BUSINESS DESCRIPTION

When a student assaults a teacher, or child threatens their parent at home with a knife there are very few options where caregivers can turn for support. A 6th grade boy says he wants to kill himself, or a 9th grade girl has started cutting herself because of stress, what resources are there to support the child and their family?  In our community, urgent mental health care concerns are often left to our already overtaxed systems (education, emergency rooms, criminal justice programing, etc) to solve.  While these systems have resources to address these needs, they are often left overtaxed and overburdened with problems because they lack appropriate funding, resources and training to support effectively.  This cycle increases burnout and strain for our existing agencies, and most importantly, it does not address the needs of the child who is seeking help and support.

Our program is designed to work with children who need a higher level of care than a school or outpatient support can address with a team of professionals highly trained in crisis work, childhood development, trauma, and regulation.  The hope of our program is to provide wrap-around support to these youth and allow them safety and space to work with a team equipped to support their needs, and engage them in evidence based practices to alleviate the burdens they are carrying with them. 

It is our hope that providing a space for this level of behavioral health concerns, in our own community, will give our existing systems space to help address the preventative needs more effectively.  We will use what we know about regulation, attachment and childhood development to meet clients and families where they are and effectively transition them into and out of higher levels of care without causing additional disruption to their threat systems, and remain with the protective factors that exist for them in their community.   

We believe that behavioral health care is just that, health care, and it should be funded as such.  We will work with our existing billing agencies to pay for this type of healthcare.  We will bill for day treatment, individual and group psychotherapy, assessment, developmental testing, diagnostic evaluation and medication management.  Because our organization already bills for most of these services, and are trained and familiar with insurance and private pay options, we anticipate minimal hurdles extending these resources.

Our program will also work to subsidize these billing resources to help provide the most therapeutic environment possible, and to attract resources that will make our service a refuge to all children regardless of race, culture, sexuality, gender or financial status. 

We are also hoping to develop a program that radically reevaluates the way we engage with children.  We will prioritize regulation models to work with them on stabilizing, but in doing so, we will recruit resources that will establish basic needs including connecting with resources on food, housing insecurity, discrimination, mobility, physical or developmental impairments and cultural considerations. Through this we will conduct thorough assessments that allows us the ability to evaluate our practice and objectively look at our model with feedback from stakeholders, as well as to collect data for multiple purposes, with the intent of leveraging this model to inform integrated behavioral health strategies across systems.