Yorktown Family Services (YFS) is a fully accredited community service agency comprised of an infant, child, and youth mental health centre; a women’s shelter and community-based violence against women services; and an integrated services site offering rapid access to multiple mental health, primary health, and social service programs for youth and young adults. For over 30 years Yorktown has been providing immediate access to a wide range of services in Toronto’s most vulnerable communities to support and equip women, children, youth and families to create positive change in their lives.
Our Mission
YFS supports and equips women, children, youth and families to create positive change in their lives.
Our Vision
Women, children, youth, and families live in safe and healthy
relationships and communities.
Our Values
The perspectives of communities that we work with inform our values and guide our actions. Our strategic planning activities reaffirmed YFS’s values. These values will guide our work on a daily basis and have influenced our strategic directions.
- Respect: We base our decisions and actions on preserving the dignity of our clients by ensuring their expressed needs are central in informing both the services we provide, as well as their delivery models.
- Accountability: We own goals and are responsible for the results.
- Responsiveness: We adapt and quickly take action to fulfil our stakeholder needs.
- Learning: We search for ways to do things better and build our capabilities to achieve results.
- Excellence and innovation: We consistently and creatively deliver high standards of service.
- Collaboration: We work with others to achieve remarkable results for our clients, communities, and cause.
- Diversity, cultural competency and equity: We are aware of, value, and accommodate people’s different backgrounds and cultures and treat them equally and fairly.
Philosophy and Service Approach
Yorktown’s service approach for all programs is one that reflects a strength-based, client-centred, collaborative process and considers the child/youth and /or family within their whole context. This holistic approach supports the individual needs and preferences of each service participant and recognizes the importance of family, community and culture. Yorktown is committed to delivering accessible services which is reflected in our flexible service hours, collaborative and responsive programs and availability to meet clients in the community when appropriate and necessary. Some programs are provided in specific languages and for all programs interpreters are used as needed.  All services are provided in a confidential manner and include a comprehensive range of prevention, early intervention and treatment programs.
Yorktown does not discriminate against anyone based on race, colour, place of origin, ethnicity, citizenship, ancestry, native language, creed, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, family status, age, economic condition, place of residence, physical and mental ability.
Yorktown is committed to creating and maintaining an environment that is safe and free from harassment and discrimination.
Strategic Priorities
Building on the growth and the exceptional services that YFS has been introducing the past years, the next phase focuses on locking-in the knowledge and the practices, evaluating and examining them more closely to consciously benefit from the lessons learned and the best practices used. Furthermore, it is essential for YFS to capture outcomes and information that can be used for more effective management of the organization as well as business development and meeting stakeholders requirements. This will require that YFS invests in the organization in terms of infrastructure, technology and processes, which will also help improve the integration across YFS different programs to provide a seamless and optimized service for clients.
➢ Ensure the necessary internal processes and infrastructure to effectively support our work.
- This will involve:
- Sustaining and improving the resources, infrastructure, staffing and internal processes.
- Strengthening our internal integration and continue to improve on transitions across services and referrals to our service delivery partners in the community.
- Strengthening our internal infrastructure and capacity to coordinate and innovate.
- Enhancing our use of information technology to support program evaluation, administrative decision making, reporting and documentation.
- Defining and implementing innovative resource development approaches to mitigate our reliance on government funding.
- This will result in:
- Enhanced use of resources to improve administrative capabilities.
- Enhanced use of technology that enables service delivery, facilitates administrative support, and improves program tracking and data collection.
- Increased performance measurement systems across the organization.
- Strengthened use of client data bases for reporting and to inform decision making.
- Strengthened use of evidence to inform practice.
As a growing organization, with different programs and many achievements over the years, YFS has a tremendous amount of knowledge and expertise. It is vital at this point that YFS institutionalizes this knowledge to support the continuous improvement, learning, and innovation which will enable achieve its mission and the role it envisions for itself in the future. This is particularly important to be able to build on YFS strengths in responding to the changing environment, trends and needs in the most effective ways.
➢ Continue to innovate and share learning at organizational and system levels through the use of evidence based practices and evaluation.
- This will involve:
- Building our evaluation and quality improvement capacity to support effective delivery and measurement of the achieved outcomes, and enable informed decision making and knowledge sharing.
- Sharing and using knowledge of innovative practices and approaches across the organization and with our partners.
- This will result in:
- Improved knowledge sharing and learning.
- Enhanced engagement and contribution to innovative practices.
- Increased ability to adapt and respond to new trends and needs.
- Enhanced approaches, procedures and practices informed by evidence based practice.
With the changing economic and political environment, continuously changing and more complex community needs, and system transformation throughout the sector, partnerships, collaboration and advocacy become increasingly essential.
Especially with YFS’s choice to focus, the fact that it cannot provide everything a client needs, requires it to partner and collaborate with others to make sure that the client needs are met. Furthermore, as a strong organization with a deep understanding of clients and community needs, YFS can benefit the community and the sector through its continued advocacy and knowledge sharing and playing an active role in the system transformation, to ensure YFS’s vision is achieved.
➢ Being an active player in system transformation and enhancing our capacity to meet client and community needs through advocacy and collaboration.
- This will involve:
- Developing an organizational framework and priorities related to partnership and advocacy.
- Developing pathways whereby we can actively collaborate with clients to identify key areas of need.
- Actively strengthen our partnerships and system transformation participation
- This will result in:
- Enhanced partnerships and improved outcomes.
- Sustained engagement with system partners.
- Improved client experience across the system.