June 30, 2014

Today’s Mission Moment  is about Treatment Foster Care.  For those of you who may not know, Treatment Foster Care (TFC) is intended as an alternative to institutional (residential) care for youth in foster care who struggle with significant emotional and behavioral problems that have prevented them from living successfully in a more normative setting.  TFC is aimed at matching troubled youth with specially trained foster parents who receive intensive support from a team of professionals here at Good Shepherd.  Essentially, the youth in this program will be precisely the sort of kids we worked with in our residential program, but this program will provide for their care in a family setting with professional foster parents.

In case you’re wondering, efforts are very much under way to launch our new Treatment Foster Care Program.  Although we’re still half a year away from being fully staffed, three of our current staffers, Kathy Fowler, Teresa Hayner, and Amanda Gschaar, traveled to North Carolina last week to become certified trainers in the evidenced based curriculum we have adopted for TFC.  Although TFC is not new to St. Louis, we are not aware of any program that is modeled like ours or any that have adopted an evidence-based curriculum like the one we’ve chosen.  Much remains to be done before our TFC program is fully implemented, but we’re excited about how things are going and about the impact we believe the program will have on the youth we will serve.

M