The NIA foster care program provides comprehensive and intensive child placement services, which include clinical and case management activities. This program serves children from birth to twenty-years old. The ultimate goal of the NIA program is to promote and achieve permanency (reunification with parents and/or family members, adoption or transition to independent living). In every case, best practices are used to minimize the length of stay in the foster care system, however, as long as a child is in our care his or her safety and welfare is our primary concern.

Each of our children has the need for a secure and loving home; a safe place where he or she can heal and grow. Most of the children we serve have been separated from biological family as a result of neglect, abuse, or some other traumatic experience. Many of them have behavioral, emotional and developmental issues compounded by the long-term consequences of chronic neglect, abuse, separation, and loss from their biological families and multiple placement disruptions. Others have a medical diagnosis for a developmental or emotional challenge and require closer supervision. Each of them needs special care. We recruit and train families to provide each child with the specific level of structure and support that he or she might need.

Both our therapeutic and traditional foster care models places emphasis on teamwork and community collaboration. Our team typically revolves around the family and the child and includes a social worker, clinical therapist, family advocate, case aide, and consulting psychiatrists, clinical supervisors, and a director. Children and youth receive weekly individual, and or group therapy, and bi-weekly in-home consultation. Additionally, children have involvement with Rites of Passage, and/or expressive therapies on a continuous basis.

We also offer a more intensive foster care service, individualized residential treatment (IRT) model.   IRT is a mental health intervention for children, adolescents, and their families.  It involves a clinically managed placement with a behavioral network of wraparound service provision. It seeks to reduce the need for psychiatric hospitalization and institutional care, and maintain clients in in-home, in-community, placement settings.

Services we offer include but are not limited to:

• Regular visits with a licensed social worker
• Spiritually and Culturally focused individual and family counseling
• Treatment Parent Skill development groups
• Parent Support Groups
• Treatment Parent Skill development groups
• Respite Care and support to families
• Psychiatric Consultation
• Monthly in-service training for families
• 24 hour crisis intervention
• Financial Supports to Foster Parents

We measure our success child by child and family by family. Our ultimate success is to reunite a child with his or her biological family. However, placing a child with a supportive, loving adoptive family or in an independent living situation with an effective support network is also a triumph. It is our belief that it takes a community to raise a child and the reward is witnessing the physical, emotional, spiritual and psychological growth and healing of that child and his/her family.

Recruitment and Training
We screen, select, and train our foster families carefully. We recruit our foster families through community outreach, marketing and advertising, and word of mouth. Each member of the household goes through an intensive screening and then through a comprehensive training process. All our parents are thoroughly informed about the potential needs of the children we place with them. Each therapeutic foster care home has 24-hour support from a team of professionals trained to offer crisis interventions, in-home family therapy, scheduled and unscheduled respite care, on going parent training and multi family retreats.

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