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About Our Services

Our primary services are three:

1. Group Homes

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.

2. Shelter Care

When families are in conflict, it is the children who often become homeless. Youth Homes offers shelter and attention to kids who are on the street because of family conflict, abuse, or because the children are acting out as a result of the conflict or abuse. In response to a community effort to change the way we respond to runaway youth, we established our first Attention Home in 1976. Today we have three Attention Homes in Missoula, Kalispell and Hamilton. We provide them a safe, stable and home-like environment where they can rejoin the community and perhaps reunite with their families. The outcome is kids being safer, crisis resolution and a plan that may better meet their long-term needs for stability and relationship. By giving attention to kids who act out, we can help them to express healthy and appropriate emotions and increase their self-esteem.

Our shelters are all seven to eight-bed homes with counselors in the home working directly with the youngsters. The homes are located in neighborhood settings. The three homes serve a daily census of up to 23 youngsters. All serve young people ages 11 to 18.

3. Foster Care and Adoption Services

We take the job of raising other people’s children very seriously and we focus our efforts on having every child in a family or working toward being in a family. These families can be the birth families, relatives or foster care families. We also are an adoption agency and seek that situation when appropriate for a child. But each case is unique.

The child needs to be ready and able to join a family and their needs to be an available family to match with the child. Our Dan Fox Foster Care and Adoption Program starts by searching for families willing to make room for a child. Then we screen, train and license the families while at the same time determining if the children in need are ready to live with a family again. As a child placing agency we then match and place children when need, match, availability and timing are right. The outcome is a new family and a tremendous opportunity for both the child and family to grow. We like to think that if a family makes a child’s life better they might find their lives better as well.

Our “foster” children are referred by State Child Protective Services, Youth Court Probation, Tribal Social Services, Mental Health Case Managers, Department of Corrections and other agencies helping children at risk. We have been offerring foster care services and support since 1991.

We offer a variety of family placement options and services:

For children, ages 2 to 17, who are stepping down from higher levels of care or moving toward adoption we offer Permanency Care, which looks like most traditional forms of foster care.

When the child’s needs are greater and/or their behavior is more challenging, we provide for Therapeutic Foster Care, serving children of any age needing a higher level of emotional support and treatment.

We also offer Adoption Services for the permanent placement of high or special needs children into families. In our state, and under current Federal Law, an adoptive home is the primary objective for placement of all children under the age of 12, whose parents’ rights have been terminated. The children in our program who we are looking to adopt are generally between the ages of three and 12. Subsidies are common for adoptions of older or higher needs children.

When a child is leaving our State Youth Correctional Facility, having successfully completed their stay, they may qualify for a Guide Home. These homes are for teenagers, ages 14-17, who’ve had a successful stay and need a positive transition back into their community.

With all these levels and services within our family foster care program we serve upwards of 140 children each day in care.

For more information on the names, addresses and contact folks for these programs and services, click on our List of Services.

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.

In providing these basic forms of care and services we have grown in our understanding of what else might be needed to support the success of our children over the long term. This has led to growth of our in-home therapy and increased activities that support each child’s development and to us providing other services:

Missoula Learning Lab – was established in 1993 to serve as an alternative educational setting for youngsters arriving at the Youth Homes who had already been withdrawn from school due to attendance or other issues. The 8-10 student center supports intellectual growth through individualized instruction by a certified teacher. Today the school has full computing capabilities and is located within the Public School District Alternative High School. Students can receive credit when doing work assigned from their home district during short-term stays in shelter in Missoula or study toward and receive their GED. We are still working on getting full credit for work done with our local district.

Therapeutic Wilderness Program – InnerRoads Wilderness Program uses Wilderness as a structure within which to teach youngsters to deal with emotions, resolve issues, make life decisions and increase they’re feeling of self-worth. The program offers four weeks of wilderness travel and skills, two weeks of camping near the community with service learning. Staff therapists and counselors provide individual, group and family therapy preceding, during and following the time away from home and family reintegration, followed by supportive mentoring for the balance of the school year (about 9 months). Groups of 5-6 young adolescents, ages 13-17, are served by a staff of 3 instructors, a program director and program or contracted therapists. To learn more click here on InnerRoads to visit a full website, with pictures. IRWP was started in 2001 and was assumed by Youth Homes in February of 2005. This year it will serve 10 families. We hope to build its capacity so that it can be serving up to 30-40 families each year with these intensive services and other children can reached through shorter-term but related wilderness or adventure-based services.