents and guardians to develop the skills necessary to assume the responsibility of providing guidance and structure for their children while empowering them with the knowledge and skills necessary to redirect at-risk children.
Our youth development services provide opportunities for youngsters to discover their strengths and talents, set personal goals, make positive choices and develop the strength and resiliency necessary to successfully overcome the challenges that confront them.
To demonstrate our commitment to ensure the safe Miami Bridge Youth and Family Services Inc., exists to facilitate and promote family preservation and youth development in an environment of mutual respect and acceptance of diversity in culture, lifestyles, and individual needs. Miami Bridge Youth and Family Services Inc., affirms its responsibility to deliver high quality services to children, youth, and families through its own continuum of residential and non-residential programs, and through linkages to healthy alternative services in the community. To this end, we, the Board of Directors, employees, and volunteers of Miami Bridge Youth and Family Services Inc., commit ourselves to the following principles and practice:
1.) Serve the Well Being, Safety and Health of Children and Youth via the Delivery of Child/Family Centered Services
- Meet basic needs of children and youth for compassion, understanding, shelter and food in a clean, loving, caring, supporting, trusting, nurturing, and culturally sensitive environment.
- Provide an environment of mutual respect between co-workers, and between employees, children, youth and families in residential and non-residential services delivery.
- Provide stimulating and engaging opportunities for the personal enrichment of children and youth.
- Insure the physical health of children and youth with universal precautions and access to health maintenance services.
- Insure the security of children and youth with the least restrictive policies and procedures possible.
- Active involvement of children, youth and families in the development of case plans that respond to individual needs.
- Provide caretakers who reflect positive professional images in their use of appropriate language, clothing, appearance, and interaction with children, youth, families, co-workers and the community.
2.) Respect Cultural Diversity, Dignity, and Rights of Individuals Who Receive Services and Who Work or Volunteer for the Organization.
- Sustain a compliment of board members, employees and other volunteers who appropriately reflect the cultural identity of chil dren, youth and families served by Miami Bridge Youth and Family Services Inc.
- Inform each child, youth and family member of their rights to receive, decline, and make choices about, participation in services offered or research conducted by Miami Bridge Youth and Family Services Inc.
- Obtain written consent from each child, youth and family member to participate in services offered or research conducted by Miami Bridge Youth and Family Services Inc.
- Protect and respect, within the limits of applicable laws, the confidentiality and privacy of children, youth and families who partici pate in services offered by Miami Bridge Youth and Family Services Inc.
- Protect and respect, within the limits of applicable laws, the confidentiality and privacy of individuals who work or volunteer for Miami Bridge Youth and Family Services Inc.
- Prevent discrimination and favoritism in services delivered and the administration and management of the organization.
- Inform, protect and respect the right of children, youth and families, employees and volunteers to file grievances and receive a response in accord with established procedures.
3.) Participate with the Community in Building a System of Quality Care for Children, Youth and Families that is Community Based.
- Establish relationships with other service providers in the community to link children and youth with medical and mental health services, legal services, education, recreation and other personal development and other support assistance not directly provid ed by Miami Bridge Youth and Family Services Inc.
- Advocate for the needs of children, youth and families across ethnic and socio-economic groups in Dade County, Florida.
- Allocate board of directors, staff time and other appropriate agency resources to be involved in community initiatives targeting children, youth and families.
4.) Strive for Professional Excellence.
- Provide opportunities to maintain and strengthen skills, abilities and knowledge related to job performance. Acknowledge and reinforce exemplary job performance.
- Encourage and support employees in their independent pursuit of continuing education or training.
- Use a team management approach to train and support personnel in supervisory positions throughout the organization.
- Hire the most qualified professionals funding can support.
5.) Customer Driven Performance Based Continuous Quality Improvement.
- Active use of feedback and recommendations about service quality and performance from children, youth, family members, other community organizations, funding sources, volunteers, and other interested parties.
- Achieve and sustain the highest level performance to insure positive ratings for licensing monitoring, audits and other quality as surance processes.
- Maintain an electronic data management system to facilitate collecting and analyzing information for evaluating services based on changing needs in the community, and the demand for services in relationship to resources.
- Clinical supervision for direct service personnel and an annual performance review for each employee.
6.) Promote Ethical Practice in Service Delivery and Organization Management.
- Enhance organization capacity for professional, mutually respectful, open communication, between members of the board of directors, employees, volunteers, children, youth and families and other community partners.
- Establish procedures that promote appropriate conduct and encourage employees and volunteers to be accountable for their behavior.
- Provide children, youth and families, employees and volunteers with an administrative process to file grievances, assurance of timely due process and safeguards against reprisal.
- Insure accountability of employees, individual programs and Miami Bridge Youth and Family Services Inc., as a whole through ap propriate supervision, documentation, and quality improvement processes.
- Annually review this Code of Guiding Principles with the board of directors, employees and volunteers.
