Helping Foster Care Survivors ‘Weather the Storms’
Anthony Pico was homeless, unemployed, and had aged out of the foster care system when he started seeing a therapist weekly from A Home Within.
Today, Pico is a nationally recognized keynote speaker on child welfare and a community engagement manager for a social care network that connects people with programs. He credits his therapist with helping him transition to “enjoying stability and happiness for the first time.”
“My therapist has been my anchor through this storm,” says Pico, a board member of A Home Within.
The national nonprofit was born nearly 30 years ago in San Francisco out of a recognition that foster youth need to have sustained, one-on-one weekly therapy sessions with a single licensed therapist, free from the limitations of insurance, cost, or the confusion of the public mental health care system. In addition to San Francisco, A Home Within maintains large chapters in Alameda County and Los Angeles.
“We’ve grown to 20 chapters in 11 states and have served thousands of young people but to this day, our home and our heart is here in the Bay Area,” says Reed Connell, the nonprofit’s president and executive director.
For foster youth who often bounce around from place to place, the concept of “home” is fraught and changeable.
“We are establishing lasting relationships for young people that transcend the many challenges and changes they go through,” Connell says.
Clients voluntarily request therapy, express their preferences, and, once matched, partner with their therapist to determine the goals and duration of therapy.
A Home Within serves foster youth as young as three years old and former foster youth through middle age. Most A Home Within clients, however, are young adults who have aged out of the foster care system and are no longer eligible to receive services.
The average “match” between client and therapist lasts three years, though many last much longer. The nonprofit has served some 1,800 clients in California since its inception.
“A Home Within is helping people who have already survived a lifetime of rough waters build on that experience and see the strengths they have now, rather than the things they never had,” Pico says.
A Home Within
Donate now!www.ahomewithin.org
(510) 387-7518
Executive Director: Reed Connell
Mission
With a mission to create and support lasting, caring relationships for children and youth in foster care, A Home Within identifies, recruits, trains, and supports a network of licensed therapists who each provide free, weekly, one-to-one therapy to a single foster youth “for as long as it takes.” For foster youth who often watch people move in and out of their lives, our model creates an anchor of support.
Begin to Build a Relationship
We know you care about where your money goes and how it is used. Connect with this organization’s leadership in order to begin to build this important relationship. Your email will be sent directly to this organization’s Director of Development and/or Executive Director.
Relational pro bono therapy can be life saving. The relational, financial, and mental health support of A Home Within has the power to heal attachment wounds, connect individuals to vital resources, and provide a very core basic need of consistent, safe, and reliable source of emotional support that one may not have otherwise.
Helping More Foster Youth Get the Therapy They Need
Committed, compassionate volunteer clinicians are at the heart of A Home Within’s mission to offer free, open-ended, individual, relationship-based therapy to foster youth. With staggering numbers of foster youth needing and seeking therapy, more volunteer clinicians continue to be needed.
Executive Director Reed Connell says, “It is likely we’ll hit 750 volunteers this year, and may double it next year. We are looking for $500,000 a year, for the next three years, to support our extraordinary growth and effectively double the number of young people we serve.”
The funding would allow the volunteer clinician community to keep expanding, creating a more robust cohort. “If we’re supporting the mental health workforce’s retention of therapists of color with LGBTQIA, native therapists and so on, we are improving the quality of the mental health field as a whole,” says Connell.
Key Supporters
May and Stanley Smith
Charitable Trust
Sarnat-Hoffman Family Foundation
In-N-Out Burger Foundation
Kaiser Permanente
MYDAR Foundation
Glass Half Full Fund
Mental Insight Foundation
Aviv Foundation
The Louis and Harold Price
Foundation
Pritzker Foster Care Initiative
CASA Organizations
Throughout California
Foster Care Research Group
at the University of San Francisco
11 California Family Foundations
Over 400 Individual Donors