The Board of Directors of Youth Advocate Programs (YAP), Inc. has added new members who reinforce the nonprofit’s commitment to giving more youth, families and communities safe and effective alternatives to youth incarceration and institutionalization.

A 45-year-old nonprofit, YAP partners with youth justice, child welfare and other systems in 29 states and the District of Columbia to provide youth and family services delivered by neighborhood-based staff Advocates. The nonprofit, which also has operations in Guatemala, Ireland, and Sierra Leone, has expanded its reach over the past year through new systems partnerships in regions throughout the U.S. “Our newest board members further enhance the agency’s capacity to expand our evidence-based program model as we also advocate for youth justice and child welfare systems change,” said YAP Board Chair Lynette M. Brown-Sow. “The board is honored to have new additions to our team to help us provide visionary governance that empowers YAP’s leaders to achieve gold-standard performance outcomes through a service delivery model rooted in cultural competence.”

The new members are:

Juan Sepúlveda

A Biden-Harris transition team appointee, Juan Sepúlveda worked in the Obama Administration as Executive Director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics. He also served as Senior Advisor for Hispanic Affairs for the Democratic National Committee and Texas State Director for the Obama for America campaign. Sepúlveda is the Ron Calgaard Distinguished Visiting Professor of Practice in the Political Science department at Trinity University in San Antonio’s TX. He has served on the university’s Director for Student Diversity & Inclusion search team and as a member of the Census and Voter Engagement Committee. In partnership with the Hispanic Heritage Foundation, Sepúlveda created and led the Dream Lead Institute, a year-long leadership development program aimed at young professional Dreamer leaders. Prior to joining Trinity, he was Senior Vice President of Station Services and System Leadership at PBS and hosted the weekly KLRN San Antonio PBS television series, “Conversations.” Sepúlveda grew up in a working class Mexican American neighborhood in Topeka, KS., working as a high school student for Secretary of State Jack H. Brier and with the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, where the late Willie Velasquez was one of his mentors. The author of The Life and Times of Willie Velasquez: Su Voto Es Su Voz (Arte Público Press), Sepúlveda serves on the national boards of the Alliance for Excellent Education; Communities in Schools; the Hispanic Heritage Foundation; MDC; the National Council for Community and Education Partnerships; and the national advisory board of Learn 4 Life. He is the third Latino ever awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and has a B.A. in Government from Harvard College, a M.A. in Politics, Philosophy & Economics from The Queen’s College, Oxford University, and a J.D. from Stanford Law School.

Janet Lincoln

For more than 20 years Lincoln’s professional and volunteer life has involved working with those in need, primarily children. Her main focus has been to provide support to youth in delinquency and dependency court cases. In her appointed position as Arizona's Yavapai County Public Defender, Lincoln oversaw the defense of indigent criminal defendants, all children in delinquency court, all children with their parents in dependency court, and all persons involuntarily committed to mental institutions. She has personally served as legal counsel for hundreds of children in juvenile court. Lincoln was a supervising attorney for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), where she oversaw the legal division for litigation in the Western region of the United States. She has volunteered as a Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) and has also donated her time with Yavapai CASA for Kids Foundation, Yavapai County Juvenile Court Advisory Board, Phoenix Youth at Risk and as a mentor for juvenile delinquency court.

Stephen Ward

With a decades-long career in public policy, Stephen Ward brings a deep set of advocacy skills and relationships to the YAP board. As a principal since 2011 with VH Strategies, a Washington, DC-based government affairs consulting, he has represented non-profit healthcare networks, advocates for investing in the nation’s crumbling school buildings, renewable energy providers, a leading technology in carbon capture, and a wide range of other clients. Prior to joining VHS, Ward served from 2003-2011 as Chief of Staff to U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), one of the architects of Obamacare and a key player in the nation’s efforts to shift to renewable energy and reduce greenhouse gasses. Early in his career, Ward was executive director of the Clearfield County, PA Youth Technical Unit, an Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP)-funded project focused on developing in-community resources to reduce out-of-county institutional placement of at-risk children and youth. During that time, he cofounded and led the Youth Services Alliance of Pennsylvania, a state-wide coalition of community-based providers, including YAP, that was instrumental in legislative efforts to ban placement of youth in county jails and creating financial incentives to encourage in-community services as an alternative to detention and placement. Ward worked closely on those successful efforts with YAP board member Bill Wachob during his time working for Tom Jeffers in the early days YAP, and later when he was a Commonwealth legislator. Ward has taught and operated a service-learning program at an alternative high school, and spent a decade in electoral politics, and a decade representing a high-tech company on federal policy. He received his B.A. and M.Ed. from Penn State.

A. Toni Young

A. Toni Young is a longtime advocate for women’s health, with a focus on reproductive health matters related to HIV/AIDs, she recently co-founded Rural Health Service Providers Network, which addresses the epidemic of HIV/AIDS in West Virginia communities. Prior to her move to West Virginia, Young founded Washington, DC. and San Francisco-based Community Education Group (CEG), a non-profit organization dedicated to stop the spread of HIV and eliminate health disparities. Founded in 1993 as the National Women and HIV/AIDS Project, CEG trains community health workers; and educates and testis hard-to-reach populations; and provides organizational capacity-building resources. Young has achieved positive outcomes by building local and national coalitions, developing a returning citizens program that trained and hired returning citizens to be local case managers and testers; and creating a tablet-based enrollment form linking real-time local Medicaid and Medicare data and services. As part of her work, Young chaired HIV prevention services committees for the DC Department of Health and the San Francisco HIV Prevention Planning Council. She is the author of numerous scientific journal publication articles and the recipient of many honors, including the WNBA Washington Mystics Capital Bank One Community Champions award for her work with helping Washington DC communities affected by HIV/AIDs. Young completed the Harvard Business School Executive Education Strategic Perspectives in Nonprofit Management Program.

Learn more about YAP at www.yapinc.org. Follow us @yapinc on Twitter.