This is our Mission and our primary objectives are to provide high quality services in residential and community settings; to develop partnerships with parents and the community in the delivery of these services; to advocate for youth suffering from chronic and persistent mental illness and their familes; and to seek to continually improve services through performance measurement and quality improvement activities.
Over the past several years the agency has incorporated this developmental approach within a strengths-based, solution-focused model. This model holds that the typical child who is eligible for agency services has experienced a combination of risk factors, including environmental trauma and biochemical and neurological deficits, which have limited the intrapsychic and environmental resources available to him. A principal task of treatment is to discover or create strengths and protective factors for the youth and for his system of care, in order to neutralize or mitigate the risk factors. To this end there is a focus on skills building, on creating successful experiences, and on assisting family and community in putting in place a combination of supports that will sustain the child after treatment. This model emphasizes shorter residential stays, greater focus on transitional and community based services, more narrowly defined goals (what must change in order to enable the child to reintegrate in a community setting), greater systems involvement, and a relative concentration of energy and resources directed to the community and the family, and not simply to the child.