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Interesting Cafety Article

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Che Gookin:
http://http://www.cafety.org/resources/804-redefining-residential-youth-guided-treatment

I decided to post this link here and discuss it here in order to have some basic moderation of the discussion.

I find the items of interest. I'm not a huge fan of fixing programs. However, if I was forced to choose between leaving them alone or enacting the changes suggested by youthmove I'd go with the youthmove/cafety changes. Not sure how popular the reforms would be considering the mania for power and control that infects programs like a sick cancer, but it possibly could do a great deal to address some of the routine issues of abuse and neglect at the hands of programs.

Whooter:
Quote from above article:


Young people who have been placed in residential settings recognize that residential providers typically operate with the best interests of the young people they work with at heart. However youth are concerned that providers and staff in residential programs are often not open to the idea that their approaches and interventions may not be ideal, even in the most extreme situations when the measures being used upon the young people in their care are abusive. While such cases may not typify the field of residential treatment, they do highlight legitimate and serious practice concerns.

Residential providers often hear the praises of alumni for the help they received. Less often do the criticisms of youth past and present get the same attention. These youth express a variety of concerns that they feel residential providers did not and do not hear. For example:

• Youth have often experienced staff attitudes and approaches that are patronizing and infer that the youth in care do not understand themselves as well as, or better than, the adults; this finds expression in decision making that not only doesn’t include the youth but dismisses the possibility that they might have valuable ideas, perhaps even better than those of the staff.

• Young people often have not experienced meaningful opportunities to discuss or question placement or to be engaged in formulating and carrying out their own treatment plans. They find themselves left with the choice of complying with a set of provisions into which they had no input or complaining, which could jeopardize their privileges or movement toward discharge. They ask that there be “nothing about us without us”.

• Point and level systems used in many residential programs are arbitrary and not responsive to their individual needs or relevant to real-life situations they will be in after discharge.

• Behavior that in many settings would be seen as “normal” is viewed as pathological.

• Staff responses to behavior are at times coercive and induce stress and fear.

• Communication with families and friends is seen by staff as a barrier to treatment.

• Treatment philosophies and approaches don’t always take the values of individual youth nor those of the youth culture into serious consideration.

Residential programs have taken notable steps toward addressing these concerns and implementing youth guided care. While it is probably safe to say that an evolutionary process in this direction has been occurring over the past decade, old habits, especially mental habits, die hard. So despite the evolution that has occurred in the field, there still tends to be collective mindsets in the system and within individual organizations that diminish the importance of meaningful youth involvement. The problem is exacerbated by residential’s typical role as the placement of last resort. Youth entering residential may feel beaten down, cynical, and untrusting due to their experiences thus far, and not receptive to good-faith efforts that may occur to encourage them to participate in their own treatment. Implementing youth-guided care can help mitigate or even eliminate this circumstance.



...

Che Gookin:

--- Quote ---Residential programs have taken notable steps toward addressing these concerns and implementing youth guided care. While it is probably safe to say that an evolutionary process in this direction has been occurring over the past decade, old habits, especially mental habits, die hard. So despite the evolution that has occurred in the field, there still te bands to be collective mindsets in the system and within individual organizations that diminish the importance of meaningful youth involvement. The problem is exacerbated by residential’s typical role as the placement of last resort. Youth entering residential may feel beaten down, cynical, and untrusting due to their experiences thus far, and not receptive to good-faith efforts that may occur to encourage them to participate in their own treatment. Implementing youth-guided care can help mitigate or even eliminate this circumstance.

--- End quote ---

You are going to have to cite a few sources to be taken seriously on these claims. Most programs, in my direct experience, tend to pass off youth involvement as positive peer culture. Which was shown by the very person who invented it as a system being poorly implemented to the detriment of the youth.

So again, specific sources, no program sources either, I'm in a shitty mood and will start deleting woodbury spam on sight.

Likewise to the rest of you vermin, if I hear any crying about what a manwhore the whooter is, I'm gonna go goon city on your ass as well. This goes doubly so to a certain someone's 45 different personalities.

Che Gookin:
Pbbttt.. I just realized that I called whooter out on a bit that came from the article I posted. Carry on as before...

:facepalms:

blombrowski:
A few notes about this paper.

1.  It is a paper that was ultimately approved by the board of Youth MOVE, CAFETY, and AACRC.  Two organizations comprised of young people who have been in residential programs (defined broadly), and an organization of residential programs.  To the point about notable steps, this paper in itself is notable.  The recognition by residential providers that they have at times done a shitty job, and aren't calling the youth that are calling them out on doing a shitty job liars and manipulators is progress but...  

2.  While the organization may be progressive (namely the leadership that comprises the board that makes the decisions for the organization), that says nothing about their general membership (i.e. Chris Bellonci, their current President was the provider who testified at the hearing with Kat Whitehead and Jon-Martin Crawford and has been an expert witness in a number of lawsuits involving programs, but if you go through their membership list, there are a number of programs that should pop out as problematic)

3.  One of the programs that has been held out as a residential program that "gets" youth-guided care (and would be considered one of those notable examples), an AACRC member, has a very interesting recent history.  They are an agency that runs all kind of services in the New York City metropolitan area (foster care, group homes, and an RTC in the foster care system, group homes in the foster care and mental health systems, juvenile detention prevention, a clinic, family support, wraparound services, etc)  Their current CEO, who sits on the board of AACRC "gets it".  When he was in charge of their main residential campus, he instituted a number of reforms, like youth running their own treatment planning meetings, holding an agency-wide retreat that includes youth and staff to help make changes to the program, establishing a regular youth council on the grounds, and hiring a youth advocate.  He no longer deals with the day-to-day operations of the facility.  The person in charge of youth development who has been charged to oversee the youth-guided reforms works out of their Bronx office and not on the ground of their Westchester campus.

Recently in a presentation she shared that staff at the residential campus held a meeting where they decided that they were going to re-institute the level system, and neglected to invite her, since they knew that she would insist that the youth on campus would have to be part of that decision.

So you have a CEO who "gets it", a youth development person who "gets it", but staff who are working there day-to-day, basically telling the CEO and the youth development person that they need more "tools" to "control the milleu", namely coercive points and level systems.

This is a program that deals almost exclusively with youth in the child welfare system, many of whom would be placed in our lovely juvenile justice system in New York State if not for this program or be stuck bouncing from foster home to foster home or group home to group home, which happens anyway.

Furthermore, residential treatment is their least profitable division within their agency.  They lose money hand over fist providing residential care (all their funds are through State contracts, which don't cover the costs of operations), and the CEO's time is devoted to fundraising to make up that gap.

So there's the residential providers "meaning well" part.  There's so much more to say on this topic.  And I hope that this can actually be a conversation, particularly around how do you make this kind of situation better?  Because ultimately, this is the kind of program that paper is directed at, not necessarily your average "parent-choice" program.

P.S. - I saw this program do a presentation on youth-guided care on two separate consecutive occasions.  The first one, didn't even have a youth presenter and was a sugar-coated version.  After one of my colleagues called the CEO about how hypocritical the presentation itself was, the next time they did the presentation about a month later, one of their former youth advocates did the presentation with them, and the pure blunt honesty about the current situation came out.

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