Paula Yost Receives 2024 Karen Ponder Award
Congratulations to Paula Yost for receiving the 2024 Karen W. Ponder Leadership Award.
Paula Yost was named the 2024 Karen W. Ponder Leadership Award recipient during the Smart Start Conference in Greensboro in May 2024. A formal celebration was held on July 17, 2024 in Concord where Amy Cubbage, President of Smart Start, presented the award to Paula in front of a room filled with her family, friends, local representatives, and many others who have had their lives touched by Paula’s work.
Ann Benfield, Executive Director for the Cabarrus County Partnership for Children, nominated Paula for the 2024 Karen W. Ponder Leadership Award. In her nomination, Ann wrote:
“Children today encounter serious challenges that were unimaginable a decade ago like opioid addicted caregivers and human trafficking. However, the children do not face these obstacles alone. Caring citizens throughout Cabarrus County are working together to provide solutions, and that great work was largely begun by Paula Yost.
By day, Ms. Yost is a highly trained patent law attorney and licensed clinical therapist who provides excellent service to her clients. However, for Ms. Yost, her practice alone was an insufficient use of her time and resources. Several years ago she volunteered to lead the Cabarrus County Child Protection Fatality Team (“CCPFT”), a multi-disciplinary committee mandated by statute. Within weeks of becoming President,
Ms. Yost had a vision that the CCPFT could be an incubator for developing child first programs and facilitating communication between area agencies. Every month, members of the CCPFT meet key providers and thinkers who introduce vital resources to the agencies working to improve the lives of community children. Ms. Yost has ensured that the team is thoroughly educated on issues such as addiction, child abuse, child homelessness, and safe sleep.
Ms. Yost has the confidence of every agency represented on the CCPFT. At the beginning of her term, she met individually with every member of the CCPFT and with those she believed could benefit the team by becoming members. She laid out her vision of what agencies could do for children when we worked together and she gained unanimous support. The hours that she has donated to committee work, child death fatality reviews and community meetings are too numerous to be calculated and she was compensated for none of those hours. Ms. Yost continues to serve as official CCPFT President and unofficial Cabarrus County “Lead Child Advocate”.
One important improvement Ms. Yost has made for community children is her work to improve services of a Cardinal Innovations. Over and over member agencies expressed frustration with the failure of that community provider to meet the needs of area children. Ms. Yost decided that our children deserved better than just complaints and set upon a campaign to make improvements with the community provider. Ms. Yost coordinated countless meetings with the provider and community members to share member issues and seek redress.
When legislative and local office holder cooperation was required to make further changes, Ms. Yost made the connections and worked hard to ensure that our elected officials had current information and real-life examples of issues children were facing from the failure of the provider to deliver services. After seeing some success, Ms. Yost has continued to query local agencies for updates and ensure that children are receiving needed assistance from the provider. Because of Ms. Yost’s efforts, every county in the community provider’s catchment area has benefitted from better practices and enhanced services. These counties will continue to benefit from the Ms. Yost monitoring.
As the leader of the Cabarrus County Partnership for Children, I can attest that those of us in the trenches of protecting children can often feel isolated from other agencies and resources for children that are outside of our practice areas. Ms. Yost understands how crucial it is that the community work together and that child welfare efforts will never succeed based on the actions of just a few agencies. Through Ms. Yost’s efforts, I now feel confident in recommending mental health services for child victims because she has worked to introduce qualified providers in the community. The child first community Ms. Yost has developed has made a huge difference to our ability to assist child victims and families. This sentiment is echoed again and again by social workers, law enforcement officers, mental health providers, child advocates, school personnel, NC Legislative Representatives, medical staff etc. We and area children have Ms. Yost to thank for that.
Paula has served as the chair of the CCPFT for 10 years and reviewed every autopsy of children in our county for 10 years. She invites all the people to the Cabarrus County Partnership for Children meetings involved in each fatalities so the team and can review case completely so we can prevent deaths or accidents in the future. Paula was a passionate advocate for a new medical examiner’s office when our community lost ours and she worked to get our state representative to make sure Cabarrus County received a new medical examiner’s office in our region.
Also in her work with the Cabarrus County Partnership for Children, she consistently called out the failings of Cardinal Innovations prior to their dissolution by the State of NC and worked tireless with NC House and Senate members and our local county commissioners to make sure everyone knew of their issues and how they were hurting our children and adults. She now serves on the Partners Behavioral Health Board of Director and serves at the Cabarrus County Commissioner designee.
I believe with Paula Yost’s persistence, advocacy and her need to keep children safe, show how much she loves all children and it qualifies her for this award and honor.”
The Karen W. Ponder Leadership Award was created in honor of Karen W. Ponder, the first president of the North Carolina Partnership for Children, and is presented annually to one local partnership nominee. All 100 NC counties are eligible to submit nominations but only one recipient is selected. This award recognizes exceptional leadership which has resulted in bettering the lives of young children and families across North Carolina. It recognizes the contribution of community volunteers (advocates, civic leaders, faith leaders, etc.). Nominees must exemplify a passionate commitment to the vision of a stronger community for children and families and have the ability to lead and inspire others in pursuit of that vision.
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