Personal and Professional Growth at YSS

Andrea Dickerson has been with YSS since 1997. When she reflects on her time with YSS – one of Iowa’s oldest and largest youth-serving nonprofit organizations – one word she keeps coming back to is growth.

She has watched YSS grow up close. When Andrea started it was two people in an office. Now YSS is a few months away from opening Ember Recovery Campus, a best-in-class facility located on 50 acres of rural ground in Cambridge, Iowa, that will open later this year. When completed, YSS professionals will provide crisis stabilization, emergency shelter, and residential addiction treatment for youth and young adults.

“When I became a counselor, we had an office in a building on Duff Ave that we rented,” Andrea explains. “There were a couple of us there. There’s been so many changes in the types of residential addiction programs.”

Andrea has grown too – both personally and professionally.

She started in YSS’s Youth Recovery House as a Floating Tech in 1997. She’s seen her roles change from counselor, coordinator, and director. In August of 2023 she was promoted to VP of Programs: Behavioral Health and Community, Youth, and Family Development. She even got her master’s degree while working at YSS.

“I’ve been given a lot of opportunities that I just don’t think I would’ve gotten anywhere else,” Andrea says.

And support. In 2022 Andrea was in a car accident while on vacation and required extended time off.

“Everything was taken care of on the Human Resources side for me,” Andrea explains. “There was never a worry about a paycheck. I look back and I know not everyone would be that fortunate to be able to have such support.”

Now, Andrea offers encouragement and assistance in her daily routine. “There’s a push to do high-quality work,” Andrea explains. “We try to support our staff in getting additional training.” She goes on to add that it is important to let therapists and counselors figure out what their niche is so they can excel.

That goes for employees and interns.

“Our interns feel supported and get opportunities,” Andrea says, with the goal being keeping them on staff after the internship has ended. “In the last year, most of our interns stayed as employees.”

Andrea doesn’t take the YSS mission of creating hope and opportunity by putting kids first lightly. She’s seen the importance programs can have up close. She tells job seekers – especially students – if they aren’t quite sure where they want to end up, get your foot in the door and get some experience.

“Anytime we can have interns that spend time, especially in residential, it can give them so much experience,” Andrea says. “Whether they want to stay in residential for the rest of their lives or even if they want to work with adolescents or youth in addiction … residential gives them invaluable experience working with the team.”