What is Contact Community Services?

Contact Community Services, Inc. is a not-for-profit human services agency located in Syracuse, New York. We provide a wide range of mental health, behavioral and safer school programs and resources to individuals, schools and school districts, and other groups and institutions in the central New York area. Our services include:

• Telephone counseling
• After-school programs for middle and high school students in Syracuse
• Social / emotional skills workshops for students
• Training for educators concerning violence prevention, crisis management and school safety
• Support and consultation in addressing student behavioral problems and mental health issues
• Teen call-in radio show
• School-based prevention and behavioral intervention programs
• Collaboration with community partners to address issues of poverty and strategies for the integration of educational and mental health systems

Our Mission

Contact Community Services helps individuals and organizations create positive personal and social change to improve the quality of lives in central New York.

Our Vision

Contact Community Services will be a recognized leader in fostering healthy emotional development in the community by offering resources and expertise that build upon the strengths of the diverse individuals and organizations we serve.

Our Philosophy

1. We are committed to the personal growth and development of each person we serve.
2. We are optimistic that the people we serve can improve the quality of their lives. Our job is to help them discover the necessary resources.
3. We value innovation, our capacity to adapt to the changing community and our ability to adopt the best, most current solutions.
4. We believe collaboration is the best vehicle for providing services to our community.

History

Contact Community Services has been serving central New York for more than 35 years. We began as an all-volunteer telephone counseling line in 1971. Since then, our scope of services has steadily expanded:

• We moved into the schools, teaching communication skills to children.
• We began training teachers and school staff in behavioral, mental health and crisis response issues.
• We expanded into the direct community programming with after-school programs and parent services and resources.
• In recent years, we have been working on educational reform at a systems level, helping school districts address nonacademic barriers to learning.
• Our newest initiative involves community mobilization around issues of poverty.