By the time she was 10 years old, Ethiopia-born Avivit Frede was in charge of enrolling her five younger siblings in school, finding jobs for her parents, and managing the details of her family’s state-sponsored benefits and the mortgage on their home.

In 1991, Ms. Frede immigrated with her family from Lalibela, Ethiopia to Israel, where she helped her parents navigate their new homeland. She said her only outlet “to be a kid” was an outreach program for young immigrant girls sponsored by the New York-based non-profit organization, Elem – Youth in Distress in Israel.

That organization, which sponsors dozens of programs for children and teenagers living on the margins of Israeli society, is celebrating its silver anniversary tonight with a fundraising dinner at the Jewish Museum on Fifth Avenue.

Through Elem, Ms. Frede went on field trips to the cinema, attended get-togethers with peers, and spoke with mental health professionals about the pressures of her home life.

“Home was a place where I had responsibilities,” she told The New York Sun, through a translator. “This was the a place where I could take care of myself, and to talk about my problems. Without it, I would be in a very different place now.”

Immigrant youth with grown-up responsibilities, as well as teenagers with substance-abuse problems, those living on the streets or in abusive homes, those involved in prostitution, and child sex offenders are among Elem’s target populations. Operating on a budget of about $7.4 million a year, the organization runs counseling centers, youth groups, and therapeutic programs in dozens of cities throughout Israel — often partnering with Israel’s education, welfare, and immigrant absorption ministries.

The organization is, perhaps, best known for its vans, staffed each night with social workers and volunteers who distribute food, and do outreach with vagrant youth. Elem’s staff of about 150, and its 1,500 volunteers assist nearly 100,000 children and teenagers in distress each year.

“In the last 25 years, the problems have gotten extremely more severe and complicated,” the president of Elem, Ann Bialkin, said, noting that, amid a precarious security situation, Israel has absorbed about 1.1 million immigrants from the Former Soviet Union and Ethiopia in recent years.

“Our biggest challenge is to meet the needs of an extremely diverse population in a very small country,” said Mrs. Bialkin, who lives in New York.

As a result, Elem offers several programs targeted at specific youth populations, such as Ethiopian and Russian immigrants, ultra- Orthodox Anglophones, and Israeli Arabs and Druze. “The problems are often the same, but different communities need different approaches, because of how the communities function, and how the families are structured,” a social worker for Elem, Simcha Getahune, said.

Ms. Frede benefited from that multicultural approach. Today, she’s a 27-year-old college graduate, working with Ethiopian immigrant youth as a project manager for Elem. “I can share with them my personal experiences as someone who has been there, and done that,” Ms. Frede, who is in New York City for the anniversary dinner, said. “I understand.”