A Home Within

A Home Within

A Home Within is the only national organization dedicated solely to meeting the emotional needs of foster youth. We recruit licensed mental health clinicians who volunteer to see one foster child in weekly therapy – free of charge, and for as long as it takes. A Home Within’s 500+ active therapists have already supported over 800 children, and provided over 2500 therapy years to this highly vulnerable population. A Home Within now has 50 Local Chapters in 22 states, each headed by a senior local clinician who participates in our three-year Professional Fellowship in the Treatment of Foster Youth.

History

Founded in San Francisco in 1994 as the Children’s Psychotherapy Project, A Home Within is currently celebrating our 10th Anniversary as a national non-profit. The founder, Dr. Toni Vaughn Heineman, continues to serve as our Executive Director, and the therapist who saw that first client, Dr. Wendy von Wiederhold, has become our Program Director of Local Chapters. By helping communities to address a tragic problem of immense proportions one child at a time, A Home Within has not only made a direct positive impact on the population we serve, but also become a model for other entrepreneurial non-profits to follow. We have and always will stick to our core goal: “One child, one therapist, for as long as it takes.”

Mission

A Home Within seeks to break the cycle of chronic loss experienced by so many foster youth with a simple, scalable model. We believe that every foster child deserves to have a healthy, stable relationship with at least one caring adult. Being shuffled from one home to the next and bounced around in the system, foster youth at best struggle to trust adults and at worst often suffer from multiple psychiatric, behavioral, and substance use disorders. A Home Within helps to mitigate these negative and often devastating effects by supporting the mental well-being of this highly vulnerable population. By helping these kids and teens to break the cycle of chronic loss and address childhood traumas, therapy is often a transformative experience that reduces anxiety, stress, dissociate states, and many other symptoms – ultimately enabling them to become healthy, productive members of their communities.

The information above can be found on the official website of A Home Within. For more details about the organization and to find out how you can volunteer, please visit their website: http://www.ahomewithin.org

This entry was posted in Adoption and Foster Care, Children and Families, Counseling, Therapy, and Emotional Support, Mental Health, Peninsula, San Francisco, Youth. Bookmark the permalink.