The Therapeutic Milieu – Relationships, Responsibility and Right Choices
Supportive relationships are the starting point of the treatment program at Hand Up Homes for Youth. Every interaction, including confronting problems, must convey the message that growth and improvement are possible. Collectively, we are creating a high trust culture within which each resident can use his head, heart and hands for growth and change toward building healthy relationships, taking responsibility and making right choices. Milieu processes are designed with the individual resident in mind, capitalizing on his unique strengths, addressing his personal needs, and leading him to new levels of personal awareness and lifestyle safety.

School – Academic Progress with each student
The Hand Up Homes for Youth Project Self Discovery School has CED approval for the treatment of educationally handicapped youth. In this client-centered, self-contained, small classroom environment, certified special education teachers provide stimulating educational and therapeutic classrooms.

Clinical Services – Prevention, Recovery and Community Safety
The Hand Up Homes for Youth clinical leadership team adheres to the principles and standards outlined by the National Adolescent Perpetrator Network and National Standards of Care on Juvenile Sexual Offending. Utilizing a multi-modal and multi-systemic containment-oriented, cognitive behavioral approach, our clinical program strives to achieve prevention of further abusive behaviors, the holistic recovery of the adolescent and above all, safety in the community.

Family Therapy – Effective Parenting and Informed supervision
Families play an integral part in the treatment and recovery of adolescents. Foremost of the goals of family therapy is to create greater safety and accountability within the family system. It is imperative that the family offers support and vigilance for the youthful offender by joining the circle of containment to create an expectation of total accountability. Offense-specific family reunification protocol is observed to ensure careful planning for family reunification. This often includes weekly or biweekly family therapy, monthly multi-family therapy, supervised therapeutic family visitations and planned passes, as well as attendance at scheduled containment facilitation meetings.

Multi-Systemic Containment Facilitation – A Circle of Concern, Care and Accountability
Hand Up Homes for Youth is a pioneering agency with a commitment to the philosophy of multi-systemic containment treatment. We will always work to integrate all relevant participants into the intensive services we provide for each adolescent in our care. Creating a “circle” is hard work but ultimately establishes a more accurate environment of concern, care and accountability.

Experiential Therapy – Learning by Doing
Hand Up Homes for Youth provides a balanced approach to offense specific therapy and milieu treatment by including captivating and challenging opportunities for growth and change. Learning by doing experiences offer situations in which the use of treatment concepts can be applied in order to achieve maximum growth and development of positive self-esteem. This can be achieved through the integration of prevocational training, urban adventure service projects, animal assisted programming, wilderness exploration, and therapeutic play. Fun and leisure skill development will always be included in each adolescent’s treatment plan.

Multi-Systemic Containment Treatment
Our model supports the integrated, inclusive and thorough participation of the multi-disciplinary treatment team, community representatives and family members in the treatment of each youth. This model is accurate for those youth with a diagnostic profile that might include conduct and defiance problems, sexual reactivity and abusive behaviors, trauma reactivity, compulsive self-abuse or repetitious delinquency features.

The functional definition of containment theory is the practice of hard work, communication, consistency, coordination and compassion.

Educational and Day Treatment programming are offered in each Hand Up Homes for Youth program, and are perhaps the most central and effective opportunity for transformational learning to occur in the hearts and minds of our student clients. Our structured classrooms and program are designed to become the door through which any student can enter into a hands-on, in the field, kinesthetic, learning “journey” that takes him to new levels of competence and confidence.

To fulfill these objectives, we have established 3 key areas of outcome measurement

Program Integration – MTP & IEP
A central feature of the treatment process is to have all Treatment Goals and Educational plans common to both the Master Treatment Plan and the Individual Education Plan / Individual Learning Plan.

Program Integration – Informed Supervision
All HUHFY staff including educational staff are “informed supervisors” and must be completely aware of all current treatment issues of each student-resident in the program. Careful supervision and safety planning are the basis for improved accountability.

Experiential Learning

1. Educational and Day Treatment programming utilizes a non-traditional multidiscipline experiential learning model. Experiential Learning emphasizes understanding the subject by hands on participation.
2. Our objectives for Day Treatment and Educational programming are rather simple in nature but will serve to transform each student into a life long learner.
3. We want every student to be accurately understood in regard to his ability to learn.
4. We want every student to be approached with a planned method of teaching that meets his needs.
5. We want our planned clinical interventions for each student to be fully implemented in the school setting and the planned educational interventions to be implemented in the milieu setting.
6. We want our classrooms to be fully equipped, orderly and engaging educational environments that inspire students to enjoy their educational opportunities.
7. We want our school programs to become a learning laboratory for the experiential education of each student who enters our program.

Animals are important members of the Hand Up Homes for Youth Programs. Animals serve many roles when interacting with youth in the program: teacher, friend, confidant, playmate, social support, and non-anxious presence. We have found our youth readily identify with animals and therefore enter more comfortably into relationship. The relationship offers the opportunity to express and receive love, to touch and be touched, to nurture and care for another being, to respect another creature, to exercise self discipline, to empathize, to be tolerant of differences, and to enhance self esteem. The interaction with animals develops an understanding, compassion, and respect for other living things. Realizing that animal assisted interventions are adjunctive to other types of therapy, when well conceived and artfully designed, animals serve as wonderful participants in the overall therapeutic process facilitating change and growth in the most natural and meaningful ways.