Skip to main content

Helping Foster Youth Build a Home Within: Q&A with Toni Heineman [ChronicleOfSocialChange.org]

imgres-1

Working with foster children in her private psychotherapy practice in the 1980s, Dr. Toni Heineman realized that the profound effects of trauma and loss experienced by foster children were often exacerbated by another loss: that of their therapists.

 

Seeing too many foster children lose their therapists just because the allotted number of county-approved sessions ran out or the intern to whom they were assigned left the agency, Heineman set out to develop a better option. In 1994, she founded A Home Within.

 

Based in San Francisco and now a nonprofit with a network of psychotherapists in 22 states, A Home Within provides open-ended, pro-bono psychotherapy to current and former foster children of all ages “for as long as it takes.” On average, clients served by the program are seen for about three and a half years.

 

[For more of this story, written by Melinda Clemmons, go to https://chronicleofsocialchang...-toni-heineman/13034]

 

Attachments

Images (1)
  • imgres-1

Add Comment

Comments (1)

Newest · Oldest · Popular

A similar loss of Therapists may occur for Vocational Rehabilitation clients, who have limited visits. Foster Kids who enter the Vocational Rehabilitation programs in their respective states, may have similar recurring experiences of this. If I'd had a thorough assessment, the first time I applied for vocational rehab services, it might have been for naught--because PTSD was barely even formally conceptualized. But I've had the ten therapist visit limit, and also been abruptly cut off after a more-than-ten visit limit. They were EMDR certified clinicians-which "managed care companies" supposedly favor because of the "high speed" results. I was never in "Foster Care". Although I left "home" at 15, for a very liberal State Youth home-with an 11p.m. curfew on weekdays, and 1am on weekends, enrolled in a different high school,... I left there at 17, and became an "Emancipated Minor", initially "couch surfing at friends" and started working [at Kodak] 1/2 days my senior year in high school to cover my apartment rent and utilities.... I had no idea then, that I had an ACE score of at least 6. ... (If I'd used the WHO ACE International Questionaire, it would probably have been higher than 6.)

Post
Copyright © 2023, PACEsConnection. All rights reserved.
×
×
×
×
Link copied to your clipboard.
×