The One Heart Project works with kids in the criminal justice system. 

The group provides counseling, mentorship and job training to help them develop social-emotional skills to create “healthy relationships that they need to navigate life successfully,” said the group’s founder and CEO, Steve Riach. 

They are pretty good at what they do. 

Riach said recidivism among kids before entering his programs typically hovers around 75%. But kids in his Texas, Kansas and Nebraska-based programs average around 18% recidivism, sometimes as low as 12% depending on the location. 

Riach said his group is giving people a second chance. 

“We’re seeing young men or young women that we’ve worked with 10 years ago who are now married and raising a family,” he said. “They’ve got their own children.”

Funding for programs like the One Heart Project could be murkier in Kansas if a bill reworking certain grant funding passes. 

The bill does a handful of things. It increases the amount of time kids can be jailed and allows Kansas to incarcerate more children, despite overwhelming evidence that jail time makes the behaviors worse.  

It allows courts to sentence any child “to the custody of the secretary of corrections for an out-of-home placement” for a first-time offense, misdemeanor crimes and for children as young as 10, the Kansas Department of Corrections said. 

But the bill also spends down a pool of grant money designed to fund programs that help kids. That grant money is currently used for dozens of programs, like One Heart Project. That pool of money would be drained to build new congregate care bed facilities. Kansas previously had programs like that, but they only successfully discharged kids 46% of the time. 

That worries Brenna Visocsky, campaign director at Kansas Appleseed — a group that lobbies on foster care and youth justice issues. She said Kansas is taking money currently spent on successful programs and spending it on programs that have failed before. 

“I never want to say something is impossible,” Visocsky said. “(But) it seems extremely close to impossible that we would be able to stand something up that’s better than what we had before.” 

Congregate care facilities close 

A 2015 report by the Kansas Department of Corrections found that the previous congregate care facilities strategy, called Youth Residential Center II, failed to successfully help youth more than half the time. Only 14% of youth who left the facility went to lower-level placements. 

YRCII facilities took kids between the ages of 10 and 22 with a history of aggressive, abusive, impulsive and other high-risk behavior. The 24-hour facilities were group homes that were supposed to teach children social skills, decision-making and addressing underlying problems. These facilities were supposed to get children back into the community. 

Kansas then shifted to its current grant funding model where kids get treatment in their community. 

Visocsky said YRCII facilities failed because they cost too much, failed too often, took kids out of their homes and didn’t offer enough therapeutic services. It’s possible the new program could do better, but Visocsky said she’s worried there isn’t enough money to fund quality programming. 

The pool of grant money would completely run out by 2028, KDOC said.

Kansas lawmakers are more optimistic about the new proposal. 

The bill passed with bipartisan support in the House and mostly along party lines in the Senate. It has a veto-proof majority. Foster care agencies and police are pushing for the bill, saying high-risk youth who are a danger to other kids are ending up in foster care. 

Kristalle Hedrick, a former social worker and CEO of the Children’s Alliance, told lawmakers during the legislative process that this bill will strengthen prevention services. 

Nonprofits who received juvenile justice money from Kansas say there isn’t enough money being spent to help kids up front, and some are seeing cuts to other services that could help kids, like sports leagues. 

Hedrick said this bill creates treatment that is sorely needed. Some kids end up in youth detention while others need services at home. The state doesn’t have enough of the middle tier of treatment for kids who need something more but not too restrictive. 

This does that. 

“This bill supports a more flexible continuum that allows youth to receive the right level of care at the right time – particularly youth who present with complex behavioral needs but do not belong in either detention or foster care alone,” Hedrick said. “A stronger continuum improves outcomes (while) reducing reliance on costly, high-acuity placements.”

Social-emotional services 

Moses Wyatt Jr. works with Jegna Klub, a nonprofit in the Kansas City area that got grant money from the state. 

Wyatt said successful programs help kids build a brighter future and address social-emotional learning. That’s what his group does. 

Jegna Klub teaches kids about multimedia production, like audio and video editing. It has podcast studios, partners with schools to broadcast sports games, and gets kids on the radio. Wyatt said it builds skills for kids thinking about getting into broadcasting, radio, TV, movies, journalism or any similar field. 

He said kids need to be optimistic about the future because if they aren’t, they don’t care about their present. That’s why skill building is so important. But they won’t succeed unless they can process their emotions and react to situations differently, Wyatt said. 

“Some of them can’t even name or understand their emotions,” he said. “I’m angry. I’m upset. I’m sad. I’m depressed. Like you got to be able to name that.”

Wyatt said he doesn’t think any kid is too high-risk for help. He said the highest-risk children need the most help. 

Riach, with One Heart Project, still remembers when the retaining wall at his house needed work. One of the workers who came to fix it was a former One Heart kid. Juan had been incarcerated, he never knew his father and got into trouble. 

But then he graduated from the One Heart program and was married with kids. He served as a mentor to his brother — who also spent time locked up and worked at the same company as Juan. 

Juan told Riach that he never knew his dad, but that will be different for his kids. This was out in Texas, but the grant funds One Heart received helped them expand to Sedgwick County. 

Without the funds, One Heart wouldn’t be in Kansas. If those funds weren’t available, “a whole bunch of kids’ lives would not have been transformed, and that would be tragic,” he said. 

Future congregate care beds 

The bill was amended in the Senate, so both chambers will need to agree to a final version before it’s sent to the governor. 

Sen. Stephen Owens, a Republican representing Harvey and Sedgwick counties, said he’s concerned about the youth justice money being emptied, but the proposed bill isn’t the problem. 

Money sat in the youth justice fund for years, and burdensome requirements prevented groups from being able to use it. In past years, the money was sent to the general fund to be spent on whatever the legislature wanted. 

Future legislatures could always add back more money to the grant program, and the youth justice fund is just one of many sources of funding for crime prevention. 

“If it is the will of the legislature and the governor to deplete this fund, I would much prefer it be utilized in ways (the bill proposes) because then it is at least being used to help juveniles,” Owens said. “Sweeping it to the general fund does nothing for the juvenile justice population in Kansas.”