Vision
Envisioning communities where youth make choices that strengthen their lives, their families, and their world.
Mission
Strengthening communities through innovative, family-focused strategies that connect youth to opportunities for positive choices.
History
Mark Shriver, son of Sargent and Eunice Kennedy Shriver, founded The Choice Intensive Advocacy Program in 1987 as part of the Children and Adolescent Health Advocacy Project (CAHAP) in Baltimore City. Shriver saw Choice as a response to the alarming disproportionate confinement of Black youth. Shriver designed Choice to provide a community and home-based alternative to locking up adolescents.
Although preventing disproportionate confinement continues to be an issue on the forefront of Choice’s interventions, we have since expanded to include a variety of different program services to better meet the needs of young people, whether system-involved or not. These include vocational training, school-based initiatives, arts programming, job-training and college and career access.
The Choice Program has been successfully replicated in San Diego, California, Hartford, Connecticut, Syracuse, New York, Providence, Rhode Island, and Wilmington, Delaware.
