When youth thrive, communities thrive.

Elevate Youth Services is a Vermont-based nonprofit dedicated to empowering young people to lead healthy, fulfilling lives while advocating for the well-being of all youth. For nearly 50 years, we have supported youth in Washington County and beyond through a continuum of programs and services. From a welcoming drop-in teen center to individualized counseling and family therapy, we meet youth where they are. We also provide shelter for youth experiencing homelessness, substance use treatment, and support with education, employment, housing, and other critical needs—helping young people build stability, resilience, and brighter futures.

A Community of Care

At Elevate, we believe young people don’t just need programs — they need people. They need a web of trust, belonging, and support that doesn’t fall apart when one piece shifts. Our Community of Care is the living system that holds youth through crisis, growth, and transition. It is not a single program or a ladder of services. It is a circle — a network of relationships, safety, healing, and opportunity. It is built on the belief that belonging is the best prevention: when youth feel seen, valued, and connected, they have the stability to imagine and create the futures they deserve.

Core Principles

Every decision begins with youth voice and choice. We walk beside, not in front of, the people we serve.

Youth at the Center

Change happens at the speed of trust. Programs are important, but it is connection — with staff, peers, and community — that makes them matter.

Relationship First

We do not see ourselves as saviors, but as co-creators of safety and belonging alongside youth, families, and neighbors

Community Is the Intervention

Housing, healing, skill-building, and leadership are inseparable. We meet immediate needs while nurturing long-term possibility.

Hollistic Support

We ground our work in mutual care, trauma-informed approaches, and the knowledge that systemic inequities shape youth experience. Our role is not only to respond, but to transform.

Liberatory Practice

The Shape of our Community of Care

  • Meeting youth where they are — on the street, online, in schools,at the Teen Center, in community. No judgment, no requirements, just presence and possibility.

  • Immediate safety through emergency shelters, basic needs, and crisis response. A warm bed, food, safety — the baseline for everything else.

  • Counseling, peer support, mentorship, and spaces where young people can process trauma, build trust, and reconnect with themselves and others.

  • Education, employment readiness, creative exploration, leadership opportunities. Building the tools and confidence for independence and interdependence.

  • Youth Advisory Boards, mutual aid circles, advocacy training. Young people leading the way, shaping the programs, shaping the community.

Why It Matters

This Community of Care is our answer to disconnection. Addiction, homelessness, and despair grow in the cracks of isolation. Belonging, possibility, and transformation grow in relationship. By weaving together programs, people, and places across Central Vermont, we are creating a living ecosystem that holds every young person — housed or unhoused, in crisis or in transition, searching or thriving. This is what it means to love in practice.