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About Our Services
Group Home
For many children, the pain of family breakdown is too much. They have suffered tremendous loss and act out this loss in many ways. Sometimes their pain and their behavior are too difficult for any family to absorb. For these children, our group homes offer care, guidance and treatment. Our hope is that they can make progress and eventually rejoin their own families, or succeed with a foster care family. Within the group home they are also building relationships with caring adults that can last a lifetime. Each home is targeted to specific issues and designed to address the unique differences of ages and gender. We currently offer four long-term group homes for adolescents, all within Missoula County. We have provided group home care since 1971.
Three of these are Treatment Homes serving youngsters identified as having serious emotional difficulties. Many of the youth are also involved with youth courts and child protective services. One of the homes is an all girls’ home, one is for boys and one is coeducational. The coeducational home accepts youngsters ages 11-15 (with the possibility of having them in care till age 16) while the others are for those ages 13-17 (possibly in care till 18 or beyond). The fourth home is for youngsters in need of a homelike environment within which to prepare for emancipation as adults.
Our group home programs expect placements for at least six months and work with youngsters so they may return home, move into substitute families or emancipate. They are designed for 4-6 residents and have counselors and therapists on staff and in the homes. The four homes serve a daily census of up to 22 youngsters.
In addition to Youth Homes offering these services, we formed the Partnership for Children in 1999:
For children who have shown an inability to attach to appropriate care-giving adults, Youth Homes has formed a unique collaboration with Intermountain Children’s Home of Helena. The Partnership provides services to children ages 4-11 with severe emotional disturbances due to early childhood trauma. The Partnership for Children merges the tested and proven positive treatment approach that Intermountain Children’s Homes has modeled on its Helena campus with the knowledge of the local community and ability of Youth Homes to deliver sophisticated children’s group treatment homes and its own unique foster care program. This combination of care and expertise of the two partners gives the children the gifts of permanency, safety and stability throughout their entire healing process. The operation of the Partnership for Children as a non- profit agency, by the two partnering non-profit agencies is rare – but very successful.
The Partnership has two intensive Treatment Homes for six children each, ages 4-11. Treatment there lasts 12 to 18 months with the promise of family placement and permanency after successful completion of the course of treatment.
The Partnership also operates its own foster care program. The program places children out of the Treatment Homes, does the work up front to support eventual adoption, works with troubled foster placements prior to placement into a treatment facility, and can work with birthfamilies where the issues of attachment can be addressed within the family setting. The program is staffed to support a daily census of up to 24 children in placement and also to provide assessments on attachments within current placements and families.
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